THE Bee Gees were possibly the first pop group to perform with an orchestra in their live shows in the ’60s.
The Beatles had recorded with string arrangements by producer George Martin as early as 1965 with Yesterday, recorded A Day in the Life in February 1967 with a 40 piece orchestra in the studio and performed live in the studio in June 1967 for the first worldwide television satellite cross recording All You Need is Love.
In 1966, the Moody Blues came out with their third album, Days of Future Passed, the first Pop or Rock album to be recorded in stereo and the first one to make use of a full orchestra.
But The Bee Gees were performing the hits of their album Bee Gees 1st, such as New York Mining Disaster 1941, I Can’t See Nobody To Love Somebody and Holiday, live on stage with an orchestra as early as 1967 as they were recorded early that same year.
Original Bee Gees drummer, Ipswich Grammar School old boy Colin Petersen, said the songs were always meant to be played with an orchestra.
“Certainly when we started to record the first album it was envisaged to bring strings in and it ended up at the Albert Hall with a 90 piece orchestra. It just got out of hand. It was like Cecil B DeMille; Stigie [Bee Gees manager Robert Stigwood] couldn’t help himself,” Petersen said.
“But really the orchestra brings out so much to those songs. It just makes so much sense.”
The Bee Gees were performing with a 30 piece orchestra in 1967 and the productions got bigger. Their opening show of their 1968 tour at the Royal Albert Hall featured a 67 piece Symphony Orchestra, a huge choir and the RAF Apprentices Marching Band.
“I toured with that for over two years, with these magnificent orchestras – 60 piece orchestras,” Petersen said.
“Musically, a live orchestra has got an emotive quality about it that nothing else does have. All the instruments are like voices. They’ve all got their own characters.”
Petersen recalled the early Bee Gees recordings at IBC Studios in London where the Kinks, The Who and Cream also recorded.
“I used to always go to the orchestral overdubs, always. I never missed one. We put down maybe three tracks, maybe sometimes two, and then tidied those up that they were final and then put guide vocals on it, and then handed that to Bill Shepherd, our musical director and it was up to him.
“We’d leave spaces, it wasn’t cluttered. We were musicians in that sense, and then Bill Shepherd would come in and do his thing, play overdub on two or three tracks.
“I remember distinctly, I was sitting at the left hand end of the board [the mixing console, or soundboard], and there would have been a couple of engineers and maybe one or two of the band.
“We just got back from America from a promotion tour, and the first one that came up was a song that the Gibbs had recently written, called Massachusetts. I thought it was really nice track, great album track and lovely melody. But it was when I heard the introduction that Bill Shepherd wrote for that song that I thought, this is a smash. It’s certainly one of the most beautiful little pieces and he writes some lovely things, it’s a stroke of genius in my opinion.”
The Bee Gees perform with a 30 piece orchestra at Saville Theatre London in 1967.
Now performing in tribute show The Best of the Bee Gees, Petersen is back touring with an orchestra as the band celebrates an amazing milestone of 25 years of shows.
For the latest tour the band is accompanied by the George Ellis Orchestra, with orchestral charts as originally written and recorded by the brothers Gibb with Bill Shepherd.
“It’s a complete package now. Obviously, we can’t afford to have this every time we step up on a stage, because it’s a 22 piece orchestra, it’s not a cheap production,” Petersen said.
“We can carry it off ourselves. These guys have been doing it for so many years, but the orchestra just completes the picture.
“It’s something that identified the Gibbs for a long time. They played with an orchestra from the time I was with them and I think they held on to an orchestra right up until around the time their music changed, like Jive Talkin, Main Course album.
“In those later songs, Grease in particular, there are some lovely orchestral parts too.”
The Best of the Bee Gees perform with the George Ellis Orchestra and special guests Colin Petersen and Roslyn Loxton at QPAC Brisbane on October 26.