Bee Gees

The Bee Gees' second R&B album, Children of the World, had the advantage of being written and recorded while the group was riding a string of Top Ten singles and the biggest wave of public adulation in their history off of the Main Course album…

THE ULTIMATE BEE GEES is a double-disc career retrospective featuring the group's many hits and chart-topping singles, performances of a selection of hit songs they wrote for others, and liner notes by Tim Rice. Tim Rice's liner notes accompanying THE ULTIMATE BEE GEES puts the group's extravagant popularity into perspective. 'Within this package is a collection of performances and songs that very few practitioners of popular music of the past could match for quality, originality, and emotion. It's the singing, the harmonies, the arrangements, the sound, the rivalry, the love, the intelligence, the determination, but above all it's the songs.'

Documentary following the fascinating, and at times turbulent, story of the Bee Gees, one of the most successful bands of all time. This is the story of three very close brothers, tied together by familial love and a natural aptitude and obsession for all things musical.

The Bee Gees were a pop music band formed in 1958. The band's line-up consisted of brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. The trio were successful for most of their decades of recording music, but they had two distinct periods of exceptional success: as a popular music act in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as prominent performers of the disco music era in the late 1970s. The group sang recognisable three-part tight harmonies; Robin's clear vibrato lead vocals were a hallmark of their earlier hits, while Barry's R&B falsetto became their signature sound during the late 1970s and 1980s. They wrote all of their own hits, as well as writing and producing several major hits for other artists.

The problem with the recent spate of "number one" collections from the pop elite – the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and now the Bee Gees – is that they're consistently marketed as "greatest-hits" collections. The conceptual weight of "number one" singles for the average listener is about as heavy as the slabs of wax they came out on, and compiling an entire record around them only shines the spotlight on the tracks that suffered the cut…

"Horizontal" is the fourth album by the Bee Gees, and the second to receive an international release. After Bee Gees 1st, the Bee Gees went straight into their next album. Horizontal has a much bigger sound than 1st and, with more use of electric guitars, it has a much harder edge. There is also less reliance on strong melodies and more on abstract lyrics. And, of course, the album features the first ever Bee Gees number one single, the anti-flower-power tour de force 'Massachusetts'.