It’s hard to grasp how famous the Bee Gees really were. They remain the third most successful band of all time after the Beatles and the Supremes. In the late 1970s there were weeks when they had four or five hits in the charts simultaneously. Their soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever was the No. 1 album on the Billboard Charts for the entire first half of 1978 and broke all sorts of records, selling 15 million copies in the US alone.
No wonder there was a violent reaction as music fans rose up against disco domination. That reaction was so drastic it casts a shadow on Frank Marshall’s absorbing biographical documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. Marshall may not be a familiar name – his previous directorial efforts being features such as Alive and Arachnophobia – but he does a proficient job with this non-fictional material. We don’t get into the nitty gritty of the band’s personal relations but neither do we get a hagiography. The emphasis is on the music and the fickle nature of celebrity.
