Robin Gibb’s unknown brilliance

On one of his many visits to America, Bee Gee Robin Gibb happened to catch an old interview with John Lennon on television.

The former Beatle was meant to be promoting his record Imagine. But the album in his hands was not his own record. It was in fact Robin’s Reign, the solo album that Robin Gibb had made in the late 1960s, following a traumatic break-up with his brothers.

Robin Gibb’s widow Dwina recalls her husband’s delight at stumbling across this generous endorsement from John Lennon, which somehow he had never seen.

“Robin had known nothing about it. He was really surprised and pleased,” she said. “He knew the Beatles. They all shared the same management and were always running into each other. And John always said that he enjoyed Robin’s voice. I’m sure he had meant Robin to see it. He was sending a message: ‘Well done Gibby’.”

As a member of the Bee Gees, Robin, along with brothers Barry and Maurice would enjoy major hits with dance floor classics such as Saturday Night Fever, Stayin’ Alive and How Deep is Your Love?

However, Robin’s own brief but prolific period as a solo artist, when the brothers Gibb went their separate ways, has been largely overlooked, until now.

Following her husband’s death three years ago, Dwina, who still lives in the home that they shared in Thame, has been heavily involved in a project to put that right, to ensure her husband’s complete musical legacy is properly celebrated.

The album held up by Lennon all those years ago is now being re-released, along with a second album of songs recorded by her husband, Sing Slowly Sisters, which for all its brilliance and originality was never released, and regularly features high on any list of great ‘lost’ albums. The newly-released three-CD box set Saved By The Bell – The Collected Works of Robin Gibb, featuring 63 songs, is completed with a disc of rare recordings made between 1968 and 1970.

It has taken more than a decade to bring the project to fruition. Much of the music had been missing for years, with some of the precious tapes having ended up in the hands of collectors across the globe.

It all began with the opening of huge wooden crates from Germany in the winter of 2005 and was finally completed with the mastering of the discs earlier this year.

In the months before his death, Robin Gibb had concentrated on producing new music at The Prebendal, his home in Priest End, Thame, including an album of music composed with his son RJ Gibb, The Titanic Requiem, written to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

His widow said: “After being diagnosed with cancer Robin just threw himself into everything. He hardly slept. He felt he needed to fill every minute of every day doing something creative, feeling time was running out.

“Robin never heard The Titanic Requiem songs performed. He went into a coma two days before it was performed in Westminster Central Hall.”

But with the family keeping a constant bedside vigil for the star, his favourite music was played to try to rouse him. He was to regain consciousness as music from The Titanic Requiem was played, to give him only a few more precious weeks.

Dwina reveals that after being diagnosed with cancer, Robin had desperately wanted to get back with Barry, the only surviving member of the trio of brothers. Maurice Gibb had died in 2003, while their kid brother, the teen idol solo artist Andy Gibb, died at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital in 1988, soon after his 30th birthday.

Dwina said: “Robin was ill and Barry needed an ear operation so they never got back together to make music, although they were planning it. It is sad to think of all the songs that the world never got to hear.”

Since Robin’s death, aged 62, from kidney failure following a battle with cancer and pneumonia, Dwina has never been in much doubt that the world continues to want to hear her late husband’s music.

“When he died, I did not feel as though I cried alone. I felt the whole world was crying with me. I remember being in a desert region of India and finding somewhere selling cold drinks. Then I heard Robin’s voice on the radio – Robin singing I Started A Joke. You might have expected to hear Stayin’ Alive, not that early song. It struck me how his music is still being played in every corner of the world.”

But the new CDs offer music from Robin Gibb that the world does not know.

Robin Gibb

Long before becoming the kings of disco music, as teenagers in the 1960s the Bee Gees had enjoyed huge success, recording four albums in two years. But a fall-out over the choice of a single led to a temporary breaking of the fraternal bond.

Robin’s time apart from Barry and Maurice is best known for his song Saved By the Bell, which charted at number two. But we now know that over little more than a year, songs poured from him, in what some now view as his most creative and experimental period.

Producer of the new release, Andrew Sandoval, said: “Making sense of Robin’s solo work from March 1968 to April 1970 had been an epic quest. The majority of the music had surfaced in the collectors’ world, but few, if any official documents detailed just how prolific Robin was as a producer and writer.

“Dwina first approached me about the material at the BMI Awards in 2006, wondering what I knew of her husband’s lost album. She lamented the fact that Robin may never get around to realising this intriguing repertoire while immersed in so much new activity.”

It is claimed that Robin’s Reign featured the first appearance of a drum machine on record. But even more striking is the haunting vocals and melancholy lyrics.

“I think that all three brothers felt lonely when they were separated from each other,” Dwina told me.

When the single was later released the single received little airplay, with the exception of DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. The reason it was being widely ignored, Freeman later explained, was because the music industry wanted to get the Bee Gees back together.

The world would get its wish in June 1970 when Robin, Barry and Maurice were reunited, their solo careers forgotten.

So why has it taken so long for a proper assessment of the undervalued solo pop gems from the saddest Bee Gee?

“The Gibbs were never short of songs, so it made spotlighting one area of creativity difficult for them during his lifetime,” Sandoval told Uncut magazine.

As for his widow, she is just glad one of her favourite albums, Sing Slowly Sisters, is finally available, the release coinciding with completion of the carving of song lyrics on her husband’s headstone.