The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees by Hector Cook

Author:Hector Cook [Bilyeu, Melinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-004-5
Publisher: Music Sales Corp.
Published: 2003-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

23

A NOT SO GOLDEN GARTER

STEPHEN WAS BARELY a month old when he moved with his parents and maternal grandparents to a rented house on Glencrutchery Road in Douglas on the Isle of Man. It was a move inspired not so much by any longing to return to the land of Barry’s birth, but for more practical reasons: the prohibitive tax situation in the Britain of the early Seventies.

“We were all born on the Isle of Man which … helps us enormously if we live there, tax wise,” Barry explained. “The Labour government in England had raised the taxes to something like 83 per cent in the pound, which was terrifying to anybody who was actually making good money. The Isle of Man was our original home, so I think it was a bridge in a way to us moving to America because we’d done quite well up to this point. We’d had four really quiet years between ’70 and ’74. We couldn’t get arrested, I tell a lie, we could get arrested! But we were lucky, we didn’t get arrested! We weren’t selling records and the media were sort of saying, ‘Well, that’s enough of The Bee Gees.’ You know, you had them in the Sixties and you know what happens in this business at the end of every decade, it’s anyone who was big in that particular decade gets ejected unless they’ve got a few tricks up their sleeve.

“So it was the end of the Sixties, it was the end of people like us, and four years went by. We had some money put away from our success in the Sixties. This was our way of trying to save some money, and [although] we didn’t know it at the time, we were going to move into America. We were going to have another shot at the whole thing in a different country. But we went to the Isle of Man for about two years, and I stayed in that little semi-detached at the top of Bray Hill and then [the] little white house at the top of Princes Road, which I fell in love with.”

Maurice also had a new home, a five-acre estate in Sussex, following his separation from Lulu. “Of course I still think of Lulu and I still love her,” he confessed. “It took a long time to get over the shock, and when her TV series started I just couldn’t watch it. But I did catch one show and thought she looked like a million dollars and was singing really well.

“I feel I’m much more grown-up and independent now,” he continued. “I don’t think I’d have moved down here unless we’d separated, but it really is a fantastic place. Our home always used to seem to be full of pop people. And that doesn’t help when you just want a bit of peace and quiet. Living away from it all has taken away the pressure.”

With the new house in the country, he’d added a new hobby. “I’ve really got the horse-riding bug,” he revealed.

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