Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’ on HBO, A Visually Rich Ode To The Pop Music Lifers 

Now on HBO, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a terrifically rewarding journey through the rise, fall, and disco-fueled rise again of the Brothers Gibb. 

THE BEE GEES: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The pop music journey of Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb has been a tumultuous one, and How Can You Mend A Broken Heart puts it all on the table. They broke loose in 1967, alongside the British Invasion and the Beatles’ worldwide takeover, and churned out a string of hit singles based around the formula of their immaculate three-part harmonies and knack for earworm pop melodies. Even by then, the brothers Gibb had been singing professionally for years, mostly in Australia where their father had hustled to find them gigs. With the advent of pop stardom, and the pressure to keep up with the music industry demand for more more more, the Bee Gees’ career began to swing on a pendulum, back and forth between high profile hits and slumming for work. For example, they broke up in 1970, but by 1971 had their first US #1 in the ballad “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” It was a wild ride, and that pressurized environment exacerbated the perpetual push-pull at the heart of the group, which was the tussle between Robin and Barry to be king of the mountain. Maurice, always in the middle, did his best to be George Harrison and mediate between the two would-be frontmen.

The documentary utilizes the talking head format pretty heavily. Contemporary interviews with Barry and archival ones with Robin and Maurice (who have both passed away) tell the story of the group’s undulating career arc, and their backing band and various record producers fill in the margins. Present too are observations from Nick Jonas about the nature of singing in a brotherly band, Eric Clapton on the joys of recording a record in 1970s Miami, and Chris Martin, commenting on how backlash is inevitable when you’re the biggest thing going.

As it turns out, the biggest undulation of the Bee Gees’ career hit like a hurricane right when they really needed it. While they had explored funk-adjacent sounds and soul melodies on earlier 1970s records, it was the demos they recorded for a little movie their manager was backing called Saturday Night Fever that inserted them into disco’s bloodstream. And disco was an animal. But the Bee Gees’ relationship with disco is torturous. On one hand, it revitalized their career (again), emerging fully formed and funded-up just as they were searching for a new stylistic direction. On the other hand, it saddled them with being the face and voice of the genre as it reached new zeniths of popularity. Nothing that burns as hot as the disco sun did can sustain itself forever, and when disco’s star collapsed, it took Barry, Robin and Maurice down, too.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2013 film The Secret Disco Revolution takes a revealing look at the genre’s roots, and includes a wealth of interviews with disco scene heavy hitters. The recent Netflix doc ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band From Texas profiles a much different band, but one with a similarly lengthy and storied 50-year career. And the Academy Award-winning 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom was a great look at the music industry from the perspective of backup singers.

Performance Worth Watching: Barry Gibb’s feathered hair is a marvel. It makes one disoriented. You wish to dive in. It’s like looking at a Degas and getting lost in the subtleties of the brush work.

Memorable Dialogue: According to Justin Timberlake, Barry Gibb’s voice is the “Human embodiment of a brass section.”

Sex and Skin: None. Lots of chest hair, though.

Our Take: As the only surviving Gibb brother, Barry, now 74 and living in Miami, his hair thinning but still rock star long, becomes the emotional center of How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. The Gibbs were very close. Despite his rivalry with Robin, Barry says he’d give it all up, the hit singles and the money and the fame, if he could only have Robin back. That sincerity infuses a nice undercurrent of personal history into a doc that on its surface is very much about the mechanics of stardom, and its wealth of 1960s and 70s footage is terrific. Like the best music documentaries, once you’re hooked on the storyline, every little detail is another morsel from the era. Rollicking through the British Invasion, the excess of the early 1970s, and the heady joy of disco, Broken Heart is as visually rich as it is informative and emotional.

Of particular interest to Bee Gees heads and music fans in general will be the absolutely fascinating studio breakdowns of the stone-cold classics from the band’s catalog, iconic songs such as “Jive Talkin'” (Barry explains how the rhythms of driving across a steel bridge informed its percolating beat), the sumptuous keyboards of “How Deep Is Your Love,” and the studio experiments with looping and sampling that led to the inescapable, titanic grooves of “Night Fever” and “Staying Alive.” Couple all of that with vintage footage of radio stations at work, including the legend Casey Kasem, and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart becomes a meta indulgence not just in the Bee Gees themselves, but in the look and feel of an entire era, and how music was made, played, and promoted. It’s engrossing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is an informative, revealing look at the interpersonal dynamic at work inside one of the biggest pop music groups of the 20th century. Come for the music and interviews. Stay for the feathered hair and satin jackets.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

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