Barry Gibb stayin alive at 80: A look back at the Bee Gees singer’s iconic career

Everybody listened to Love Songs ‘Til Midnight in the late 90s, whether they admitted it or not.

And I mean everybody.

Burly truck drivers. Wannabe gangsters. Bogans. Grannies. Doctors. Lawyers. Dorky high school kids. Cool high school kids.

It was a broad church, and if you were a Bee Gees obsessive like me, there was barely an hour you wouldn’t hear one of their songs … either as performers, A-list writers for hire, or in the form of a cover. I listened every night before going to sleep.

But wait, Pete Sinclair wasn’t a fan?

So I kicked into my traditional Bee Gees-evangelist mode because I never accept that someone doesn’t like the Bee Gees.

I told him there are three types of people: those who like the Bee Gees, those who pretend they don’t and those who do, but just don’t realise it yet.

With youthful braggadocio, I bantered with a radio legend more than triple my age about how Barry and his brothers Robin and Maurice were the greatest, most prolific, most covered songwriters ever, rattling off facts to back it up.

Pete was bewildered, but the assault worked.

“Wait a minute – how old are you? And you’re a walking Bee Gees encyclopaedia? Tell your supervisor you’ll be back in a half an hour because you’re coming into the studio for an interview with me.”

And that, in a nutshell, is how I became a radio announcer.

That and having won a “Bee Gees Mastermind” radio competition a few months earlier. So I owe this band my career.

The official prize was front-row seats and a backstage pass to the Bee Gees’ One Night Only Western Springs concert on March 20, 1999, but the unofficial prize was a foot in the door in broadcasting.

Tim Roxborogh with the Bee Gees in March 1999.

I spent every day of the next four months – from winning the competition to the concert – thinking about what it would be like to meet the Bee Gees.

Wearing my best “going-out shirt” and new corduroy trousers, I remember Robin smiling but not saying much, Barry being friendly and agreeing their 1993 hit For Whom The Bell Tolls was one of his favourites too, and the ever-gregarious Maurice chuckling when I said I loved his rare 1970 solo single Railroad: “I’m glad somebody liked it!”

Leaving the greenroom, I told the brothers their music meant the world and I hoped to meet them again.

“Oh you will, you definitely will,” said Maurice.

Ultimately, he was prophetic in ways I could never have imagined, but not before the worst news struck.

Maurice died suddenly in 2003 aged 53, bringing such heartache to Barry and Robin that for some years they were scattered.

When Robin passed away in 2012 aged 62, Barry became – in his words – “the last man standing”, given the youngest Gibb brother Andy had also died barely five days after turning 30 in 1988.

It was against this backdrop of profound loss that I got to know Barry.

By the early 2000s, I was full time in music radio, and when Barry reteamed with Barbra Streisand in 2005 for the Guilty Pleasures album (25 years after her career-defining, Bee Gees-written Guilty), Barry agreed to a one-hour interview.

It was the first of seven interviews we’d do together over the next 20 years.

There are aspects of that first interview that make me cringe, namely me playing guitar down the phone line to Barry, attempting to replicate his famous no-chord strummed intro to Jive Talkin’.

Barry cracked up and said, “not quite how I would’ve done it, but pretty good!”.

Again, the (misplaced) confidence of youth. But Barry was a gentleman; he appreciated I knew my stuff beyond the Saturday Night Fever and falsetto questions he usually faced, and we agreed to stay in touch.

Barry Gibbs and Tim Roxborogh at Sunset Marquis, LA, in 2014.

A second interview followed a year later to coincide with his 60th birthday, while our third came in London in 2009, 10 years after we’d last met face-to-face.

Barry, and his beautiful wife since 1970, Linda, would later tell me this conversation was up there with his favourite interviews of his entire career.

We covered seemingly everything; his relationships with each of his brothers; his thoughts on some of the buried treasures in his catalogue; how Michael Jackson used to book into Miami hotels but secretly stay at Barry’s house, and his take on Jimmy Fallon’s maniacal Saturday Night Live skit The Barry Gibb Talk Show (he’s a big Fallon fan).

When considering who Barry is, as a musician and a person, a few memories come to the fore.

I sense he’s aware he’s a brilliant songwriter.

When you’re an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Kennedy Centre, how could you not?

But he’s also the type who gets blown away to the point of disbelief any time anybody tells him so. It’s a dichotomy that exists in many of the most gifted creative minds, especially someone like Barry who’s endured periods with as many slings and arrows as accolades.

It’s like an endless internal tug of war between your drive and demand for respect versus your sensitivity and humility. Maybe this is part of why he’s such a great songwriter, in particular, of love songs.

Think of those songs, somewhere between 1000 and 2000 works dating back over 65 years. You don’t create songs of such timeless emotional connection as To Love Somebody, Islands In The Stream, How Deep Is Your Love, More Than A Woman, Too Much Heaven and Alone without having a lot of love to give.

The Bee Gees performing at Western Springs to a capacity crowd.

Speaking of which, in 2013 he sat me side-stage next to Linda for his Mission Estate concert in Napier.

Backstage, he signed my Spirits Having Flown record (the Bee Gees’ 20 million-selling 1979 album) with, “To Tim, thanks for caring”.

Is there any other music superstar who would write that to a fan? In 2014 he performed to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl and days later caught up with me at the iconic rock star haunt, the Sunset Marquis, where we discussed his love of classic first-edition books.

He’s the kind of man whose music has sold 220 million units and who, when I married my wife in 2017, sent us a bouquet of flowers so big we needed a van to get them home, along with an autographed guitar and a video message.

It was Barry who put me forward to be an adviser on the 6x Emmy-nominated Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend A Broken Heart (2020) as well as the Kennedy Centre Honours (2023).

These are the highlights of my career.

Barry once told me, “you can’t make dreams come true unless you try”.

And he did. He made those dreams come true. Mine too. Happy birthday BG.