Bee Gees
Credit: X/@AgenteDEL1992
Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hitmaking ballads, the other during its white-hot disco superstardom — died four days apart, according to posts from the tribute band and former bandmates.
Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died Thursday, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died Monday at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on the The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, was a part of the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Webster said.
Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including Massachusetts, To Love Somebody, I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You, I Started a Joke and Words. He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film Smiley, which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.
Bryon, born in Cardiff, Wales, was a part of the Bee Gees for many of its greatest hits in the 1970s, including Stayin’ Alive and the rest of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, You Should Be Dancing and “How Deep is Your Love. He started playing drums when he was 14.
More recently, he played with a tribute band called the Italian Bee Gees, formed by three Italian brothers.
The Bee Gees sold 220 million records during their career, according to Billboard.
The band was formed by brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb as teens in Australia in the late 1950s. Their long career was filled with improbable ups and downs, from heartache ballads in the late 1960s to reemerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.
By 1974, around when Bryon joined, the Bee Gees had waned. They had drinking and drug problems, and their albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in a 2020 HBO documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. Their embrace of what would become the disco sound quickly turned their fortunes around and made them one of the world’s most popular groups.
Barry Gibb is the last surviving brother. Maurice died in 2003 and Robin died in 2012.