Bee Gees

Bee Gees is an Australian-British pop band, from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. They were formed in 1958 by three of the Gibb brothers, originally from Douglas (Isle of Man) in the United Kingdom: Barry and the (fraternal) twins Robin and Maurice, initially joined by a guitarist (Vince Melouney) and a drummer (Colin Petersen, later Geoff Bridgford), all Australian. The band's total record sales over their career are estimated at 220 million, making them one of the best-selling music acts of all time.

Over their roughly forty-year career, three distinct periods of success can be identified. The first is that of late-1960s-to-1973 British pop, with songs such as Massachusetts, To Love Somebody and I Started a Joke, a period during which Robin and Barry were the band's leaders. The second is the disco wave of 1975 to 1979, with songs such as Stayin' Alive, How Deep Is Your Love, Night Fever and Tragedy, corresponding to the trio's media and commercial explosion. Barry became the lead singer and began using the falsetto that became the Bee Gees' trademark. During this period they reached the height of their success thanks to the soundtrack of the film Saturday Night Fever (1977). The third and final period, from the 1980s to 2001, leaned more towards soft rock, with tracks such as You Win Again, but also Woman in Love and Islands in the Stream, marked by collaborations and production work for artists such as Barbra Streisand, Céline Dion, Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick.

The band won nine Grammy Awards and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Around forty of their tracks charted worldwide between 1965 and 2001, and seventeen of their compositions reached number one on the American charts between 1971 and 1983.

The Bee Gees are a group built on three-part vocal harmonies. Barry sings with his chest voice and with the falsetto voice he developed in the 1970s, Robin provides an airy vibrato, and Maurice, who was also the band's musical director, sang the high or low harmonies. The three brothers were also musicians: Barry played guitar, Robin played organ, and Maurice played bass, guitar, drums and keyboards. The three brothers wrote almost all of their songs and said they « felt like one person » when working together.

On 12 January 2003, Maurice, then 53 and suffering from a bowel obstruction, did not survive the operation and died following a heart attack. Robin died at 62 in May 2012 from cancer. After the band disbanded in 2012, the sole remaining member, Barry, has continued to tour.