Music - Richard Cook gets the heeBee-Geebees over the comeback of the Seventies siblings

There's nothing wrong with being a long-serving artiste, but it helps if you still have something useful to contribute. The blight on rock, as it enters its sixth decade, is that so many of its youthful butterflies have persisted into spidery middle age, refusing to take early retirement, in a way that would have shamed Methuselah.

Making fun of the Rolling Stones, who have cheerfully betrayed Mick Jagger's once solemn promise to knock it on the head when he reached 30, is one thing, but at least the old Twickenham blues boys have a certain raddled majesty, a cloak to sling around their shoulders. Far worse are the performers whom the American rock critic Bob Christgau recently grouped under the canny rubric "Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies". There's no reason for these groups or individuals to carry on, beyond paying a few bills: in the words of the Four Tops, they just can't help themselves.

The Bee Gees don't even have the excuse of needing a bob or two. As far back as 1969, they earned the incredible sum of £3m for a year's work. Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb more or less split up at that point, fed up with each other and the peculiar world of Sixties pop, which involved a great deal of Machiavellian management and demanded a sustained conveyor belt of hit singles, as the pop album had hardly got off the ground in those days. Luckily for the Gibbs, hit singles were what they were best at. If you can remember that far back, you will recall the string of hanky-wringing tunes that seemed to be the Bee Gees' sole trick: "Massachusetts", "I've Got to Get a Message to You", "I Started a Joke" and so on. This hardly seemed like a band for the ages.

But that is what they have become (naturally, after they got back together). The Gibbs are often thought of as an Australian band, but in fact they were born on the Isle of Man, and the family only emigrated after a local bobby advised their father that the mildly delinquent Gibb boys might appreciate a bit of Antipodean sunshine. Barry, the eldest, was only just shy of his 12th birthday when they arrived in Brisbane in 1958.

They came back nine years later, a boy band searching for a hit. Amazingly, they got one. "New York Mining Disaster 1941" doesn't sound like the sort of title Boyzone would have shortlisted for their British debut, but this plaintive tale of trapped mineworkers became an improbable worldwide hit and established the Bee Gees as a force in the London pop world of the day. Under Robert Stigwood's ingenious management, they strung together a series of successes which, by the end of the decade, made them chart fixtures of a kind. It was never very easy to tell who, if anybody, was the creative force in the trio. Barry and Robin vied for the position of lead singer, and often it seemed they were in a contest as to who could come up with the reediest, most quavery delivery.

The Bee Gees were, at least, a proper band. They even played their own instruments. Besides the singles, there was a sequence of watery albums, the kind that singles bands made in the Sixties. That culminated, in 1969, in the double-LP Odessa, often fondly recalled as one of the final follies of the decade: it came packaged in a velvet-covered gatefold that got particularly scruffy when it had been on the record-shop racks for a while. By this point, family bickering had largely sundered the group spirit, and Robin went off to make a solo record.

The early Seventies weren't kind to the group. It is hard to remember anything they did in the first half of the decade, although they continued to enjoy a fair degree of success in the US. But Britain had forgotten about them by the end of 1973. They were having to play cabaret gigs to pay off accumulated tax debts, and in 1974 suffered the ignominy of having their latest album (unwisely titled A Kick in the Head . . . Is Worth Eight in the Pants) rejected by their record company because it was so awful. How could they come back from here?

The answer, funnily enough, lay in disco. In 1975, they released an album called Main Course, produced by Arif Mardin, who had already shown a magical touch with the Average White Band. Mardin didn't exactly turn the Gibbs into soul boys, but he put a danceable spin on material that suddenly seemed light years distant from the old tear-jerkers with which they had made their name. A reviewer who heard the first single off the record, "Jive Talkin'", was bewildered: whoever's singing this, he said, it doesn't sound like any Bee Gee I've heard before.

It paved the way for the group to rule the dance floors of the late Seventies. Major hits such as "You Should Be Dancing" were only the start. Robin's wobbly whine turned into a falsetto shriek that proved bewilderingly popular. Stigwood, still in charge, hit on the idea of constructing an entire film soundtrack around Bee Gees songs, and made the story an everyday drama of discogoers that he called Saturday Night Fever. The album was released in 1977, when hardcore disco had already peaked, yet made it possible for the phenomenon to cross over from committed clubgoers to the wider pop audience. Although the new Bee Gees records had done well, they were as nothing compared to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, sales of which eventually topped 30 million. And almost every song was a Gibb composition. It was an era when many disco albums shipped gold and returned platinum, but the Bee Gees really did make all those sales.

When you have those kinds of assets, in publishing and sales royalties, it is very difficult not to spend the rest of your life as incredibly rich men. In the Eighties, it was really Barry (the original BG) who emerged as the shrewdest talent of the three. His songs for Dionne Warwick ("Heartbreaker") and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton ("Islands in the Stream") underlined his knack for the ironclad pop hook. In the end, however, the Bee Gees' day was done. They have spent most of the past 20 years in the stately decline of pop giants who once brought a lot of revenue to their business but don't really have anything more to say, aside from reminiscing on TV chat shows and picking up lifetime achievement awards. Although they do it with good enough grace (Ronan Keating might as well study their example for his retirement), you can tell they would rather be getting some fresh limelight.

Which is why we are still getting the records. This Is Where I Came In (Polydor) is their latest, well, comeback. A snap of the twentysomething lads, stood in front of their old Bedford touring van, sits squarely on the cover. The contemporary models lounge around moodily in the inside booklet: Robin has at last cut his hair short, and Maurice (who lost his some time ago) still refuses to remove his hat. On the disc is a bunch of drivelling songs that get a sprightly enough treatment (the guys still play their own instruments). "Man in the Middle" and "Voice in the Wilderness" are the old Bee Gees, "Wedding Day" and "The Extra Mile" are the very old Bee Gees, and the rest of it sounds like bits of Abba and the Beatles. All of it begs the question as to why they bothered. But we've already answered that.

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