It's quite possible the Bee Gees know everything and everybody. Zelig-like characters in popular music, they've done everything from teenage radio appearances to rehab. They have played alongside Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele, they've been called "The Beatles lite" and they kickstarted disco fever. Their songs have launched almost every boy-band going, they've collaborated with every AOR diva from Celine Dion to Barbra Streisand, and they've all had skirmishes with drink and drugs and they watched their younger brother, Andy, die of a cocaine addiction.
Having been put out to grass in the soft-rock pasture for the past decade or so, they're now emerging on the other side of the credibility gap. U2 have just given them an enthusiastic endorsement and Destiny's Child are chasing them around the block looking for songs to cover. And one of them used to be married to Lulu!
If you're familiar only with their big, sloppy radio hits, you might find it a bit rich that the present day Brothers Gibb are giving out yards about the current state of popular music - "all those three-minute pieces of crap on the radio" as Robin puts it - but then it's easy to underestimate the power and versatility of their back catalogue.
Remember, the Gibbs have their roots in psychedelica, once gave the masterful Kinks a run for their money, and have written such timeless classics as New York Mining Disaster 1941, the haunting and elegiac Massachusetts and the proto-Smiths I Started a Joke. Sure, they had their fair share of meaningless songs in very high voices, but with the aid of diagrams and an overhead projector (not to hand right now), it can be demonstrated that the Bee Gees were a major and significant influence on today's club/dance music scene. They were, in fact, the original of the "high-energy" species.
Now back with their 158th album (or so it seems), This is Where I Came In, they're not exactly taking out full-page press adverts saying "Sorry about the Soft Rock years" - but that's what you could read between the lines.
The album is a return to their pre-falsetto days, back to their 1960s "kinda groovy" pop-rock days - all very acoustic guitarish with the three-part harmonies sounding as pristine as ever. Which is just as well, as they're currently stridently reclaiming their arty cred, playing down their bouncy pop and talking up their more resonant musical moments. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years ago, they were recently the subject of a rare 32-page tribute in Billboard magazine, which celebrated their 35 years of music making. Included among the tributes was one from Bono: "The Bee Gees are up there with The Beatles. Their songs
Billboard's editor, Timothy White, neatly captured the thrust of the new album when he said: "They haven't made a record that speaks in any kind of pandering or solicitous way to the young acts that are fascinated with them. It's very fresh, very pre-falsetto. They have a passion to continue, to lead an original career and that doesn't happen enough in the music industry these days. They've always had their artistic agenda and this new album is a monumental example of that."
Chuffed by Bono's Beatles comparison, Robin Gibb says: "The Beatles are still used as the measuring stick for success today and they only lasted eight years. It's the songs, they created a whole culture". He mentions that on the new album, his brother Maurice plays an acoustic guitar which was given to him by John Lennon on his 21st birthday.
"I suppose in a sense that was symbolic because we have been wanting, for a long time, to get back to our early roots, the stuff we were doing acoustically. We wanted a more live-orientated album, especially in the title track and to have more of a human feel to the song."
With more than 500 cover versions of their songs out there - and those are just the hits - every boy/girl band from N'Sync to Steps seems hell bent on recreating the hook-laden, disco-style songs that characterised the band's output in the 1970s. Robin is scathing: "Everyone is competing to be the same and nobody's competing to be different. I come from a school where everyone competed to be different. Back when we started, every record that was put out had to be different. Today, it's 'don't fix it if it ain't broken' and you get tired of listening to all that crap. It's just awful. All the production sounds the same, as if it's coming off conveyor belts.
"It's the same groove, melodies are non-existent and there are a lot of singers who are singing for the sake of singing - and they're singing all over the place, you can't hear where the chorus begins and the verse ends."). "The vocals are fantastic," he says.
Robin (51) is Maurice's twin. Their older brother Barry (53) makes up the trio. Born on the Isle of Man, but brought up in Manchester, they emigrated to Australia when they were teenagers, returning to Britain in the mid 1960s.
"Back in Manchester, the three of us would be doing Everly Brothers songs, getting the harmonies right," says Maurice. He paints a vivid picture of the swinging It was the same for John Travolta He wanted to get on with acting jobs and we wanted to get on with writing songs."
The Staying Alive/Night Fever/How Deep Is Your Love era represented their "second wave" of commercial and critical success and the brothers threw themselves into a rock 'n' world of excess. Barry and Robin did a lot of drugs, while Maurice drank. The songs dried up. "We went through a certain amount of self-abuse and we saw our younger brother, Andy, die. At that stage we were all barely talking to each other, but his death in 1988 brought us much closer together and we realised what we were doing to ourselves. We've learned from our experience - it doesn't take a bloody rocket scientist."
Although coasting somewhat in the 1990s with weak albums such as High Civilisation and Size isn't Everything, they began their rehabilitation with Still Waters. Now it's all rock 'n' roll hall of fame, hit singles and celebrity congratulations.
"This is like our third wave of success," says Maurice, "and if you think of all our mountains and valleys, all the marriage break-ups, all the drink and drugs and all the not talking to each other, that's not bad going. We're still not finished though. We still want to write the ultimate record."
This is Where I Came In is out now. The Bee Gees hope to play Ireland and the rest of Europe next year.