Palace, that sort of thing . . . All of a sudden I had a Bentley and so much money. Wow. So much money. I just don’t know what happened. From there on in I forgot about everything. Money became the ruler of my life. It was really a sad scene.
The whole thing was really getting me down . . . I was seeing people like Clapton and Beck, people I really respected. I just wasn’t doing anything like this. With the Bee Gees I was playing G major chords and G minor chords – in the key of C all the time. I wasn’t allowed any solos. I wasn’t allowed anything bigger than a 100 watt Marshall and if I played it any louder than the two setting there was trouble. There were so many restrictions . . .35
Even though Melouney had been permitted a song on Idea, he could have little doubt that the Bee Gees were a Gibb vehicle. He left in November 1968 and formed a new band, Fanny Adams, which is discussed in a later chapter:
I told the guys I wanted to leave and they said cool.
I really wanted to write songs and no matter how many I wrote, whether they were good, bad or otherwise, I just couldn’t do a thing with them. I couldn’t play them with the band, I couldn’t record them myself, I couldn’t even give them to other people so I just became completely stationary . . .36
The Bee Gees’ balladry was the antithesis of much of the heavy rock of the late 60s, but while the Gibbs insisted on Melouney restraining himself when he was playing in the band, they were nonetheless enthusiastic about such groups. When they arrived on a visit to Australia at Christmas 1967, Barry enthused about ‘the’ Cream as ‘fantastic! They are the greatest group that ever has been or will be! . . . They just turn the audience on with their tremendous music.’ Some would have noted that this group shared a manager in Stigwood with the Bee Gees themselves; Robin Gibb – slightly more left-of-centre musically, yet affectedly reserved – chipped in: ‘I detest the guitar smashing antics of some groups . . .’37 Shortly afterwards, these two brothers would, it was reported, ‘collapse in Turkey . . . due to strain of Australian fans following them around.38
There is surely no mystery to the temporary demise of the Bee Gees in the late 60s. They had extraordinary success around the world in a short period of time at a very young age – the twins, in fact, were still in their late teens. For the ludicrous reason that every other band was inflicting overextended would-be meisterwerks on their audiences, the Bee Gees were told by their management that their next album would be a double. They rose to the challenge with the exceptional Odessa, but it caused problems within the group politically, particularly as Robin was starting to challenge Barry as a songwriter. Barry Gibb and Colin Peterson returned to Australia in January 1969 to holiday, and announced that ‘Odessa’ would be their next single. Aside from claiming that he was about to star in a Western, ‘which I have always wanted to do’ (but he did not: his film roles to date have been Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and his own execrable 1984 ‘video album’ Now Voyager), Barry announced that Peterson was like a ‘fourth’ brother.39 Soon afterwards, in a dispute over whether a Robin song (‘Lamplight’) or a Barry song (‘First of May’) would be the next Bee Gees single, Robin left the group. Barry and Maurice – and Peterson – began work on the album Cucumber Castle and its associated TV special; during that time Peterson was sacked from the band (he would later work in the Australian music industry).40 The dispute between Barry and Robin persisted; Barry claimed that Robin and Molly were accusing him of ‘foul things, well below the belt, you couldn’t print them.’41 In an unusual one-off, the oldest Gibb sibling, sister Lesley, sat in for Robin in a television appearance.
There is no definite point at which the Bee Gees ceased to regard themselves – or even ceased being – Australians; Barry visited in 1969 and 1970 and undertook low-key media commitments.42 The group reformed without Melouney or Peterson after a lengthy break in late 1970; they would produce some of their best work in the early 70s, including Maurice’s remarkable Moog experiment, ‘Sweet Song of Summer,’ and the almost-perfect album Trafalgar.
They toured Australia in 1972.43 The country had changed, and this was the time when Australians seem to have felt ready to acknowledge the problematic status of the relationship between the group and their adopted country. Alistair Jones damned them in Planet:
The brothers Gibb descend like some jet-setting relative you’ve always secretly resented but like being seen with; the way Princess Margaret can look when placed against her stolid sister, or with her dull nephews and nieces.
It’s not all that difficult to believe that they were once our very own; the haircuts have turned into coiffures, the jewels are gaudy and showy, and the colours too co-ordinated; the style is that tasteless swank of the nouveau [sic] riches – crystal palaces, gold fleur de lis [sic] and the cleaning lady on Wednesdays.
The music is a commercial success but it’s as bland as American food.44
By the time the group achieved its biggest and most lasting success in the late 70s, in association with the disco era, there was little discussion of their Australian legacy. What’s more, the humour and quirky melodrama that had made their music interesting in the 60s and early 70s was far more muted. After 1975 the Gibbs were based in Miami.
4 We Weren’t Exactly Keeping a Low Profile
The Missing Links were an anomaly for their time: they were a band – two bands, actually – that functioned as an umbrella for a range of outstanding, fiery, reckless free spirits who rapidly, yet apparently artlessly, bashed out a very fine recorded legacy. They were not typical of their day, but they were exactly the kind of band that had to exist at a time when Australians were grappling with that question of what the strengths of Australian music could be.
The idea of ‘Missing Links’ was a knowing nod to the popular perception of long-haired youth and primitive behaviour, something anyone could get. There was also a particularly Australian aspect to the name, if one wanted to make a crass analogy with Aboriginal people who were so often criticised as being primitive throwbacks and a quickly perishing connection to the past – though the Missing Links themselves did not make this comparison and, in fairness to them, were obviously claiming to be the links in question. Strangely though, the art department at Phonogram, for whom the Links made their one and only album, saw a historical Australian connection: the LP cover depicted the group shackled to an enormous ball and chain. a reference to convictism. Their final, posthumous EP kept an aspect of this metaphor going; its title was Unchained.
The Missing Links concept – essentially, loud and frantic R&B – was so strong that it survived a complete line-up change (all the more unusual because there was no strong manager figure in their orbit, eager to rationalize such changes for the purpose of retaining a commercially vibrant brand). A Sydney group, the Missing Links were important in the early to mid 1960s music scene for their vibrancy and their extreme outlook.
R&B was becoming a passion for a minority of young men around Australia; they included Keith Glass, Ross Wilson, Gulliver Smith and Kerryn Tolhurst in Melbourne, and Matt Taylor and Lobby Loyde in Brisbane, all of whom would be notable in the scene for decades. Most of these devotees began as enthusiastic magpies, and Peter Anson was no different. Anson’s father had introduced him to jazz, and he’d been listening to it from an early age: ’I collected books about it, and records. All those books mentioned the origins of jazz in early black music.’1 More extraordinarily. in a time of institutionalized racism, he was a beneficiary of the US government’s generosity