An audience with a Bee Gee - Robin Gibb

KIM KNIGHT    Nov 07 2010

Onstage he can still send a crowd wild. Offstage, Robin Gibb explains how performing helps fill a void, and reveals his peculiar sense of humour to Kim Knight. 

BACKSTAGE, AND the skinny roadies wear skinny black jeans and smoke skinny cigarettes. Security Guard #780 paces an empty corridor, outside an empty dressing room. In the bowels of the entertainment centre with the painted concrete block walls and trodden down carpet squares a radio plays: "All the lonely people..."

Yesterday Sydney, tomorrow Perth. But, if it's today, it must be Brisbane.

Fame: Robin, left, Barry and Maurice Gibb sold 200 million records as the Bee Gees.

Robin Gibb arrives 15 minutes before show time. Blink and miss the emaciated man in the neat suit and metal-plated shoes who slips – small, quiet, solo – from chauffeured car to guarded dressing room and waits for the spotlight.

In Brisbane, you can buy a full body fake tan for $25. Strangers call you "darling". International flights land on a runway built on top of a suburb formerly known as Cribb Island.

A guide to local place names records that, in the late 1950s, the children of an English migrant family from Cribb Island sold soft drinks at a local speedway, promoting themselves with a singing act. "They were well received."

They were the brothers Gibb – nine-year-old twins Robin and Maurice and elder brother Barry – dubbed the Bee Gees, after they made it to radio DJ Bill Gates' drive-time show. Over the next 50 years, the trio would sell 200 million records, chart more than 60 hit singles and produce six consecutive No1 songs in the United States.

"Robin," screams a man from the middle of the Brisbane crowd. "Will you have my baby?"

The youngest surviving Bee Gee takes the stage. A scatter of fans stand. They stretch their arms high and wide and throw their faces back. He sings. They roar.

Gibb, who turns 61 next month, once said, "to go forward, you've got to be unsatisfied".

During the 30-minute car trip back to his hotel after the Brisbane show (three encores, including "Stayin' Alive" and "Tragedy"), he explains what he meant.

"Any artist always feels a void within them. Composers, authors, painters, they constantly feel the more they're fulfilled, the more empty they are. They're constantly feeling they have to fill that void."

Because he knows he could stop this. Quit touring; quit performing the songs that were once the territory of three men, not one. Maurice died in 2003. Youngest brother Andy, who had a successful solo music career, died of myocarditis in 1988, aged 30. Barry lives in the United States. The surviving brothers – recently estimated to have a combined worth of $330 million – are, as Robin is quick to say in every interview, including this one, "the best of friends".

"Me and Barry, we do cherry pick. We've got the biggest song catalogue in the world alongside Lennon and McCartney... celebrating what we have achieved is important to us.

"Turn on any contemporary radio stations, and you'll hear us, or something we have written, alongside what is number one... it is a living catalogue... a lot of those R and B grooves are still relevant to today's music, they're still influencing people."

Gibb begins the New Zealand leg of his Bee Gees greatest hits world tour in Auckland tomorrow night, before heading to Wellington on Wednesday and Christchurch on Friday. Next week, he plays Beirut and, in December, South America. Local promoters flew the Sunday Star-Times and TV3 to Australia for face-to-face interviews after the Brisbane gig. No one is saying it, but a recent two-for-one ticket offer indicated sales here, at least, might have needed help.

Gibb last visited in 1999, performing with brothers Maurice and Barry, to an estimated 66,000 fans at Western Springs. The Bee Gees are a household name, but a solo Gibb, based on the reaction of Brisbane taxi drivers and hospitality staff, is not.

At a riverside steak bar before the Brisbane show, Nightline's David Farrier ordered a beef burger and waved the official show programme in front of the waitress. "Hot – or not?" he asked, pointing to a hairy, toothy, muscle-shirted, backlit picture of Robin Gibb, circa 1980-something. "Do you know who it is?" he pressed. "Ummm," she replied. "You?"

It's nearly midnight when I shake hands with the Bee Gee. German tour manager Rainer Hansel – a tall, straggly-haired Gandalf in obligatory skinny black pants – says this is the first time in at least seven years Gibb has done an interview post-show.

Gibb loosens his tie and says the music industry is "not like any other business".

"You're not rushing to retirement. It's just something you do, almost from birth. It's in your blood, it's not a job. If you are successful, that's just a by-product.

"When we were making our records, we never thought about [tribute] bands making a living out of being us, or of people covering our songs. To be among the top five most successful artists of all time is a great achievement, but you can't plan those things."

In fact, as a petulant 19-year-old, Robin Gibb chucked in the Bee Gees.

"I left – that's how the group broke up," he told the Auckland Star when he arrived in New Zealand in January, 1970. "I have absolutely no regrets. After 13 years, we came to the parting of the ways. I think I can say I graduated successfully."

