The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World
[A] definitive group biography ... This book, like the others, is both a fanboy’s love letter and a detailed, what-did-they-take-with-their-tea account of the musicians’ daily lives ... By the end, the brothers become a microcosm of everything that happened in the 20th-century pop world.
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Stanley makes a strong case for the Bee Gees’ impact on twentieth-century music, but his portrayal also reveals them as harbingers of the global pop of the twenty-first. He repeatedly emphasises that the Bee Gees’ lyrics sound like translationese. In this they anticipate the present era.
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Stanley is a wonderful guide, showing us the gems of this vast catalogue with enthusiasm, insight and wit ... It’s a weakness of Stanley’s book that he had no interactions with his heroes – was Barry even approached, I wonder? – and is overly reliant on observations and quotes culled from press clippings. Although he rattles through a complex triple life story at a fair clip, covering 70 years in under 300 pages, he isn’t really interested in their private lives, and I came away feeling I didn’t understand the Gibbs any better as people.
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