Maurice Gibb, 53, dies after heart attack during surgery

Maurice Gibb, a third of the age-defying musical institution the Bee Gees, died yesterday at the Mount Sinai Medical Centre in Miami, aged 53.

During intestinal surgery earlier last week Gibb had suffered a heart attack, though he had displayed sufficient signs of recovery to allow his family and associates a guarded optimism about his chances of returning to health.

"It's an unbelievable blow," the group's spokesman said yesterday. "Everyone was just believing that Maurice was coming round, and we woke up to this awful news."

Gibb's death prompted the UK's radio stations to spin Bee Gees records and the news wires poured forth hastily concocted obituaries. Both tended to pivot on the group's most celebrated contribution to popular culture: the songs they contributed to the soundtrack of 1977's Saturday Night Fever, which fixed their image in the public mind.

In the words of one dispatch, the Gibb brothers will forever be associated with "wide smiles, bouffant hair and tight white outfits". Throw in such totemic Seventies hits as "Stayin' Alive" and "How Deep is Your Love" – all groovesome, soft-focus backing tracks and falsetto vocals – and the picture is complete.

Our affection for that period of the Gibbs' progress has long since been bound up with the British fondness for kitsch and high camp – and yet to look exclusively at the Bee Gees through such lenses does them a grave disservice. For a start, the music the Gibbs created under the influence of disco, heralded by the 1975 release of the single "Jive Talkin' ", was way more than mere wedding-reception fodder.

Listen to the opening bars of "Night Fever" and it all becomes clear. In essence, the Bee Gees magnificently captured the most spangly fantasy of uptown Manhattan; to hear such music in the pinched, shabby expanse of Callaghan-era Britain must have been startling indeed.

Secondly, their career saw achievements of an equally high stripe, before and after John Travolta's dancing nudged them to the top of the charts. Having arrived in Britain in 1967 from their adopted home of Australia, they rapidly became pop conceptualists whose panache and intelligence saw fleeting comparisons with the Beatles.

Such compositions as "New York Mining Disaster 1941", "Massachusetts" and "I've Gotta Get a Message to You" back up such acclaim; 1967's "To Love Somebody" (covered by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone and the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons) remains one of the most affecting examinations of unrequited love in the rock repertoire.

For all the group's emphasis on sumptuous harmony, Maurice Gibb's offstage life proved to be turbulent, to say the least. It was during this period that he moved through a four-year marriage to Lulu and became acquainted with the heavy drinking that would eventually lead him into rehab.

Yesterday, one friend traced at least some dysfunction to the fact that, visibly at least, he was always ranked behind Robin (his twin) and his older brother, Barry: "He was not the star, and he knew it, he felt it."

In the 1980s and beyond, though the Gibbs were not quite as ubiquitous, they still stamped their mark on musical developments, writingtransatlantic hits including Diana Ross's "Chain Reaction" and "Islands in the Stream", forever associated with Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. They stood light years away from the cutting edge and were still often seen as a byword for naffness – and yet only someone with no musical understanding would have denied the Gibbs' brilliance.

Three years ago, I was in a taxi with Tony Wilson, the one-time chief of Factory Records, who had signed Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays. He had booked the Gibbs to lead a songwriting seminar at a music industry event, and – to my amazement – he fell into a passionate rant about the brothers' talents. His point was pretty much incontestable: "How can you argue with songs that good?"