previous | Gibb Songs | next

Gibb Songs version 2 by Joseph Brennan, copyright 2006—2013

1998

During the winter the Bee Gees had Middle Ear closed and re-equipped with the latest digital recording hardware, and then used it to record demos for many projects during the spring of 1998. The five songs known were for five different artists (one was the Bee Gees).

The London stage musical Saturday Night Fever opened in May, adding to the increased promotion the Bee Gees were now getting. The success of the One Night Only show in Las Vegas both as a show and as a television presentation afterwards led to scheduling a few more shows in other parts of the world. They played Dublin in August, Wembley Stadium in London in September, Buenos Aires in October, and Pretoria in November.

Maurice continued to produce songs for his daughter Samantha, now working with her brother Adam and her boyfriend Laz Rodriguez. They were not the only Bee Gees children working in music. Robin’s son Spencer had moved to Austin TX in 1996 to join the music scene there, and he was playing shows and recording his songs with his own band, independently of any Bee Gees involvement. Barry’s son Stephen played guitar with a few bands and occasionally on disk, also independently. Their activities are not chronicled here.

songs

END OF TIME
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb
no record. US copyright February 1998

SENSUALITY
Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Barry Gibb
no record.

LOVE IS BLIND
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb
album cut by Human Nature, 2004, and Col Joye, 2004. US copyright March 1998

SACRED TRUST
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb
album cut by Bee Gees, 2001. US copyright April 1998

BORN AGAIN
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb
no record. US copyright April 1998

recording sessions

Luna Park

Samantha Gibb — vocal
Adam Gibb — keyboard, vocal
Laz Rodriguez — guitar
Maurice Gibb — possibly keyboard, bass, programming, vocal
engineer: John Merchant
producer: Maurice Gibb
January or February 1998, Panther House, Miami Beach

UNTIL YOU
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1997)
undated 1998
stereo 3:32, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
Luna Park, 2008

HUMMINGBIRD LOVE
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Sarah Henderson (1997)
undated 1998
stereo 3:16, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
Luna Park, 2008

HOW WAS I TO KNOW?
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1997)
undated 1998
stereo 3:50, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
promo single, 1998; Luna Park, 2008

PLAYING CUPID
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1997)
undated 1998
stereo 3:14, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
promo single, 1998

During 1997 Maurice’s children Samantha and Adam began writing songs for a bid at a recording contract. Samantha met Laz Rodriguez and he began working closely with them on writing and recording. The three adopted the name Luna Park.

Maurice and John Merchant recorded a few of their songs around January or February of 1998. ‘How Was I to Know?’ and ‘Playing Cupid’ appeared on a promo CD single in 1998. The first three above were registered for copyright in February 1998. The first three also were issued on the Luna Park download album in 2008. ‘How Was I to Know’ has backing vocals by Maurice or possibly Adam.

Bee Gees

Barry Gibb — vocal, guitar
Robin Gibb — vocal
Maurice Gibb — keyboard, guitar, vocal
engineer: John Merchant
producer: Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb
February to April 1998, Middle Ear, Miami Beach

Demos for various projects, not intended for release.

END OF TIME
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal unknown
unreleased

‘End of Time’ was for Bette Midler. She recorded it in the sessions for her Bathhouse Betty album (1998), but it was one of a few songs dropped from it because it ran too long. The song was then given to Tina Arena who did not release it either.

SENSUALITY
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal Robin Gibb
unreleased

In April Barry mentioned that the Bee Gees were writing songs for their next album, and that they had just completed a very good song that Robin would sing. This is believed to be ‘Sensuality’. Robin recorded it later by himself for the Bee Gees, but it was not released.

LOVE IS BLIND
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo 3:37, lead vocal Barry Gibb
promo release, 2004

‘Love Is Blind’ was intended for country singer Deana Carter but it ran afoul of a country music business prejudice against non-Nashville songwriters. After kicking around for a few years it was recorded by the Bee Gees’ old Australian friend Col Joye in 2002 and ultimately released in 2004 on his Along the Way album. In the meantime it was recorded by an Australian boy band called Human Nature who got their version to the shops before Col Joye did, also in 2004.

Also in 2004 the demo itself was made available on an American publisher’s promo CD set. It has Barry and Maurice on guitars, Maurice on keyboards and programming, and Barry on vocal. The song is excellent and would have shone on a Bee Gees (or Barry Gibb) album.

