yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke — yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke

JUL 01 1968 · 12:00

yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke — yo comence la broma ---BEE GEES bee gess I started the joke (1968) Director: Jean-Christophe Averty Era: Late 1960s Psychedelic Pop Era (1968) - British Invasion baroque-pop meets European avant-garde television production; concurrent with the Bee Gees' peak pre-disco artistic period and the height of concept-driven promotional film-making for pop acts. Exceptional. This is among the earliest surviving promotional films for a Bee Gees track and one of very few examples of Jean-Christophe Averty's work in direct pop-music promotional context. The combination of a canonical song, a historically significant director, and a rare window into 1968 European colour television aesthetics makes this a Tier 1 artefact for any archive focused on the pre-history of the music video form. Context: Released in late 1968 as a single from the album Idea, 'I Started a Joke' represents the Bee Gees at the peak of their first artistic phase — a melancholic baroque-pop ballad led by Robin Gibb's idiosyncratic vibrato. The promotional film, produced as part of a German television special but shot in Brussels under the direction of French avant-garde television auteur Jean-Christophe Averty, situates the band within the European art-television ecosystem that gave pop acts visual identities before music video as a form was codified. The song peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1969 and reached #1 in Canada and Australia, cementing it as one of the group's signature recordings. Its association with European experimental television production places it in a lineage running from French ORTF variety programming through to the later MTV era. Director notes: The promotional video for 'I Started a Joke' was filmed in Brussels as part of the Idea TV Special, a German television production coinciding with the release of the Bee Gees' fifth album Idea in 1968. The special was actually shot in Belgium. The video features floating question-mark graphic overlays superimposed over the performance while Robin Gibb sings lead, a technique entirely consistent with Averty's signature bluescreen and composite graphic style. The low saturation, warm tungsten palette, slow shot lengths, and muted contrast visible in the quantitative metadata are consistent with early European colour television studio production of 1968.