The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Robin still insisted that the family ties were still there, even though they had been strained. “There are certain feelings that you can convey only to brothers and relatives … The only thing I regret about leaving is that there might have come a time in the group when we’d all have been having a good time together,” he said.

  “But that certainly wasn’t the situation when I left, and I’m much happier now I’m on my own. At last I’ve got to make my own decisions and can attract individual attention, rather than just being part of The Bee Gees … By leaving I didn’t do anything to jolt the cog of the working harmony. It was for the benefit of all really.”

  Robin claimed that he and Maurice had managed to bury the hatchet. “Maurice and I are twins and have our birthday at Christmas. We got together then and are now on extremely good terms. Maurice is incredibly happy about my success. But communication between Barry and me is nil.”

  The twins’ reunion had come at Maurice’s instigation. “Recently I saw that Robin was appearing on Top Of The Pops,” Maurice said. “I’d heard that he was a bit sorry to find he was losing contact with his brothers so I rang the studio and asked to speak to him. They wouldn’t let me. I said, ‘This is ridiculous – Man has just got on the Moon and yet I can’t even speak on the phone to my twin brother!’ But a couple of hours later there was a knock on the door and there was Robin, saying he’d heard I’d been trying to contact him. So we embraced, all emotional, sat down and had a drink …”

  After the reunion, Maurice added, “I find it easier to talk to Robin than to Barry. I can get together with Robin any time, but it seems difficult with Barry.

  “I don’t know what it is, but he just seems to have a basic distrust of me. I just can’t understand why. I’d like to be able to talk to him about it. But he seems to be the sort of guy who believes everything he reads in the papers, whereas I will read something and say, ‘What a load of crap!’ But Barry won’t talk to me and I can’t find out what’s wrong with him.”

  * * *

  New Musical Express announced that the final three days of November and first five days of December were provisionally set aside for Robin’s British solo concert tour. Although no venues were confirmed, there were to be eight concerts with an opening date in London. “I took a gamble on my own abilities,” he said. “Now it’s come off and I’m spreading my wings.”

  The proposed UK tour never did take place, but Robin was somewhat surprisingly scheduled to play two concerts, on January 31 and February 1, at the outdoor Silverstream Bowl as part of the Redwood Festival at Redwood Park in Swanson, Auckland, New Zealand. The concert poster for the event proudly proclaimed “Robin Gibb – The Voice Of The Bee Gees”.

  “It’s a place where I have had about eight number ones. ‘Massachusetts’ and ‘Saved By The Bell’ and other numbers I recorded … were number one out there,” Robin explained. “I ought to put in an appearance, but I don’t like being on the other side of the world for too long.”

  Ordinarily, artists would play various dates along the way, but Robin made the gruelling flight halfway around the world for what was virtually a “one-night stand,” flying directly to New Zealand immediately after an appearance in the United States on The Andy Williams Show.

  “He was completely out of context,” Tom Kennedy recalled, “appearing between Maori dancers or some such. The Maoris were throwing beer cans at him! Robin tells this story with great glee. Robin will tell you anything – if he’s done it, he’s honest about it …”

  Earlier, Robin had insisted that when he began making his solo appearances, they would be something out of the ordinary. “I want them to be concerts that will run like my own version of a carnival,“ he explained. “An evening with Robin Gibb will be something full of unexpected events. I want the whole thing to be an event, a performance.”

  Robin couldn’t have chosen a more apt description for the first of his two Redwood Festival concerts. Backed by his trademark orchestra, he took the stage late in the evening to the opening strains of ‘Massachusetts’. He greeted the audience, but before he could sing a note, a tomato sailed through the air and struck the side of his head.