FORTY YEARS ago, Auckland's Redwood Park soundshell was the venue of Gibb's inaugural solo show. Journalist Tony Potter reported the riotous weekend-long festival: Three security men stood at the front of the floodlit stage, in front of them some 10,000 people – some of them itching for trouble. Gibb had been on stage for just 29 minutes when it happened. A tomato and a hair brush missed him, but nearly clipped a viola player. He put his instrument away... fires were lit as the pop bands crashed on.

Gibb remembers the incident clearly. "They didn't want music at all. They just wanted to lash out. It was very, very dangerous. In those days, there was a reckless attitude, that you could stick artists in the middle of thousands of people. That, and drinking at the same time, don't go together."

There is no alcohol on this tour. Gibb claims to have completed 200 sit-ups this morning, and is, reportedly, a vegetarian (we never find out whether that is real or synthetic hair covering his normally bald pate).

"I don't like hurting living things. Just because they're not human, they're still life, and life has a right to life."

How long has he held those philosophies?

"About five minutes."

Gibb's sense of humour is – peculiar.

An example. He says he doesn't recall much about living in Brisbane. Nothing formative happened to him here?

"I wasn't raped or anything..." He laughs – and there's more – but the conversation is moving quickly, to a story about another time he was here, in the cockpit of a jumbo jet bound for Tokyo, when he found out the international runway had been built on top of his old street.

How did he react?

"I told him to take me to Cuba. That's why I was in the cockpit. I was hijacking the plane."

Gibb makes the papers with charities and causes. He is a major donor to Britain's Bomber Command aircrew war memorial. He has spoken out against a 530-home development in Thame, Oxfordshire, where he lives, saying an influx of residents would stretch community health resources.

But he also has a reputation for eccentricity. And, last year, media had a field day with news he had fathered a child with his 33-year-old housekeeper (who, at the time, lived with Gibb and his bisexual druidic wife, Dwina). Back then, a "friend" told the Daily Mail: "He's a very odd man." In July, the Guardian asked him for his most embarrassing moment. He said, "my whole life, but I wouldn't change it".

The fans don't care. Ashburton-born Chris Middleton was at the Brisbane gig with her husband, Jim. He saw the Bee Gees back in the 1960s. The music, he says, "brings back old memories".

Robin. Robin. They chant him on to the stage, a crowd of around 4000, old enough to remember that to hustle is to dance, and that John Travolta was once white (suit) hot. It was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that sent the Bee Gees stratospheric. Gibb hung up on Radio New Zealand's Kathryn Ryan in July when she asked him about life after disco. Tonight, there is no escaping the songs from what he simply refers to as "that film".

"We love you Robin," says the man in the crowd. "I love me too," says Robin.

"Sometimes I talk a little bit too much to the crowd," he says later. "There's a fine line when they talk back... you don't let them get too cocky. Particularly females with a guy, who happen to like you a lot, he's going to say something to offset that."

How deep is their love? A 1981 headline sums it up: Brain damaged girl, 11, recovers after visit from the Bee Gees.

Gibb doesn't remember the alleged incident, but he does appear to take the historic Weekly World News clipping seriously.

"I do know kids have been brought out of comas, actually, with my voice ... music and sound can do that. Certain vibrations can affect the brain."

Popular songs, says Gibb, are the new hymns. "People are getting married to our songs, and they use them at funerals." American paramedics, he says, sing "Stayin' Alive" in their heads, while they administer CPR. "They trialled 2000 songs and `Stayin' Alive' is the one, that, if you think of, you never fall below 103 beats when you're doing that."

Does he know what the runner-up was? "`The Day We Went to Bangor' ... No, I think it was `Tie A Yellow Ribbon' ... `Have You Ever Been Mellow'?" Oh. He's joking. Again.

Thirty minutes on Brisbane's byways, and our Audience with Robin Gibb is drawing to an end. If fame has a precarious fragility, in a world where we secretly like it when the mighty fall, Gibb appears oblivious.

"I'm used to being known, and people knowing me. I've known nothing else, pretty much since I was a teenager. When you've got a catalogue like ours that you can hear on the radio anywhere you go in the world any time, it's there and it can't be taken away. You can't take away what's already been done and achieved."

In 1999, Gibb was, apparently, so famous, that he made New Zealand headlines for walking into The Warehouse and buying a $12.95 portable alarm clock.

"I don't know. I can't remember. Buying an alarm clock? It might be possible that I wanted a wake-up call. You can't count on those wake-up calls. You think they're always going to forget, it defeats the point, you stay awake all night wondering if they're going to forget.

"Without a doubt, I am one of those people that worry all the time that if I stop worrying everything will go wrong. As long as I'm worried about it and keep thinking about it – I think it's obsessiveness actually, it started as a kid, [it] comes with being attention deficient disorder.

"You have to keep thinking about the one thing over and over again, in order that if you keep thinking about it, it's in control, it's in check."

What does he worry about the most?

"I think it's probably – I don't know – obviously the inevitable. And after that everything's a bonus, I suppose."

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