The long awaited trailer to HBO Max's new documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, has been posted with a December 12th premiere date announced. Rolling Stone reported, the doc features “revealing interviews with oldest brother Barry Gibb and archival interviews with the late-twin brothers Robin and Maurice Gibb. The film features a wealth of never-before-seen archival footage of recording sessions, concert performances, television appearances, and home videos.”
The film, which was directed by Frank Marshall, features interviews with Eric Clapton, Noel Gallagher, Nick Jonas, Chris Martin, Justin Timberlake, music producer Mark Ronson, Maurice's first wife, singer Lulu, and RSO Records executive Bill Oakes, among others.
Shortly before his 2012 death, Robin Gibb shed light on the group's beginnings: “Well, we started writing songs when we were eight-years-old and started natural harmonies. Nobody ever taught us anything, so we did it out of fun — for nothing else. We started in Manchester just copying what we heard on the radio and imagining what their new single would be like and as young as eight or nine we were actually imagining and composing music.”
Not long before Maurice Gibb’s 2003 death, he and brother Barry Gibb recalled the moment during the 1975 sessions for their Main Course album ushered in the groundbreaking moment that led to renewed superstardom: “(Maurice Gibb): We were completing ‘Nights On Broadway.’ We had just done most of the vocal tracks and most of the harmonies and stuff and usually at the end you have some ad-libs, or some kind of thing to take it away from the original melody and have some fun. (Barry Gibb): So (producer) Arif (Mardin) wanted us to go out and sort of sing — or try to scream like Paul McCartney would sometime scream in falsetto. (Maurice Gibb): So Barry said, ‘I’ll have a go.’ So we went out there and he did the ‘blamin' it alls’ ad lib on ‘Nights On Broadway.'”
In the mid-'80s, after the hits had dried up, youngest brother Andy Gibb was able to take a long hard look at what his brothers had famously termed “First Fame”: “It certainly made me very spoiled. I thought that it was always going to be that way and there would always be those Number One hit records and stuff. Also, I mean, y'know, I'd be foolish to deny it — you suddenly do get an ego and you've got to come back down to Earth and control that. It was a pretty wild roller coaster ride for those two or three years.”
Barry Gibb explained that his late brothers — Robin and Maurice — served as both their greatest critics and mutual sources of inspiration: “They drove me as much as I drove them, and they drove each other. And there were many situations in our lives where we didn't agree and there were any situations in our lives where we completely were on the same page. We just had 45 years of hit records, and I don't think we could've done that if it had just been one of us. No way.”
