In 1997, the brothers were promoting their Still Waters album and its title track.

As detailed in a new HBO documentary, How Do You Mend a Broken Heart – which is broadcast on Sky Documentaries this Sunday and released on DVD the following day – they were masterful, complex, and eternally influential songwriters, and their careers marked by huge success, substance abuse, and – pun partially intended – tragedy. It’s still easy to overlook how fantastic The Bee Gees were. The walk-off also reinforced a likely-unfair presumption about The Bee Gees: that they were spiky and humourless. ‘Still in touch with The Bee Gees?’”Īt the time, the Brothers Gibb – Barry, Maurice, and Robin – were cast by popular consensus as naff relics, with their disco bangers yet to be reclaimed as works of genius, and their best-remembered image – the high-pitched voices, the medallions, the hair (or lack thereof) – an easy target for ridicule. “But if I meet people in the street that’s almost the first or second thing they say to me. “I do get asked about it in interviews,” Anderson tells me (answering yet more questions about the Gibb brothers).

Indeed, aside from some dodgy cover versions – Take That, N-Trance, Pras, and Steps – the incident might have been The Bee Gees’ biggest hit of that era.Ĭlive Anderson admits it’s the best remembered moment from his decade-plus of television chat shows. It was a headline story of the week by 1999 the incident was being listed as one of the all-time great TV moments in end-of-the-century retrospectives.

The walk-off came after nine minutes of seemingly innocuous ribbing at the Gibb brothers’ expense.Įlvis Costello, also in the studio that night, tried to talk The Bee Gees round, while Clive Anderson was met with an immediate phone call from a tabloid journalist. “You’re the tosser, pal.” Those four words – from the almighty Barry Gibb, no less – punctuated one of the Nineties’ most notorious TV events: The Bee Gees storming off Clive Anderson All Talk in October 1997.

Bee gees put your worries in my pocket