I wouldn’t say that I was particularly a fan of the BeeGees, and I didn’t feel any immediate sense of shock when I heard of Robin Gibb’s death at the end of last month, but the press coverage of his funeral has made me feel sad.

The sight of Barry, the sole survivor of the four Gibb brothers, leaving the church was very poignant.  Being the eldest of four, he might reasonably have expected not to be the one left on his own; how bereft he must feel.  And how awful for their mother to have outlived three of her four sons.

There was a period in the mid to late 1970s when the music of the BeeGees dominated; the songs from Saturday Night Fever were the unavoidable sound track to my teenage years.  I only got around to buying any of their albums in the late 1990s, when I acquired one of the retrospective live ones.

Tracks from it pop up every now and again when I have the iPod on shuffle, and memories of awkward nights in discos in Birmingham and all those terrible television programmes made to jump on the disco band wagon arrive unbidden and in droves.  (And a quick search on google confirmed that the 1978 discomania episode of Starsky and Hutch was not a figment of an over excited imagination.)

But this weekend I spent some time listening to all the tracks I have, and I was properly reminded that between them, the BeeGees wrote a great collection of songs both for themselves and for others.  ‘Alone’ felt all too much like an encapsulation of how the surviving family members might feel.