"BEE GEE BARRY SAYS: NO WONDER ROBIN COLLAPSED"

 (Disc & Music Echo, August 2^nd, 1968)

Transposed by Anne Marie

 

Robin Gibb got up from his settee to switch the channel on his Tv set, pitched forward and fell unconscious on the floor ... and the Bee Gees’ million dollar American tour was off.

That was the dramatic start to Robin’s breakdown which brought, from his two brother Maurice, the comment “I could see this coming – he’s such an incredibly highly strung person that he was bound to snap eventually”.

Maurice, talking to me at a Marylebone mews house warming party thrown by the Paper Dolls last weekend (they’ve moved into Maurice’s old pad while he’s switched to pastures prosperous in Belgravia where his next door neighbour is veteran actress Margaret Rutherford), said “Robin never has a holiday. As you know, we have just come back from holiday, but Robin never moved out of his hotel room.

“He went with Barry to Rome and Nairobi, but in both places, while Barry went out sightseeing, Robin just stayed in his room writing songs. Amazing but true.

“He seems totally unable to relax. He always has to be writing and yet, instead of sitting back after his songs have been recorded, he immediately turns to new writing. So he gets tense and tired with the result that he collapsed last week.

“We may be twins, but I’m not a bit like him.” Maurice spent his holiday commuting between the Bahamas and Britain and Rome and Britain. He came back each time to tear about in his beloved Aston Martin.

Maurice added that doctors were so disturbed by Robin’s condition that at first they wanted to “put him out” for a few days so that he would get some much needed sleep. Instead he was transferred last week from a Regents Park nursing home to a health farm in Sussex.

Postscript on the Bee gees by the way: Could a new Robert Stigwood progressive group formed of former Remo Four and Creation musicians and called Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke soon become Ashton, Gardner, Dyke and Melouney? Puzzle that one out – plenty of people in the pop biz already are.