Three brothers from Manchester, two of them twins, built one of the most durable and successful careers in popular music, a career that stretched from the late 1950s to the early 2000s and across radically different musical eras. Barry Gibb, born September 1, 1946, and his fraternal twins Robin and Maurice Gibb, born December 22, 1949, on the Isle of Man, were three of five children in a family that encouraged their musical instincts from the start. Their father initially saw them as a miniature version of the Mills Brothers, and in 1955 the three boys began singing between shows at local movie theaters in Manchester. When the family moved to Australia in 1958, settling near Brisbane, the brothers began performing as the Brothers Gibb, with Barry writing the songs.

They attracted the attention of a local disc jockey, earned their own television show, and adopted the name the Bee Gees. Despite considerable popularity in the Australian press and on television, actual hit records proved elusive. By late 1966, with the Beatles having made England the center of the rock and pop world, the trio decided to return to the United Kingdom. They had sent demo recordings ahead, and their song “Spicks and Specks” became their first Australian hit while they were still crossing the ocean.

The recording caught the interest of manager Robert Stigwood, who signed the group upon their arrival. In the environment of swinging London, Barry and Robin Gibb alternated lead vocal duties, harmonizing with each other and with Maurice. Their sound drew from a broad range of influences, including American country music and soul, and at this stage they were most comfortable taking elements of Black American singing and harmonies apart and rebuilding them in their own style. In 1969 the trio split over a dispute involving the album “Odessa,” a lushly orchestrated double LP and their most ambitious recording to that point.

Unable to agree on which song should be the single, Robin Gibb walked out. Barry and Maurice continued under the Bee Gees name for one album, “Cucumber Castle,” while Robin released “Robin’s Reign” in 1970. Nearly two years older and considerably wiser, the brothers decided to reunite, having matured both personally and musically. They now created a progressive pop-rock sound similar to that of the Moody Blues and returned on a high note with two striking songs: the soulful “Lonely Days,” which became the group’s first number one hit in America, and “Morning of My Life,” which remained a fan favorite and stayed in their concert repertoire for decades.

Their momentum began to fade after another major international hit, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” in 1971. The single “Run to Me” reached the top twenty in 1972, but the album “To Whom It May Concern” was quickly forgotten. Their fortunes continued to decline through 1973 with the album “Life in a Tin Can” and the single “Saw a New Morning,” which failed to reach the top forty despite a move to America and a heavy promotional push. The trio was sliding into a deep creative and commercial hole.

Rescue came from an unexpected suggestion. Eric Clapton recommended they try recording at Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida, where he had just cut an album himself. In the process, the disco era was born in America. “Saturday Night Fever,” as both an album and a film, supercharged the disco phenomenon and broadened its audience by tens of millions, with the Bee Gees at the forefront of the music.

Ironically, their sound had not changed all that much. Amid the dance numbers, the group still delivered a healthy portion of romantic ballads with memorable hooks. At the urging of producer Arif Mardin, they had simply decided to forget that they were white Englishmen and plunged into soul music, emulating on their own terms the funkier Philadelphia soul sounds that all three brothers knew and loved. In one stroke, the group melded every influence they had ever absorbed, from the Mills Brothers and the Beatles to early seventies soul, into something of their own that was virtually irresistible.

“Spirits Having Flown” was their crowning commercial triumph, selling more than thirty million copies and producing three more number one singles. But by the end of the 1970s, the disco era was waning, hurt by a bad economy and political chaos at home and abroad. An ad hoc backlash had already formed against the group’s dominance of the airwaves, with disc jockeys organizing mass burnings of Bee Gees posters and albums. The group itself contributed to the end of the party through its participation in the film “Sgt.

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” inspired by the Beatles album. The movie was both a commercial and critical disaster and an embarrassment to everyone involved. For most of the 1980s, the Bee Gees were virtually invisible in America. Barry Gibb instead pursued work as a producer for other artists, creating hits for Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross.

By 1987, with the album “E. S. P. ,” their sales had rebounded everywhere except the United States, and they produced a number one single outside the U.

S. with “You Win Again. ” The 1989 album “One” received a good reception worldwide and generated a top ten U. S.

single. In the 1990s, Polygram Records released the four-CD anthology “Tales from the Brothers Gibb,” which sold well around the world. The group’s 1997 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame led to a resurgence of interest, heralding the release of the live album “One Night Only” in 1998, recorded at their first American concert in nearly a decade. The Bee Gees remained active until January 2003, when Maurice Gibb died of cardiac arrest during surgery.

Following his death, Robin and Barry decided to stop performing as the Bee Gees. Their recorded legacy, however, subsequently became more visible than it had been in decades, especially after their catalogue moved to Warner Reprise. Robin Gibb was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and underwent treatment. He died in London in May 2012 from complications of cancer and intestinal surgery, at the age of sixty-two.

Given the earlier deaths of their brother Andy and Maurice, Robin was the third Gibb brother and the second member of the Bee Gees to pass away. In the wake of the tragedy, Barry Gibb kept working, appearing on other people’s records, playing concerts, and releasing a solo album titled “In the Now” in 2016. The following year, the Bee Gees were honored at the 2017 Grammy Awards. Their music was then featured in the star-studded concert “Stayin’ Alive: A Grammy Salute to the Music of the Bee Gees,” broadcast by CBS in April.

The career that had begun in Australian movie theaters more than six decades earlier had left an imprint that reached well beyond its sales figures, with the group’s sound and style mirrored in acts as disparate as Justin Timberlake and of Montreal.