I’ve just finished watching the 46-minutes of Bee Gee Barry Gibb on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories and as is sometimes the compulsion from late night Gibb activity, I wanted to post a link to it before going to bed. This was a This Is Your Life style production that featured Piers one-on-one with Barry as well as interviews with Barry’s wife Linda, daughter Ali, sons Stephen and Ashley and superstar peers like Olivia Newton-John, Dionne Warwick, Sir Tim Rice and Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus.

Of note for me:

• Never before has a Bee Gees or Barry Gibb interview featured so much from Barry’s family.
• Barry acknowledges that he’ll never have as strong brand recognition being “Barry Gibb” as he does with “Bee Gees” and as such his wish for how he’ll be remembered is as “one of the Bee Gees”. This doesn’t rule out the validity of another full solo tour once this year’s commitments are out of the way, but it does reinforce to me that any advertising or publicity attached to a tour would be ill-advised to not spell out the words “Bee Gees” as well as “Barry Gibb”.
• Barry performed an acoustic snippet of Too Much Heaven in a very clear, strong-sounding falsetto. Traditionally he has preferred to sing this 1978 US#1 in natural voice. Indeed, throughout this TV special Barry was in fine voice with his falsetto standing up really well.
• While there wasn’t a huge focus on Barry’s recent solo album In The Now, it was a nice reminder that this beautiful LP received overwhelmingly positive reviews and peaked as high as UK #2 (not to mention Australia #3, New Zealand #2, Scotland #5, Austria #15 and Germany #12 – great numbers for a 70-year not especially known as a solo artist).
• The respect shown in particular from Bjorn Ulvaeus was great to see and was a reminder of something Burt Bacharach once said to me in an interview: the songs the Bee Gees were recording in the late 70s were “as good as it gets”.

So in case you missed it, here is Barry Gibb on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories. And scroll beneath this clip for two of my favourite songs from In The Now, Diamonds and Cross To Bear.