The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is informative, entertaining, and heart wrenching as Director/Producer Frank Marshall reveals the band's soul and the power dynamic that propelled the Bee Gees to superstardom. Highly recommended.

I've always loved the bee gees, I'm an age where I remember all that disco sucks nonsense, they were so much more than the Saturday night fever album, although I did love that album. The way the brother's gibb sang together, no one can top them, they harmonize so beautifully, certain songs can send chills up your spine. I've watched this twice now, I'm sure I'll watch it many more.

The Bee Gees were breaking ground long before The Beatles exploded. Their genres evolved from soul, to folk, pop rock, to disco to classic adult contemporary. Their musical influence had an extraordinary effect in four great decades. They are icons. How they craftily maneuvered in the world of music is beyond genius. They are songwriters who had the ear for the perfect rhythm. They were gifted singers as well. They made the biggest songs in an imperfect world.

When I first really heard the Bee Gees I was nine years old and my mum had just brought a 7" single called "How Deep Is Your Love " . Of course this was after the disco period and the swinging sixties but there was something about their harmonies that had me hooked .

This brilliant documentary film is an exploration of the history of the Bee Gees, featuring revealing interviews with oldest brother Barry Gibb, and archival interviews with the late twin brothers Robin and Maurice.

There is something about this film that is incredibly sad hence the title . " How can you mend a broken heart" Barry Gibb is the only surviving brother and you and tell he's heartbroken.

He even says that he would rather not have had a hit record to have his brothers back.

The Bee Gees were experts at re inventing themselves . In the sixties they sounded very much like the Beatles and had that familiar sixties sound . Then came my favourite era , Disco. It's the time when they really found their voices and that wonderful falsetto harmony only to be discredited by the anti Disco movement lead by homophobic and racist Steve Dahl.

Then came the love songs such as how deep is your love and finally they came good again in the eighties.

I loved this film. Some of the archive footage is fantastic. When they step on stage and perform it's so natural and despite their fall outs you can tell they loved each other deeply.

It's a film about family , grief and musical reinvention and it's one of my favourite films of this year .

"The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" (2020 release; 111 min.) is a documentary about the famed pop trio. As the documentary opens, we hear the disco-charging "Stayin' Alive" over the opening titles and then go straight into a live concert from 1979 in Oakland. We flash forward to "Miami 2019" as Barry Gibb, the only surviving member of the Gibb brothers, rues "My immediate family is gone". From there we go back in time to when the Gibb brothers were just young lads growing up on the Isle of Man before the family relocates to Australia. It is there that the lads find their first taste of success... At this point we are 10 min. into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest project from Frank Marshall, best known for his production work (including for Steven Spielberg), but here he directs what is clearly a labor of love about the long and complicated history of the Gibb brothers. If you ask anyone today what the Bee Gees stand for, almost certainly the answer will be "disco" or "Saturday Night Fever". And of course they were that, very much so. But as this delicious documentary reminds us, they were more than that, in fact so much more than that. It feels like the Bee Gees had, like cats, nine lives, or at least four or five (pre-SNF, the 1975-1981 disco era, the immediate post-disco era, and the latter days). Along the way we get treated to a bunch of archive footage that certainly I had never seen before, and of course also the 'talking heads', including Justin Timberlake, Eric Clapton and most interestingly Nick Jonas and Noel Gallagher, both of whom also performed as brothers in a band. There are some heavy duty moments in this documentary when we are reminded of the deaths of younger brother Andy Gibb (for whom the Bee Gees wrote a bunch of songs), and then twins Maurice (in 2003) and Robin (2012). But in the end the music prevails, and on that count, it still feels to me that the Bee Gees are underappreciated, even though they are rightly so in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I love their disco stuff, but I equally love their late 60s/early 70s pre-disco output (think: "Massachusetts", "World", "I Started a Joke", "Words", etc.). Such great songs.

"The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" premiered this weekend on HBO and is now available on HBO on Demand and other streaming services. If you have any interest in the history of rock music, or are simply a fan of the Bee Gees, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.