As a songwriter, it’s easy to feel that all the good songs have already been written. No matter how often you create unique material, someone will always claim it’s been done before or that you’re wasting your time chasing trends. However, it’s possible to twist those familiar chords into something new and unheard. Despite the criticism the Bee Gees faced in their time, John Lennon was always a staunch supporter of their work.
That said, it’s about time more people see the Gibb brothers as more than just a standard dance act. While history has written them off more as the band that helped pioneer the sounds of disco on Saturday Night Fever, the real power behind their music started much earlier when they were a baby version of The Beatles.
Compared to the other pop-rock acts coming out of the late 1960s, hearing songs like ‘I Started a Joke’ and ‘To Love Somebody’ was very reminiscent of what John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to get up to in their early years, especially when all of their voices blended well together on the choruses.
For every band that sounds close to The Beatles, there will be the snobby rock fans who just claim that they are a lesser version of the Fab Four. Just ask Oasis, and they’d be glad to tell you about how fun it is trying to be compared to The Beatles at every opportunity.
Then again, Lennon never had a problem with the Bee Gees at all, recalling in one of his final interviews, “All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the ’70s who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music is just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees. They do a damn good job”.
At the same time, Lennon probably knew that people were critiquing the originality of his work all too well. The Beatles always had people taking jabs at them in the press for playing raucous rock and roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and Lennon getting a slap on the wrist for the similarities between Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Come Together’ probably made him cool his jets when talking about artists ripping him off.
Despite their Beatles associations, there are more than a few songs that the Bee Gees made that equal or even surpass some of the Fab Four’s best moments. Looking at a song like ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, the chord progression is one of the more sophisticated sequences to ever land on the charts, almost like they made a jazz-adjacent song and slowed it down until it sounded like a romantic ballad.
It’s not like Lennon wasn’t paying attention, either. As much as Double Fantasy focused on the domestic side of living, Yoko Ono’s contributions to the album, like ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss,’ were still based on disco tropes that the Bee Gees helped pioneer. None of the Gibb brothers really needed a confidence boost after featuring on one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, but getting the nod from one of The Beatles probably didn’t hurt, either.
