"BEE GEE BARRY LEAVES THE MENAGERIE"

 (Disc & Music Echo, June 29^th, 1968)

Transposed by Anne Marie

 

Barry Gibb the Bee Gees leader, is moving into an elegant £80 per week penthouse flat just up the road from Disc’s Fleet Street offices this week … and all (well nearly all) because of his manager Robert Stigwood’s obsession for stuffed animals.

The Stigwood establishment in a quiet mews tucked behind Grosvenor Square looks like a taxidermist’s workshop. Tigers are poised to pounce on you from balconies, every wall is embroidered by the horns and heads of stags who didn’t run fast enough, the floors are carpeted with polar bears and lions. Even the odd pictures on the walls are of animals.

“It all upset me in the end” says Barry, who has been sharing home with the Stigwood menagerie “I’m against the killing of animals and I just couldn’t bear always to be confronted by all these animals which looked like a lot of stuffed dolls”

His new home will not be sullied by a single animal hair. “It’s absolutely fabulous and just like a Hollywood movie set” Barry tells me. “It has three bedrooms and a very large living room with a gold spiral staircase in the middle. The walls are marble and there are two roof gardens.”