Bee Gees

Three brothers who spent forty-five years writing in close harmony and reinvented themselves completely halfway through. Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb were born on the Isle of Man and raised in Manchester before their parents emigrated to Redcliffe, north of Brisbane, in August 1958. They sang for coins thrown onto a speedway track, took their first Australian chart success with Spicks and Specks, and returned to England in January 1967, where Robert Stigwood signed them and had Bee Gees' 1st in shops by July. Horizontal, Idea, and Odessa followed inside two years, built on Robin's vibrato lead and three-part harmony the brothers wrote entirely themselves.

Arif Mardin turned them toward R&B on Main Course in 1975, and Barry's falsetto did the rest. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack sold more than 40 million copies and sits among the five best-selling albums ever released. Nine of their songs reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, which ranks them the 14th greatest Hot 100 act of all time, and they wrote and produced hits for Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, and Kenny Rogers besides. Sales figures start at 120 million records and climb from there. Brian Wilson inducted them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Maurice died on January 12, 2003, and Robin on May 20, 2012. Barry, knighted in 2018, still performs the catalog the three of them built.