Robin Gibb 'Shows Flickers Of Life After Brother Sings To Him'
(The
Telegraph website, April 20, 2012)
Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb has shown “flickers of life” after his brother Barry sang to him to help wake him from his coma, it has been claimed. His family continue to keep vigil at his bedside. As his wife Dwina said music appeared to be helping. She said his brother had been singing to him, while his children played music to “try and bring him back to us”.
The Sun newspaper has reported a “source close to the 62-year-old
music legend” as saying there have been hopeful signs of recovery but that he
was “not out of the woods yet.” The
source said: “There were flickers of life from Robin. His eyes moved and there
was an attempt at speech.” The singer
has been in hospital in Chelsea, west London, since he lost consciousness last
week, after contracting pneumonia in his fight against cancer.
His wife Dwina, who is at his bedside with their daughter Melissa,
37, and sons Spencer, 39, and Robin-John, 29, has thanked fans for all their
support. In an interview with Northern
Irish publication the Impartial Reporter, she said: “Thousands of people are
saying prayers every day. “His brother
Barry, his wife Linda and son Stephen came over from America. Barry was singing
to him.” She added she had taken
inspiration from her husband’s latest work, a song to commemorate the Titanic
called “Don’t Cry Alone” in which a fallen husband reassures his wife “he is
only a whisper away”. A statement on the
singer's website RobinGibb.com said: "Sadly the reports are true that
Robin has contracted pneumonia and is in a coma. We are all hoping and praying
that he will pull through.”
Robin Gibb has enjoyed a musical career spanning six decades, from humble beginnings as part of a sibling trio in 1950s Manchester to his most recent classical venture, the requiem for The Titanic. In the interim, he sang some of the 1960s and 1970s greatest hits, including Massachusetts, I've Gotta Get A Message To You, Lonely Days, How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, How Deep Is Your Love and Stayin' Alive. Gibb last performed on stage in February, supporting injured servicemen and women at the Coming Home charity concert held at the London Palladium.
He had been due to premier his classical work, The Titanic
Requiem, this month with son Robin-John, but the event went ahead without him
due to his poor health. Gibb had surgery
on his bowel 18 months ago for an unrelated condition, but a tumour was
discovered and he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon and, subsequently, of
the liver. It had been thought his
cancer was in remission as early as last month, but the latest deterioration in
his health coincides with reports of a secondary tumour. His twin brother and bandmate Maurice died
from the same bowel condition that initially led doctors to operate on Robin.
Gibb's band the Bee Gees will be best remembered for their
contribution to the soundtrack of 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, which turned
disco music into a worldwide phenomenon and placed the distinctive look of the
era's hairstyles and outfits into pop culture legend.
Robin Gibb Of Bee Gees Dies At 62
(By Elysa
Gardner, USA TODAY, May 20, 2012)
One of the most beloved trios in pop history is now down to a
single surviving member. Robin Gibb, 62, died Sunday of colorectal cancer —
following twin brother Maurice, who died in 2003 after suffering a blocked
intestine and cardiac arrest. Robin
Gibb, who had been hospitalized for pneumonia and had surgery to remove a
growth from his colon, was central to the group's success both as a songwriter
and a vocalist. He was the original lead singer, and his tangy, tremulous tenor
and older brother Barry's deeper, breathier, falsetto-prone voice were
constants as the Bee Gees traversed a wide range of musical styles.
Though the family act first gained attention in the '60s for
Beatle-esque pop tunes, they moved into orchestral rock and then the soaring
disco that made them superstars in the late '70s. Their contributions made
1977's Saturday Night Fever soundtrack a No. 1 album for 24 weeks, earning them
chart-topping singles in Stayin' Alive, Night Fever and How Deep Is Your Love. Gibb nodded to the Bee Gees' different phases
and the shifting tastes of pop audiences in his solo career, which predated the
band's commercial heyday and continued after his twin's death. In 1969, he had
a No. 2 hit in the U.K. with the lush, pining Saved By the Bell. In 1983, the
lithe, danceable Juliet became a fan favorite, while 20 years later Gibb
incorporated a rap segment into Please, a minor hit in England. He also collaborated with Barry Gibb in
writing Woman in Love, a No. 1 single for Barbra Streisand in 1980. The
brothers worked on hits for artists from Dionne Warwick (Heartbreaker) to Dolly
Parton and Kenny Rogers (Islands in the Stream).
The Bee Gees were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in
1994 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2001, they released their
final album, This Is Where I Came In. After Maurice died, the surviving
brothers retired the name but had reconsidered in recent years. They appeared
together at a 2006 concert in Florida and again on Dancing With the Stars in
2009 to promote a retrospective, The Ultimate Bee Gees. This spring, Gibb made his classical album
debut with Titanic Requiem, co-written with his son RJ. He was too sick to
attend the work's world premiere April 10 in London. In a 2001 Bee Gees interview with USA TODAY,
Robin proved the impish wit of the group, quipping at one point, "We're
comforted by the fact that most of our critics are dead. … We've outlived
them." Certainly, the music will do
so.
