“THE first time I heard Bee Gees harmonies was in the quadrangle of Ipswich Grammar School on my transistor radio”.

Colin Petersen would go on to become the fourth member of the Bee Gees, joining the Gibb brothers as their drummer when they moved to London in 1966.

He had attended the same school as Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, Humpybong State School on the Redcliffe Peninsula, but left before they arrived at the school, to pursue his film career in London which kicked off with his starring role in Smiley, and then moved to Ipswich as a boarder at Ipswich Grammar School.

“If I was walking down to footy practice or between classes walking from one building to another, on would come the transistor radio and I’d be listening to the top 40,” Colin said.

“It could have been one of the recordings they made with disc jockey Bill Gates that he would have broadcast without them having a record deal, or it could have been their first record, which I believe was Three Kisses of Love.

“I didn’t particularly love the record. I was more into listening to rock and roll and more sophisticated stuff that was coming out of America like Leiber and Stoller songs and The Drifters. But there was something about those harmonies, they jumped out at you.

“You only had to hear it two or three times and the next time you heard them, you would put everything else aside and think, that was the Bee Gees. There was a uniqueness there.”

Colin recorded five albums with the Bee Gees, helping to create some of the most memorable songs of the 1960s.

He continued in the industry as a producer and in music management before turning his back on drumming and the music industry for four decades.

It wasn’t until the manager of tribute show the Best of the Bee Gees approached Colin and asked him to join the show that he started to celebrate his career as a Bee Gee.

“I was a little bit reluctant at first,” he said.

“I went to see the show. It would have been about the third song in, and I thought to myself, bloody hell, this band is really great, and the voices were so close, and it was well presented and they all seem really comfortable on stage and enjoying it, which is really important.

“And so, then the idea came up, that I would relay little stories about different times in my life and link those stories to the next song.”

It wasn’t long before he was asked to get behind the kit again.

“I said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t played for so long and there is no way that I am getting up in front of an audience and making one little mistake, I’d rather not do it’.

“I remember Joanne [his wife] saying, you know these songs back to front Colin, just have fun and do it and it’ll be like riding a bike, you know, the old cliché.

“It is nothing like that. Nothing like that when you start off again.

“They sent me up a kit of drums. I would only play for about an hour a day. After that my head felt like it was going to explode because I am such a perfectionist.

“I would play a track, and even if it got to the second bar, and there was a slight flaw, I would put the CD back to start again, and the challenge was to play the track from start to finish without a mistake for a start before I started to branch out and do some little fills. “After six weeks of this, I put my hand up, and I love it. It’s really great.”

It would be no easy feat to reproduce the harmonies of the Gibb brothers, and particularly the unique vocals of Robin Gibb,

Colin said he was surprised at how close the lineup of Evan Webster (Barry), Russell Davey (Robin) and Greg Wain (Maurice) could get.

“I still find it quite astonishing,” Colin said.

“Russell’s voice is so close. It is quite uncanny.

“The first time I heard Russell, it was I Started a Joke, I closed my eyes just to concentrate, and, apart from little bits of pronunciation which were not quite spot on, the tone and the emotion of it, it is like he is living it on stage and the mannerisms.

“For his part, Russell and the other guys are the same, it’s not just recreating the songs, they put themselves into the personas of the individual Gibbs to a large degree.

“It’s not blatant. What the three lead singers of this show have going for them is that they capture the subtleties and they have such respect for what the Gibbs produced.

“Barry is the only one surviving and from all accounts he’s really happy because in his words, he was interviewed not all that long ago [on the album Greenfields featuring covers of Bee Gees songs by country musicians] and he was asked ‘why are you doing this?, and Barry said ‘It’s very simple. All I am doing is trying to keep the songs alive’.

“And that’s exactly what I’m doing and I’m sure Barry would appreciate that, and for me, it has come at a great time in my life and it is even sweeter because I’ve been out of the limelight for so many years.”

The Best of the Bee Gees with Colin ‘Smiley’ Petersen brings the hit songs and first hand accounts of the Bee Gees to the Ipswich Civic Centre on November 12.