  Undaunted, Robin brushed the remains of the tomato from his hair and, accompanied by flying debris, sang the song without missing a beat. At its conclusion, as he thanked the audience for their appreciative applause, a teenage girl suddenly leapt onto the stage and with an enthusiastic embrace sent the slight young singer reeling into the astonished orchestra. Robin was rescued by the police, and the young girl escorted away. Then a young man jumped onto the stage and was thrown roughly back into the audience. By now the security guards realised that they had lost control of the crowd, and Robin and his orchestra hastily exited the stage. Police efforts to calm the furore were futile as the mutinous mob lobbed bottles, beer cans and whatever else was at hand.

  Robin’s second appearance was scheduled for the following afternoon, and that morning the promoter tried desperately to assure him that this time everything would run smoothly. The audience was moved back 25 feet from the stage, and two security vans waited on either side of the stage in case he had to make another expeditious escape. Police were planted in the audience about 30 feet away from the stage, with security guards on stage with Robin and guard dogs backstage at the ready.

  “I can’t say I really felt scared – I was terrified!” Robin quipped later. “No, I can’t say I felt scared; it’s quite natural that something like that should happen after a crowd of such vast amounts had been there all day. It was quite late when I appeared, and they had sort of had the weather all day – it was sort of heated and they had the yen to do something physical.”

  At any rate, Robin added, “I have an obligation to my audience not to look scared – even when they hurt me!”

  Noting that Robin was much calmer about the whole incident than he was, the promoter tried to downplay the episode, saying, “The thing has been blown out of all proportion because – what were there? Ten cans, two bottles and half a dozen tomatoes.”

  “A smorgasbord,” suggested Robin helpfully.

  With a cheerful reminder that “This is a new suit,” Robin stepped out into the bright New Zealand sunshine and performed his set unscathed. He ended the concert with a moving rendition of ‘I Started A Joke’ and, with an almost audible sigh of relief, said, “Thank you, everybody, and this is where I take my leave.”

  After this eventful live début, it was back to Britain and the business of promoting records. Robin’s second single, ‘One Million Years’, was somewhat in the same mould as the first, and he even admitted to reporters to playing it safe, hoping for a repeat. The lyric is actually daringly morbid; a dead man telling his lover he’s waiting, but melodically it is more flat, and it failed to make any impact on the British or American charts, although it reached number 14 in Germany. Robin claimed that this came as no surprise to him. “I never expected the single to do anything,” he explained, “because it was released over Christmas at a time when all the radio and TV producers had already pre-set their plugs for the programmes over the festive season. It got lost in the avalanche of record releases over that period, which is exactly what I expected.”

  The song would not even be included on Robin’s album for some reason, leaving it with 11 songs at a time when most albums had 12. It did, however, appear on the German LP and is on the CD reissue from Germany, both in mock stereo made from the mono single master.

  * * *

  Jonathan Ledingham was raised in a house overlooking Drogheda, near Dublin. On leaving the Royal Irish Academy of Dramatic Arts where he studied dancing, fencing and method acting, he arrived in Britain in late 1968. By mid-1969, he had become Jonathan Kelly, and was a struggling musician living in The Madison, in London’s Paddington area, which had gained some notoriety for its clientele. Amongst the hotel’s other guests were Joe Cocker and The Greaseband. One day he received a visitor. “The person was like an archetypal Mafioso guy,” he
says. “Seriously! I think he had a patch over one eye, he had a limp; he wore his coat over his shoulders, but not through his arms. This guy was absolutely, 100 per cent mafia.

  “He got me this gig in The Hotel International [in Lancaster Gate], and the score was, that I would sing, and get paid – £15 per week, and I’d also get my meal in the evening. So that was quite a good gig. But it was a posh hotel, and I was not the kind of singer who entertains posh people. I was singing songs like ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carol’, songs about changing the world. These people didn’t want the world changed, they wanted it just the way it was, only with more money for them.

  “One night Colin and Joanne Petersen came in with a party of other people, and I had just done a song called ‘Sailor’. Colin invited me over to the table and asked, ‘Who wrote that?’ I said I had and he asked me whether I had written any more. I sang him some; I think I even did a Bee Gees song, for crying out loud! Then he ordered champagne, it was marvellous. And then he said, ‘Let’s do a song together, now!’ So we made up a song right there, which is what I would do all the time, so I was quite happy doing that. So we got on really well.