SACRED TRUST
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal unknown
unreleased

‘Sacred Trust’ was for the popular Florida-based group the Backstreet Boys, who had acknowledged the Bee Gees as an influence. Their breakthrough success in 1997 made them the ‘senior’ boy band that inspired many imitators. In the middle of 1998 they took a break from performing and then changed management, and somewhere in those proceedings the idea of recording ‘Sacred Trust’ was lost. Their original manager Lou Pearlman was later known for pocketing unusually large percentages of his bands’ income, and if he intended to take any of the song income for ‘Sacred Trust’ he would have come up hard against Barry’s unbending protection of his rights, which might have been another reason the song was not recorded, at least before the band got out of their contract. At any rate the Bee Gees ended up recording it themselves in 1999 or 2000 for their next album.

BORN AGAIN
Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal unknown
unreleased

Lastly ‘Born Again’ was given to the Québec-based Belgian singer Lara Fabian. If she recorded it, it would have been for her first English language album, released in 1999. The album would include her American hit ‘I Will Love Again’.

Bee Gees

Barry Gibb — vocal, guitar
Robin Gibb — vocal
Maurice Gibb — keyboard, guitar, vocal
James Kelly — fiddle
unknown — bagpipes, drums
engineer: John Merchant
producer: Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb
March or April 1998, Middle Ear, Miami Beach

ELLAN VANNIN
Eliza Craven Green (1854); J Townsend or F H Townend; Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal Robin Gibb
charity A side, April 1998

‘Ellan Vannin’ appeared on two limited edition CD singles both containing just the one song and both released in the Isle of Man, the brothers’ birthplace. The title phrase is the name Isle of Man in the Manx language. The song, first published as a poem by singer and poet Eliza Craven, is sometimes called the unofficial anthem of the Isle. The Bee Gees partially rewrote the lyrics. Robin’s stirring vocal bends the melody into blues notes in places. (The Bee Gees recorded another version in 1971 of the first verse with harmony vocal instead of the solo.)

Luna Park

Samantha Gibb — vocal
Adam Gibb — keyboard, vocal
Laz Rodriguez — guitar
Maurice Gibb — possibly keyboard, bass, programming
engineer: John Merchant
producer: Maurice Gibb
about November 1998, Middle Ear, Miami Beach

SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1998)
undated 1998
stereo 5:26, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
Luna Park, 2008

IT’S OKAY
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
unreleased

BACK WHERE I STARTED AGAIN
Samantha Gibb, Adam Gibb, Laz Rodriguez (1998)
undated 1998
stereo, lead vocal Samantha Gibb
unreleased

Luna Park made further recordings later in 1998. A promo EP was released featuring the three songs above plus ‘How Was I to Know?’ (from earlier this year). The US copyright on ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ is November 1998 and the other two are January 1999. ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’ was issued on the Luna Park download album in 2008.

Early in 1999, Luna Park entered a contest run by Burdines department store in Florida. Their song ‘How Was I to Know?’ won and was used in commercials for the store in 1999.

selected record releases

A variant of the German tribute album (December 1997), with two previously released recordings by Boyzone and N-Trance and a new one by C-Block, three songs accordingly dropped, and the running order changed.

‘Ellan Vannin’ was a limited-edition CD sold to benefit the Manx Children in Need. It had just the one track on it.

The full artist credit is ‘Pras Michel featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and introducing Mya’ and the US copyright notes that it ‘contains an interpolation of Islands in the stream and a sample of Get up, get into it, get involved’... quite a hybrid work, but the main chorus ‘Ghetto superstar, that is what you are’ sung by Mya is the chorus melody of ‘Islands in the Stream’. The songwriter credit is Pras Michel, one of the three members of the Fugees; Wyclef Jean, another Fugee; Russell Jones, also known as O D B; and Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb. The single includes instrumental and a cappella versions as B sides.

Gibb Songs does not list all recordings or reinventions of Gibb songs but this one is rather striking in its prominent use of a Gibb melody in a fresh new song. In the 2001 Bee Gees version of ‘Islands in the Stream’ Robin sings one chorus with the ‘Ghetto Supastar’ lyrics.

The cast album of the London stage musical Saturday Night Fever. Vocals mainly by Adam Garcia, with Simon Greiff, Adrian Sarple, Sebastien Torkia, Michael Rouse, Tara Wilkinson, Anita Louise Combe, Richard Calkin. The album was produced by Nigel Wright.

The new songs for the musical were ‘Immortality’ (already released in a version by Céline Dion) and the short piece ‘First and Last’. None of the Bee Gees were involved in recording these songs. ‘Boogie Shoes’ and ‘Disco Inferno’ were in Saturday Night Fever but were not written by the Gibb brothers.

Cast albums were also released for the New York production and others.

Céline Dion’s version of ‘Immortality’ was released as a single in Britain and Europe. The two UK singles are listed above.

The One Night Only show in Las Vegas, 14 November 1997, was recorded to multitrack and video and appeared in a series of formats over the next year. A complete video was shown in the US on 31 December 1997 as a pay-per-view television special, and a shorter version was shown on the HBO cable network in the spring of 1998 and also outside the US. A new edit of the entire show was released to home video in the fall of 1998.

