Introduction:
It began, as many great stories do, with a Christmas morning.
Barry Gibb was nine years old when he woke to find an acoustic guitar propped at the end of his bed — a gift that would shape not only his life but the sound of popular music for decades to come.
“I discovered jukeboxes and coffee shops,” he recalled with a smile. “At nine, I’d go down to the local café, put on Wake Up Little Susie by the Everly Brothers, and play it over and over until the sun went down. Those guitars were amazing — they still are. I don’t know how they recorded them back then, but that sound was magical.”
The Everly Brothers’ blend of harmony and melody left a mark on the young Gibb brothers that would never fade. “Those harmonies were more like bluegrass than anything else,” Barry said, “but we didn’t know that at the time. We just knew they were beautiful.”
The First Gig — and the Birth of the Bee Gees
It wasn’t long before the Gibb brothers — Barry, Robin, and Maurice — began looking for places to perform. One afternoon, they heard about a local speedway not far from their home in Redcliffe, Queensland.
“We walked up to this man sweeping the racetrack,” Barry remembered. “‘Can we sing?’ we asked. He looked at us like we were crazy. He said, ‘This is a racetrack — can you run at the same time?’”
Eventually, the man relented. “He told us to come back on Saturday night. So we did. Between the main stock-car races, they gave us a microphone in the middle of the oval and let us sing over the PA system. It was the first time we ever sang to a real audience — people who hadn’t come to see us. They came for the races. But they listened.”
As the brothers performed, the crowd began throwing coins onto the track. “We didn’t know if it was a compliment or if they wanted us to get run over,” Barry laughed. “But we ran out and collected the coins — maybe five pounds in all. That was our first payday.”
Among the spectators that night was Bill Gates, a local DJ and stock-car driver (no relation to the Microsoft founder), who offered to promote the young trio. “In those days, nobody used the word ‘manager,’” Barry explained. “‘Promoter’ was the term. Bill Gates and another racer named Bill Goode both had the initials ‘BG’ — and along with our mother’s initials, BG, and ‘Brothers Gibb,’ they came up with the name: the Bee Gees.”
Brothers in Harmony
From those humble beginnings, the Bee Gees would go on to redefine pop music. Yet for Barry, the essence of the group was never about fame or the charts — it was about brotherhood.
“I always felt that the Bee Gees were four brothers,” he said softly. “Andy was a bright spark — a lovely kid. But he’ll always be 30. That’s how I think of him.”
Each brother brought something unique to the family’s sound and spirit. “Maurice was extroverted, full of life — he had his problems, but he shared them with everyone. Robin was the thinker, the worrier. He could swing from being the funniest person you’d ever meet to the most unhappy. And me? I was the eldest. I tried to look out for everyone — that was my role, and it always would be.”
A Family Shaped by Music
The brothers’ love for music was inherited from their father, Hugh Gibb, a drummer and bandleader. “Our father wanted to be famous,” Barry reflected. “He wanted to be a big-band drummer, and he had his own band. I think he lived that dream through us. Whatever he was, musically, is what we became. It’s in the genes.”
Hugh also became their first manager by necessity. “Because we were too young to perform in clubs and hotels, he had to be there with us. Otherwise, we couldn’t have played. So he became our guardian, our manager, our protector. He did what a lot of parents don’t do — he let us be the Bee Gees. He didn’t try to shape us into something else. He just watched us grow.”
The family would drive for hours across Australia to play a single show. “He nurtured us along,” Barry said. “That was his strength — just always being there.”
Loss, Legacy, and Love
The story of the Bee Gees is inseparable from tragedy. Barry’s younger brother Andy Gibb, who launched a successful solo career in the late 1970s, died in 1988 at just 30 years old. “What happened with Andy was always abstract,” Barry said. “His heart was bad, but his lifestyle — that L.A. lifestyle — made things worse. Very few of us really knew what he was going through.”
In 2003, Maurice Gibb died unexpectedly at 53 from complications following surgery. “We lost Mo in 48 hours,” Barry remembered quietly. “He was his usual, wacky, spirited self — then suddenly, he was gone.”
Nearly a decade later, in 2012, Barry’s twin brother Robin passed away after a long battle with cancer. “With Rob, I always felt something was wrong,” Barry admitted. “When something’s really wrong with you, you don’t want everyone to know. Nobody ever really knew what the three of us felt for each other. Only the three of us did. It was such a unifying thing. The three of us were like one person. We all had the same dream.”
The Last Gibb Standing
As the last surviving brother, Barry carries both the joy and the burden of memory. “That’s what I remember most — the dream we shared,” he said. “And that’s what I miss more than anything else.”
Today, when he performs classics like To Love Somebody, How Deep Is Your Love, or Words, it isn’t just nostalgia. It’s an act of remembrance — a dialogue with the brothers who stood beside him from that first speedway gig to the world’s biggest stages.
“The one thing I’ve learned,” Barry once reflected, “is that you never stop loving somebody — the way I love them.”