1968
Maurice GibbBarry may be the beautiful one; Robin may have the remarkable voice; Vince may be the musician; Colin may have the cuddly charm; but it is Maurice Gibb who has the romantic image.
A short and bitter-sweet love affair with Lulu broken by the dastardly Davy Jones despite despairing trans-Atlantic telephone calls to try and patch up the affair gave the gossip columnists a glorious time.
A consoling East-West affair off the rebound with a glamorous little pop girl from Hungary called Sarolta heightened his image.
And the truth of it all? "I am supposed to be the Don Juan of the group, but I haven't even got the same initials as him," says Maurice. "I'm not a Casanova and it's all most unfortunate. I've never been publicised to be available. Because of the stories of my affairs with Lulu and Sarolta, the fans feel, "Oh, we won't bother about Maurice because he's always got a steady girl".
"So I seem to be the Gibb brother who gets left out in the cold. The teenyboppers come to see Barry because he's pretty and got the sex image, while Robin's got the voice and all I do is stand there and play my guitar.
I'll have to change all that. I'll have to learn to keep my mouth shut. That supposed affair with Sarolta, for instance. It was a publicity idea for her and I agreed to play along."
The Maurice Gibb image is already altering. Once the only brother Gibb, who went gallivanting in the clubs and, therefore, rather more approachable than either Barry or Robin, he has, in his own words, "gone off the clubs".
The heavy work schedule which the Bee Gees have undertaken has also toned down Maurice's late-night looning. "So many groups fail because, having got quite well known, they decide to spend all their time in the clubs. Work pours in and they can't handle it because of late-night drinking.
I went to bed at 11.30 pm the other night, which is incredible for me. But we worked for 11 years to get where we are today, and I want to take our work seriously so that later on I'll be able to appreciate the money we've made".
On stage, Maurice enjoys far less of the spotlight. "I do less singing, of course. I only come in on the high harmonies. I'm more of the musician, playing the piano, bass, mellotron or organ on our records, which saves money on hiring musicians, for one thing.
It's the same when it comes to writing. I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to. It's the same as on stage - when we write we complement each other. To prove that, we wrote six songs, Barry and I, while Robin was ill during the American tour, and they were terrible until Robin came back, and then everything worked out. It's very hard to write a song alone, and it's only by jamming that you can get a song together. That's the way we do it.
At the same time, I've never liked many of our records. I positively hated "Massachusetts" and "Message", and yet they've been two of our biggest hits".
Maurice is a fairly quiet person (and the exact opposite if he's on a rave-up) and possibly the most mature of the brothers. He has his own house in fashionable Belgravia and currently gets a kick out of his expensive video tape equipment (all the brothers get crazes for gadgets which fade out in favour of something new, for they are all very restless boys).
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