Meanwhile an audio version had been mixed in January 1998, and a radio-only promo CD of the song ‘Don’t Throw It All Away’ was issued in February in the US to promote the HBO television showings. Commercial CD release finally came starting September 1998, with six titles edited out so the remainder would fit on one disk.

In Australia there was a second release of One Night Only in April 1999 with two disks. The first was the same as before and the second one had the six missing songs. This second disk later was available separately under the title One Night Only with a cover notation ‘the limited edition 6 track CD’. Release of the separate 6 Track is confused, with Australian-made copies appearing in the UK and as imports in the US. The songs on the main CD are in the same order as the live show, and the 6 Track CD also has the missing songs in the order they appeared.

The stage performance included some taped elements according to several attendees, and this is consistent with television appearances earlier in the year. Obviously ‘Don’t Throw It All Away’ includes parts of the Andy Gibb vocal and ‘Grease’ included parts of the Frankie Valli vocal. Céline Dion joined them on stage live for ‘Immortality’. But the instrumental backing and Bee Gees guide vocals were also taped with the band playing along live and the three Gibb brothers singing along to tapes. Robin and Maurice (in his one song) seemed especially to be relying on the taped tracks for their lead vocals, Barry perhaps less so. A rehearsal a few days earlier was also taped, and it was used for parts of the video presentation; whether it was used for audio is unknown.

The band were: Barry (guitar), Maurice (keyboard), Alan Kendall (guitar), Stephen Gibb (guitar), Ben Stivers (keyboard), Matt Bonelli (bass), and Steve Rucker (drums). Stephen is Barry’s son. Engineer John Merchant was on hand for the live sound and he remixed the video and audio versions that appeared later.

One Night Only was a top selling album in Britain and Europe, reaching number 4 in Britain and 5 in Germany. Americans were less impressed, taking it only to 72 in Billboard, even after all the promotion.

The Gotta Get a Message to You tribute album grew out of a charity promotion led by Granada Television called Live Challenge ’99. It was to benefit young people in northwestern England, considered to include the Gibb family home town of Manchester. Thirteen artists recorded new versions of previously recorded Gibb songs with the proceeds of the album to go to the project. Several of the songs were released as singles too, of which Steps charted at number 1 and 911 at number 2. Boyzone had had a hit with ‘Words’ in 1996, but this is a new recording of it.

Barry sings backing vocals on this David Foster production. This is the English-only version of the 1996 recording previously released in both Spanish and English on Anka’s album Amigos. Once again lead vocals are by Anthea Anka and Paul Anka. Billboard calls A Body of Work a ‘most confusing title for an album of newly recorded material’, but in fact a few of the songs including this one are all-English mixes of recordings made for Amigos.

A promo-only CD. Maurice produced and may have played some instrumental parts.

Brilliant from Birth is by far the most important release of the Bee Gees’s Australian recordings. It contains all 35 of the songs originally released from 1963 to 1966, and all 24 of the songs released in 1970 on Inception / Nostalgia, and even 4 more songs done for television that had never been released on disk.

For this set, the master tapes and disks were sent to the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra for sonic restoration. Sadly their idea of restoration was to boost the volume into distortion, most notable on the louder songs of which ‘Coalman’ is an especially ludicrous example. As a result many of the songs sound better on Birth of Brilliance. There are some genuine problems with these recordings that could have been fixed and were not, like wobbly volume levels. But that would have taken song-by-song analysis and tweaking by hand.

The package itself fails to live up to the promise of a definitive collection. First of all the title was ill chosen since it is easily confused with the earlier set Birth of Brilliance, which strangely enough was kept available for some years even though every song on it was also here and in better quality. Secondly the running order is awkward in places and needed just a little more thought (see below). The notes contain some awful errors— Ossie Byrne and Bill Shepherd produced none of the titles assigned to them, and young Barry’s Tin Pan Alley lyrics hardly deserve the praise given.

Despite its shortcomings, no fan should be without Brilliant from Birth. All in all there is (as yet) no better collection of the Bee Gees’ Australian work.

This CD is a collector’s item. Most of the tracks on Assault the Vaults were making their first appearance since their original release on very rare singles. The title phrase is misleading. These are not cover versions but the original versions of songs written by Barry, Maurice, and Robin that were never released as Bee Gees tracks. All were recorded in Australia from 1963 to 1966. Many were written specifically for these artists, and best of all most of the tracks feature vocal or instrumental parts by one or more of the Gibb brothers. In fact one single billed the artist as Trevor Gordon and the Bee Gees. These nearly-forgotten songs include some of the Gibbs’ best songs from Down Under and this release finally made them available to fans in good quality for practically the first time.

previous | Gibb Songs | next