Lulu and Maurice Gibb: the end of the swinging sixties dream
“Going steady is quite the wrong way to describe what was happening between us. Going unsteady might better sum up the way we fell in and out with each other”. Lulu and Maurice Gibb: not exactly the world’s strongest power couple.
The year was 1969, and the Scottish singer met the Bee Gees backstage at Top of the Pops. “I thought Maurice was cute,” she said, and to all intents and purposes, that seemed to be the extent of the talking they did. Within months of that first meeting, the pair entered a whirlwind and ended up married, skipping happily off into paradise.
Or, at least, that’s what the mood of the ’60s had conned them into thinking. It had been a decade saturated with peace and love and smooth feeling that there was probably a sense that this hippie train was going to last forever. As such, when the whole thing fell to pieces while the wedding bells were still ringing, it came as quite a stark shock.
To say that Lulu and Gibb were a dysfunctional couple would possibly be too kind a way to put the real state of affairs, not least for the fact that by 1973, they were already divorced. But to give them their credit, within that span of four years, they had experienced every high and low endured by a couple in a marriage lasting decades or longer – they just went through it at a rate of knots.
Of course, being in the glare of the spotlight, with drink and drugs and every form of hedonism at your free disposal, can’t have helped. “We thought we were king and queen of the world and were fabulous. The drinking was a part of it, but we shouldn’t have got married in the first place… we should have just had a romance,” Lulu recalled in later years.
You could look at this as a case study for the disaster celebrity couple that they most definitely were, but underneath that tabloid veneer, it said a lot more about the death of the ‘60s than people might realise. It was a time when the youth truly thought they were invincible, could reach for the stars and genuinely grab it: but the rest of life doesn’t tend to pan out that way.
At just 19 and 20 years old, respectively, when they first came into each other’s orbit in 1969, Lulu had grown up in a formative era that sold them the dream that any old person could become the next global megastar. Just look at Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Twiggy: normal people with normal roots, but who transformed into icons.
In that sense, as much as the pair mastered the art in terms of the fame aspect, it came with the presumption that you should also keep all your eggs in one basket and play out your love life in public, too. That was the real recipe for disaster. It seemed that Lulu and Gibb were fooled by a false sense of romantic idolisation, which would have them donning magazine covers like John and Yoko. The reality was that they actually had to get along to achieve that.
Subsequently, as the ‘70s dawned and the marriage grew uglier by the second, it demonstrated a powerful lesson that the swinging decade was suddenly clattering down from its worldwide high. This is not to say the ‘60s was a lie, but it certainly sold a false dream that people like Lulu and Gibb fell victim to. Fame is fun, but not all that glitters is gold.
