The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb Has Written More Hit Songs Than Almost Anyone

Photo 31565590 | Barry Gibb © OnAir2 | Dreamstime.com — Dreamstime

Understand that the music was everywhere, icing turntables, electrifying strobe-lit clubs, flooding the radio dial when radio was everything, commanding valuable real estate in our brains, an earworm with an indelible disco beat.

“Saturday Night Fever,” the double album including other artists but dominated by the Bee Gees, wasn’t merely the soundtrack to that movie with those lush three-part harmonies, all those hit singles: “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Night Fever,” “More Than a Woman.”

It was the soundtrack to the late-1970s, with six consecutive No. 1 hits equaling the Beatles’ record, five simultaneous songs in the top 10, two years boogieing atop the charts, and 25 million copies sold before the decade’s close.

The leonine-locked Bee Gees, in second-skin slacks and navel-slashing shirts, became a prime example of the law of celebrity gravity: Anyone that big will be taken down, polyestered casualties in the war on disco. To the brothers, the moment was so personal, sustained and painful that it was referred to as “The Backlash.”

This fall, Barry Gibb, 77, sat in his ducal South Florida home sipping microwaved sake from a souvenir coffee mug. “If you have too much success, people are not happy with you,” he said without a tinge of sadness, more as a statement of fact. In a lengthy afternoon interview, Gibb was relaxed, candid and prone to humility, possibly due to the Australian aversion to bragging — the “tall poppy syndrome,” which stipulates that anyone too boastful will be sliced down to size.

But respect has a tendency to return with age. Sir Barry since 2018, Gibb is among this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients, the eldest and last of the English-born, Australian-raised Gibb brothers, the contributor of that haunting vibrato and the principal architect of their singular sound. Twins Maurice and Robin died, respectively, in 2003 and 2012.

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