AS CROWDS wandered through Bee Gees Way, stopping for a photo with the statues of the Gibb brothers, one of the original band members was sitting quietly, taking in the music he helped create.

 “This is an interesting track, Holiday. I worked out that little snare thing, because there was no rhythmic scope there for drums. And I just thought, some little identifiable thing that will come in and set that apart. It’s so simple. That’s the lovely thing about it.”

The introduction of ‘To Love Somebody’ stops the conversation that followed dead in its tracks.

“This is gorgeous. That intro is lovely. Bill Shepherd wrote that. He was our musical director. Bill worked with us for like three years. He’s a bit like our George Martin [The Beatles producer] figure.”

The fourth member of the Bee Gees, drummer Colin Petersen, was caught in the moment reflecting on his time with the band.

Unlike the crowds that swarmed over Redcliffe Parade in 2015 hoping to get a glimpse of Barry Gibb as he opened Bee Gees Way, Colin sat alone, a humble figure, unrecognised by those taking in the photos along Bee Gees Way as a recording of Barry Gibb tells the story of the band.

Petersen turned his back on the music industry for decades after creating some of the most memorable music of the 1960s in the Bee Gees and a stint in music management and as a producer in the UK and in Australia, with acts including Jonathan Kelly, Carol Lloyd and Mark Holden during the 1970s, to settle into a quieter life working as a house painter in Sydney.

Now in his 70s, life has gone full circle.

He moved back to the Redcliffe Peninsula this year and has started celebrating his career with the Bee Gees, touring with tribute band The Best of the Bee Gees where he shares his memories and gets back behind the kit for a song.

“It’s funny; the big wheel turning of life isn’t it, that I’m back here,” Colin said. “I love it. It’s a lovely place.

“I’m doing a lot of gigs with The Best of the Bee Gees from here on in and it’s just nice to come back to a really quiet place and just reflect a bit and recuperate.”

SMILEY GETS BACK TO SCHOOL

Born in Kingaroy, Colin moved to Brisbane with his family and went to the same primary school as the Gibb brothers, Humpybong State School. While he was in the same year group as Barry Gibb, their paths never met until years later.

Fame had caught up with Colin before Barry, Robin and Maurice. He landed the lead role in ‘Smiley’ when he was nine and attending Humpybong school and starred in two further British films ‘The Scamp’ and ‘A Cry from the Streets’.

“I came back in 1958 from spending off and on three years in England making films, which the ‘Smiley’ film kicked off and [the Gibbs] decided to emigrate and came back in that same year, by which time I left Humpybong School and they enrolled, so we didn’t meet.

“I went from Kingaroy to Chermside via [Redcliffe]. That was in 1958 and that was when my film career wound up. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have another offer. I had an offer to do a film called ‘Tiger Bay’ that Hayley Mills subsequently did.

“It came as a hell of a shock because that had become my life. My mother announced, ‘We’re not doing any more films Colin, it’s time you went back to school’.”

INSPIRATION IN IPSWICH

It was the isolation of being a boarder at Ipswich Grammar School that Colin credits for his early success as a musician. He had proved a natural on the drums after his uncle bought him a drum kit in his younger days.

“What it did for me more than anything else, it introduced me to a couple of quite talented, budding musicians. So that got my head back into wanting to play again.

“So, I think my studies suffered a little bit from there. I didn’t come out of it with dux of the school or anything.

“It taught me to be independent. It taught me to live alone to some degree, to live in your own headspace, and it gave me confidence when the opportunity came up to leave home not long after arts school to join a band.”

BECOMING A BEE GEE

Petersen had been playing in Sydney band Steve and the Board before he made the move to London and had flown up to Brisbane to play as a session drummer on a dozen of the Bee Gees early songs.

“They were going out as a trio working RSL clubs. They basically were a cabaret act. They weren’t a band,” Colin said.

“Once they discovered The Beatles, they wanted to be a band and to be a band, they needed a drummer and a lead guitar player. It was as simple as that. And we had become really good mates by that time.

“Bill Shepard, who later on was our musical director in London, he worked on several of their recordings in Australia as well, so it was a bit of a matter of putting the old team together in a way.

“I’d been in England for a couple of months when [Spicks And Specks] was released in Australia. I’d been there maybe three months and I knew they were coming over because we’d discussed that before I left.

“Although I went over to try to get back into films I always had that little safety net that if that didn’t happen, the Gibbs were coming over and the offer was there to become the fourth Bee Gee which I did on the day that they arrived in London from Southampton. I met them at the station.”

With the addition of former Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs guitarist Vince Melouney, the five-piece Bee Gees soon started to dominate the charts.

CREATING WORLDWIDE HITS

Colin was in awe of the creativity between the Gibb brothers.

He was in the studio stairwell with them when the electricity failed and they wrote their first hit in the UK and US, New York Mining Disaster 1941.

“This concept of a miner being trapped underground in the dark came up and they wrote the song in about 25 minutes,” he said.

“It was just their imagination. It was such a privilege looking back now. When they clicked, it was just an amazing thing to watch, the fluency of it.

“We would never rehearse to go into the studio. The record evolved in that studio, and when something evolves from nothing to a backtrack, that creative process, if it’s in one go, I think it’s got a certain immediacy, a freshness about it and I think a lot of that stuff, most of it in fact, had that sense of spontaneity about it.

“As an observer of the three [brothers] they were poles apart with their personalities. They were all ambitious, but Barry was tenfold as ambitious. Barry was so determined and had so much confidence and such talent that he was the driving force there. Barry was obsessed with being a pop star. Robin had a very quirky sense of humour but really was very eccentric. Maurice was just such a nice bloke and as far as the musical side of it, he was vital in that band because he had such an eclectic view of music.”

BEE GEES BREAK-UP

After four studio albums, solid worldwide touring and TV appearances, Vince Melouney left the band in 1969, followed by Robin Gibb.

Colin worked on the fifth album with Barry and Maurice but was starting to lose interest and left the band.

“I didn’t have the heart in it that I had had previously before Robin left. In my mind the Bee Gees were more than a sum of the parts. They were 10 times more than the sum of the parts. If one of them left they wouldn’t be the same. They were like a tripod. If you kick one leg away the whole thing falls over.

“They had individual talent that kept them going, but it took their reunion and several years for them to kick off again with Jive Talkin’. But after Jive Talkin’, they never separated.”