The first time Barry Gibb went on stage to perform solo as the last surviving Bee Gee, he was urged on by his wife Linda. She told him to stop moping over the death of his brothers, get off his backside and make music again.
Even so, it was a lonely moment. ‘The realisation that my brothers — first Maurice and now Robin — weren’t standing next to me any more made me feel pretty isolated,’ he says.
‘When I looked left or right, they weren’t there with me. ‘Maurice’s death in 2003 and Robin’s last year had been a huge trauma for me and everyone in our family. Before that, in 1988, we’d lost our kid brother Andy, who had his own solo career, and my father, Hugh, died soon after. ‘Robin’s much more recent passing had made me depressed, and there were times when I’d felt that nothing was worthwhile any more. ‘But getting back to performing in Australia earlier this year — thanks to Linda giving me a metaphorical kicking — turned out to be the tonic I needed.’ His sense of loss was eased, too, by inviting his guitarist son Stephen and Maurice’s singer daughter Sami on the tour, to keep it a family affair. ‘Now it has begun to feel like the sun has finally come out again,’ Barry tells me when we meet at his magnificent nine-bedroom mansion in Beaconsfield, set behind iron gates in 90 acres of Buckinghamshire countryside. He and his Scots-born wife Linda — a former Miss Edinburgh — had flown in from their main home in Miami for Barry to receive a lifetime achievement honour for his services to music. It is his first visit here since Robin’s funeral in June last year.
‘I feel good — a lot better than I did this time last year with all the stress over Robin,’ he says. At that time, his grief had threatened to engulf him.
‘We all lose someone and you have to deal with it and grow from it in some way,’ he says. ‘My way of handling it is to go back on stage.’ For Barry, it is an abiding sadness that in their final years his relationship with Maurice and Robin had deteriorated to the point where he feels they were no longer friends.
‘You see, it wasn’t just the loss of my brothers, it was the fact we didn’t really get on. And so I’ve lost all of my brothers without being friends with them.
‘When Maurice passed, Robin and I just didn’t feel like the Bee Gees anymore, because the Bee Gees were the three of us.
‘So while Robin went around saying “I’ll always be a Bee Gee”, he didn’t really want that: he wanted to be Robin Gibb, solo artist. Deep inside, I think that was so. That was the competition.’
‘Now I’m on my own, so I’ve got to make it on my own. I feel as if I’m a piece of a puzzle, or a cog in a machine, and that it’s for the betterment of everyone to do just what I do.
‘And then I look at my mum. At 93 and reliant on a wheelchair to get around, she’s despondent and still hasn’t got over any of it. So I feel for her — I know it’s worse for her than it is for me.’
Barry’s lifetime achievement honour, from the Nordoff Robbins music charity’s 02 Silver Clef Awards, has helped to rekindle his enthusiasm.
‘Inside me, I’ve found the hunger to be on the stage again — like I did when I was a child. Music has been therapy. I didn’t go and see a psychiatrist or anyone for help. I have dealt with it myself, through music.’ His shows, the Mythology Tour, backed by a ten-piece band, were a huge success, with six nights in Australia. This autumn, he is coming to Britain and Ireland.
‘Making records has become a bit of a bore because of having to spend hours in the studio. For me, performing is best,’ he says. ‘On stage, I’m not singing the songs that Robin sang. I won’t encroach on his territory. I’m not going to try to do anything that Rob did, or Maurice or Andy. I’ll only do the songs I was instrumental in creating or that we collaborated on together.’
Nor will Barry be involved in the organisation of Robin’s memorial service, being planned by Dwina and R-J at St Paul’s Cathedral this year. ‘No, I can’t do that, because for me the grieving is over,’ he says. ‘It would throw me back into that dark place again.’ He is leaving it to Robin’s close family, ‘or whoever really feels they have to do that’.
He adds: ‘Robin is always with me. I don’t need to stand in a church or be in some place where there’s a ritual.’ Inevitably, though, he has been reflecting on his own mortality.
‘I don’t have any fear of death: it could just as well be tomorrow. ‘Don’t plan for the next five years: plan to get up in the morning. And that’s the lesson for me. That it can all disappear just like that.’
