The Bee Gees' Black Metal Night, Fact or Fiction?

Deep in the heart of the closet I recently unearthed a box containing a CD with 'archive 95-96' in faded Sharpie. In a folder, in a folder, in a folder named 'BGs-N-F" I found some images long forgotten.

I don't know how much of this is accurate and what is urban legend, but this is what I recall from 25 years ago. [What follows was communicated in the mid 90s on what sounded like a ham radio from a guy, with a fantastic accent, that knew a friend of mine from the late 80's Cleveland heavy metal scene.]

Legend states, it was early November of 1995 and The Bee Gees were concluding the Northern European leg of their 1995 world tour. The band had a night off in Oslo and decided to visit the nearest pub. They were delighted by a very warm reception by the locals which included several members of well-known bands in the Norwegian Black Metal scene (it is worth it to Google "Norwegian Black Metal" if you are unfamiliar with how unique they are). These musicians were big fans of The Bee Gees since they grew up playing their songs.

Accordingly, the spirits were flowing and everyone was having a wonderful time when Maurice Gibb began feeling ill. In a later interview he claimed to have eaten some questionable seafood but witnesses report it was the Jägermeister shots he was dispatching with their new friends. As luck would have it, the members of one of the bands had rehearsal space nearby so the rowdy party moved there.

With instruments ready to go, it wasn't long before they were all playing AC/DC and Black Sabbath songs together. Eventually they thought it would be funny playing Bee Gees staples like How Deep Is Your Love and Stayin' Alive in the Black Metal style, off-tuned blistering guitars, machine gun drumming, growling — then they tried Black Metal classics in "The BeeGees style.

Robin Gibb started singing Mayhem's seminal classic Funeral Fog in his sweet vibrato tenor voice.

"From a place empty of life

Only dead trees are growing here

As it comes from a far

Only dead trees are growing here"

Robin was pretty lit by that point and couldn't get through the lyrics, eventually bursting out laughing."Bloody hell, how can dead trees grow anywhere?!"

"The guy that wrote that is Dead," someone chimed in, "That was his name too!" and everyone laughed. [Per Yngve Ohlin a.k.a. Dead was Mayhem's singer and lyricist before his death in 1991 but it was their drummer, Hellhammer (Jan Axel Blomberg), that actually penned the 1994 hit.]

Again, as luck would have it, someone was able to hit 'record' and the priceless session was superbly recorded. The very next day, the band were so pleased they decided to tour the rest of the month in and around Norway with their new supergroup. The wheels were turning, promotional posters and T-shirts were being printed. They even ordered a limited edition EP of the session, 666 copies printed on blood-red vinyl.

It all came to a very abrupt end when The Bee Gees' tour manager rejoined the band after a brief family-related absence. He was an extremely devout Roman Catholic and did not think any of this was funny or fun. This is where it gets weird and conjecture enters: apparently every single copy of the EP (666 copies in red vinyl) disappeared. Everything disappeared, every last trace that the band even visited Scandinavia that year vanished. The Bee Gees would not be heard from again until November 1997 when they filmed the immortal One Night Only in Las Vegas.

Even the Japanese import CD version retitled Too Mvch Heaven with different cover art and secret bonus track, a 21-minute long How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, 333 copies in all, mysteriously vanished.

In 1986 I did the logo for a Cleveland heavy metal fanzine, Pounding Metal, which was an early publication in the U.S. writing about emerging extreme heavy metal bands like Destructor and Mayhem. It was published by the older brother of a guy I went to high school with.

The fellow with the great accent, mentioned at the beginning of this blog, worked for the record company Bucket of Blood Records in Norway that put together 'The Bee Gees & Friends' project and was good friends with Pounding Metal and that's how I got the gig.

I'm not hopeful it will ever surface to see the light of day, or if it ever really happened.

I never got paid, but I did locate a few screen-printed posters I'm considering putting up on Etsy. Stay tuned.