  “He asked me to come around to the mews, and then of course he talked about doing music together and that sort of thing. So I just got involved with him and doing their new project, which was for Joanne to be managing and for Colin to be assisting and producing, and it was really nice, and they gave me excellent opportunities. They were very kind; very nice,” recalls Jonathan.

  “Nice” barely describes Colin’s attempts to make his protégé feel special. Jonathan’s first promotional photo shows him smartly dressed and sitting in a Jacobean chair whilst holding an exquisite looking instrument. “That was Barry Gibb’s guitar, a custom built [Gibson] J-200, a beautiful guitar! I dropped it on stage and broke all the side and a guy invisibly mended it down in Brighton.” In actual fact, the guitar was one which Colin had bought himself, but as Jonathan was so impressed by the guitar’s background, it seemed a shame at that time to destroy his illusion.

  Jonathan Kelly was in the right place to observe Colin’s reaction to his departure from The Bee Gees. “He was a bit cross about it, but he was also a bit excited by the whole thing because it was in the papers and things like that, and no publicity is bad publicity. So I think he felt … it meant something was happening. He always wanted a full diary of things happening. When things weren’t happening, that’s when he was unhappy. So he wasn’t unhappy to be in the limelight as it were, through this. Being the drummer with writers like Robin and Barry around, all that he was doing was playing over the tracks. They were coming up with all the creativity.”

  Giving him expensive instruments aside, Joanne and Colin did well for Jonathan professionally too. “Colin organised a recording contract with Parlophone,” explained Jonathan, “with an Australian called Ken East who was head of EMI or something at the time, he was a nice chap. He also organised a publishing deal with Carlin with Freddie Beanstock.”

  By then, Colin had also started his own music publishing company, Hercules, named after the couple’s little Yorkshire Terrier, and he produced Kelly’s album, which was preceded by two singles, also produced by Colin. ‘Denver’ was the first release, but the follow-up, ‘Make A Stranger Your Friend’, is of more interest, both from a musical and non-musical perspective. “What a crazy song,” Kelly concedes. “None of my friends liked it. [It’s] just about ending human conflicts and racism. Racism is the ugliest face of mankind that people express. They made me write a letter to [The Reverend Ian] Paisley!” Tory M.P. Enoch Powell was another recipient of the plea for better understanding between people of all religions, colours and races.

  The recording session for Kelly’s new single was also the cause of some friction between Robin Gibb and his new management, as Vic Lewis refused to allow Robin permission to participate in the “super-session” organised by Colin Petersen. Mick Taylor of The Rolling Stones, Klaus Voormann of Manfred Mann and The Plastic Ono Band, Madeleine Bell of Blue Mink, Carl Wayne formerly of The Move, Christine Holmes, Steve Rowland and Albert Hammond of Family Dogg, Jackie Lomax, Tony Ashton of Ashton, Gardner & Dyke, Leslie Duncan, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were others who had all been invited to participate in the recording, and Colin had included Robin on the list.

  “I wanted Robin because his high voice is just right for the record,” Colin explained. “We’re both friends – despite all The Bee Gees business. It’s a pity he couldn’t take part.”

  “There should be a clause in recording contracts which allows artists to work with whoever they wish,” Robin protested. “Music shouldn’t be tied down in this way. Companies should have got together long ago to break down this barrier. It’s all furiously frustrating. I was dying to get down there and join in. But I’d only have to open my mouth and I’d be in breach of contract!”

  Even the thought of one of his signed artists working for another label infuriated Robin’s manager. Vic Lewis complained, “It’s a load of tripe. I don’t put people under contract so they can record for other people! All these stars think they should be allowed to record like this without getting paid. But they’d soon be worried when they hadn’t any money.”

