The last Gibb standing

Barry Gibb was born in 1946 in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, to a father who worked as a hotel drummer and a mother who stayed home with the children. When he was almost two he pulled a hot teapot off the table and was badly scalded. He spent about two and a half months in hospital, and gangrene set in. He says he remembers none of it, only the scars. The twins Robin and Maurice arrived in December 1949, and the three brothers would become the Bee Gees.

Gibb sang with a wide range and a far-reaching falsetto, and he wrote at a scale few can match. He shares the record for the most consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number ones, six, with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and in all he has written or co-written sixteen chart-toppers. Guinness World Records lists him as the second most successful songwriter in history, behind only McCartney. In 2007 Q magazine put him 38th among the 100 greatest singers.

Recognition came from several directions. He and his brothers entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and he joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 as a member of the Bee Gees. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002, and in 2018 he was knighted. In January 2022 he was made an Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, the country where the group had its first chart successes.

Today he is the only surviving member of the group, and his career now spans more than seventy years. That figure is easy to read past. It means a boy from the Isle of Man has been writing and performing for most of a century's second half, and he is still part of the story. The scarred toddler who survived has become the keeper of one of the great catalogues of popular music.