The Bee Gees are Stayin’ Alive with a new ‘best of’ show featuring one original member.
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The Best of the Bee Gees will bring the Greatest Hits Tour to Riverlinks Eastbank Shepparton on Saturday, July 6, with special guest Colin ‘Smiley’ Petersen, the original drummer for the band.
Mr Petersen said the show was a must-see, and he was happy to be a part of it.
“This has given me the opportunity to have travelled around the world,” Mr Petersen said.
“I never had the opportunity of seeing all these different centres in Australia and I really enjoy that part of it.”
Before he was Colin Petersen of the Bee Gees, he was just Colin, a primary school student in Brisbane with a love of the drums.
“My first appearance on stage as a drummer was at the Brisbane City Hall,” he said.
“I went along and was instructed by my drum teacher to set up my drum centre stage and I thought, ‘oh, that’s great, isn’t it?’.
“I set up the drums, and then he came up, and he proceeded to take the front skin off the bass drum, and he said to me, let’s see if you can fit inside the drum and I sort of knees to my chin, arms folded, just managed to sit in there.
“He said ‘that’s fantastic because what we’re going to do is we’re going to replace the front skin, and we put this paper front on’.”
Mr Petersen said he knew where it was going, but it wasn’t smooth sailing.
“He said ‘now there’s a slight problem here because there’s no curtains’,” he said.
He was told to sit in the bass drum and wait until the audience was in and seated, about 3000 people, so he said he was in the drum for about 30 minutes.
“I’m sitting inside this space drum with a few little holes near my nose, so I could breathe, that was my mother’s concern — that I’d never get out of it,” Mr Petersen said.
“So I’m sitting in there and honestly, I could have been in there the best part of an hour, and suddenly, I hear the ‘dun dun dun’ of the intro.
“And on cue, I burst out of this bass drum and 3000-odd people gave a standing ovation.”
He added with a laugh: “Can you imagine as a little kid what that felt like? But the problem was that I’ve been trying to live up to that ever since.”
After his debut on the stage, he was ready for the silver screen, auditioning and getting the role of Smiley in the 1956 film of the same name.
Movie poster of Smiley, introducing Colin Petersen.
“And there’s a connection between that actually and the Bee Gees because the Gibb family apparently went to see the movie,” Mr Petersen said.
“They were living in Manchester and there was a very gloomy atmosphere in Britain, but they saw this movie, which was all beautiful landscape and colour and optimism, and then according to Morris, they decided to come to Australia, and if it wasn’t for that particular occasion, they could have gone somewhere else, and we would never have met.
“I later met them, obviously in Sydney got to know them, and one time they said, ‘Have you got anything going as far as the films are concerned?’ and I said ‘No’ and they said, ‘Well, you’re the fourth Bee Gee’ and that led me to a three-year career with that.”
More than 50 years after Mr Petersen left the band, he’s back touring with the songs he once helped create.
He won’t be a passive member; he will chat throughout the show and even get back behind the drum kit for a song.
“It takes them (the audience) on a trip down memory lane and music is a wonderful thing because it puts you back in situations you were during your lifetime,” he said.
“It’s a wonderful experience for me.”
It would be a Tragedy to miss the debut of The Best of the Bee Gees on the Greatest Hits Tour at Riverlinks Eastbank, Shepparton — especially if you fancy a little Night Fever with a set list of soaring harmonies, a sensational band and timeless classics.
Tickets are available now from Riverlinks. Visit riverlinksvenues.com.au or call 5832 9511 to purchase.
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