  A photo of the session shows one young man with wavy hair wearing a conservative dark suit, the only one of the group who is facing away from the camera. The hand cupped to the ear is a powerful clue as to his identity, but for contractual reasons, officially Robin did not participate. The passing of 30 years has diminished Jonathan Kelly’s memory of exactly who was present, but he too clearly has his suspicions, although he has another theory about “the hand”.

  “I’m sure he came down and sang with us,” he said. “I think that [shot’s] very interesting because, when he saw the photograph being taken, that’s why he put his hand over his face. That’s what happened – he’s actually hiding! It would make sense that he was hiding from any photographer taking pictures.”

  The one man who knows for sure ain’t saying. In a weekly column he was writing at the time, his entry for Friday, January 16 reveals, “Surprise, surprise! Today I received a telephone call from ex-Bee Gee Colin Petersen, now personal manager of the fantastic new singer Jonathan Kelly – soon to be celebrated. Colin asked me if I would like to visit Jonathan’s recording session that night, which Colin himself was producing. As one good friend to another, I did not hesitate in saying ‘Yes.’ So, at 7 p.m. I arrived at the IBC recording studios in Portland Place and found the session already underway.”

  Robin then goes on to claim that he spent the remainder of the session “sitting in the control room with Colin and commanding a view of the whole proceedings.” That may well be the case, but one indisputable fact is that the various photos which appeared in the Sunday newspapers clearly show Colin at the microphone singing along with all and sundry.

  Colin even attempted to get all the artists together for an appearance on Top Of The Pops but it was something of a nightmare for him. Peter Sellers was overseas, whilst Spike Milligan was “indisposed”. Although the performance was filmed, it was never shown.

  Jonathan’s next single, ‘Don’t You Believe It’ also had an anonymous but equally famous participant. Eric Clapton agreed to play lead guitar because he disagreed with the way that Colin had been treated by both Robert Stigwood and The Bee Gees. Eric was also due to appear on Top Of The Pops for the single’s TV début but had to call off at the last minute and Tim Staffel played instead. Clapton’s absence didn’t over adversely affect sales as it shifted about 4,000 copies over the following weekend.

  If Record Collector magazine is to be believed, there is a suggestion that the alleged appearance by Robin on ‘Make A Stranger Your Friend’ was not the first time that he had shown a disregard for his contractual obligations by making an incognito performance. In February, 1969, the Tonbridge based band Jason Crest released their fourth single, ‘Waterloo Road’, recorded at Philips’ headquarters in Stanhope Place in Wes
t London. According to a 1999 article in the magazine, a “contractually anonymous Bee Gee contributed euphonium.” Although Maurice is usually considered the undisputed instrumentalist of the Gibb brothers, Robin has always been a keen collector of musical instruments, making up in enthusiasm for what he may lack in musical proficiency. Indeed, the recording session was interrupted by an over-zealous policeman who considered that the sounds emanating from the studio constituted a disturbance.

  18

  GOING UNDERCOVER

  AT THE SAME time as The Rattlesnakes were strutting their stuff in Manchester, two boys of roughly the same age were doing likewise in The Blue Sect in Lincolnshire’s seaside town of Skegness. Trevor Gordon Grunnill was on piano whilst his cousin Graham Bonnet sang and played guitar. Trevor emigrated to Australia with his family at the beginning of the Sixties, and enjoyed some success down there, but in the latter half of 1967 he returned home at his cousin’s request. Graham had decided to form a band and wanted Trevor Gordon – he had dropped his surname by then – to be an integral part of it.

  Progress was slow during those formative months, and there could have been a temptation to look for outside help, but the thought didn’t even cross Trevor’s mind. “When Graham wrote to me in Australia asking me to join his group back home in Skegness, it never occurred to me to contact Barry Gibb, who was a very good friend of mine. In fact, it was quite by chance that we got a booking in London’s Revolution Club. Barry was there and saw us, and from that night came … our new manager, Robert Stigwood.