Robin
Gibb Dies: Former Bee Gees Member Helped Define ’70s Disco Subculture
(By
Terence McArdle, Washington Post, May 21, 2012)
With a Beatles-influenced pop style, they had an initial run of
success in Australia in the 1960s with songs that included “Spicks and Specks.”
They later brought disco music into the pop mainstream and set fashion trends
with their polyester suits, open collars and flowing hairstyles. During their 1997 induction into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, the Bee Gees were described as “pop’s ultimate chameleons”
because of their work in several musical genres. On recordings such as “New York Mining
Disaster 1941” (1967), a song inspired by a Welsh mine cave-in, and “I’ve Gotta
Get a Message to You” (1968), in which a convict awaits his execution, the Bee
Gees combined somber, melodramatic storylines with lush orchestral
accompaniments.
Mr. Gibb’s signature song, “I Started a Joke” (1969), dealt with
the embarrassment of someone who has said something horribly wrong. The
quavering vibrato in his voice helped underscore the song’s neurotic,
self-conscious lyrics. Other performers
took notice of their songwriting. “To Love Somebody” (1967), co-written by Mr.
Gibb and his brother Barry and originally intended for soul singer Otis
Redding, became one of the era’s most recorded love ballads. Although Redding died before he could record
it, the song was covered by such performers as Janis Joplin, Tom Jones, Dusty
Springfield and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Disputes between Mr. Gibb and his brother Barry over who should sing
lead culminated with Mr. Gibb’s departure from the group in 1969 to pursue a
short-lived solo career. The other brothers split up shortly after the filming
of a television special, “Cucumber Castle,” which aired in 1970. “I think it was partly the fact that we’d
always lived with our mother and father and we were just becoming adults and
looking to be free of each other,” Mr. Gibb told Billboard magazine in 2001. The group reemerged with a ballad reportedly
inspired by their reconciliation, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (1971).
Within a few years, the Bee Gees found a new, highly profitable
direction. Producer Arif Mardin pushed Barry Gibb to sing in a piercing,
falsetto style — the group’s new trademark — with the song “Jive Talkin’ ”
(1975), a breakthrough hit in the disco market. The soundtrack to the movie
“Saturday Night Fever” (1977) followed and was estimated to have sold 40
million copies worldwide. By the end of
the decade, there was a critical and popular backlash against the Bee Gees — a
result of their domination of the airwaves and a reaction against the disco
subculture. Their starring roles in a
disastrous 1978 movie inspired by the Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band” further alienated rock fans. Rock stations advertised Bee
Gees-free days. A parody record by the Hee Bee Gee Bees was titled “Meaningless
Songs (in Very High Voices).”
Turning their attention to songwriting and production, the Gibbs
opened a Miami recording studio, Middle Ear, and produced successful recordings
by their younger brother, Andy Gibb. They were prolific tunesmiths, penning
songs for Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick and Kenny Rogers
throughout the 1980s. The Bee Gees’s
last top 10 hit was the single “One” in 1989. They released their last album,
“This Is Where I Came In,” in 2001. That same year, the Bee Gees were knighted
as Commanders of the British Empire.
Robin Hugh Gibb was born Dec. 22, 1949, in Douglas, on the Isle of
Man. His father, Hugh, led a dance band on ferry boats. His mother, Barbara,
was the band’s singer. The family moved to Manchester, England, where Mr. Gibb
and his two brothers made their debut at a movie theater. With the addition of a couple of friends, the
brothers formed a skiffle group, the Rattlesnakes. However, Mr. Gibb and his
brother Barry were repeatedly in trouble with the police for truancy, break-ins
and fire setting. “One day I was walking
home,” Maurice Gibb once said, “and all the billboards on the main street in
Chorlton [their Manchester neighborhood] were blazing away, firemen and police
running around everywhere. That was Robin, the family arsonist.”
The family packed up for Australia in 1958 when the brothers were
threatened with jail time. Andy Gibb,
who also had a successful singing career, died in 1988 of myocarditis. Maurice
Gibb, Mr. Gibb’s twin, died in 2003 of a heart attack after surgery on an
obstructed colon. Mr. Gibb’s cancer was disclosed shortly after he underwent
the same procedure in 2011. He struggled
with substance abuse and said he was addicted to amphetamines for many years. Mr. Gibb said in interviews that he and his
wife, Dwina Murphy-Gibb, who has been described as an ordained druid priestess,
believed in open marriage. In 2008, he had a daughter by his housekeeper,
Claire Yang, according to British media reports. His first marriage, to Molly Hullis, ended in
divorce. In addition to his wife and
daughter, survivors include two children from his first marriage; a son from
his second marriage; his mother; and his brother Barry.
Robin Gibb: Recommended Listening
(By Edna
Gundersen, USA TODAY, May 20, 2012)
Lead
vocals on Bee Gees songs:
•I Started a Joke (from Idea, 1968)
•Lamplight (from Odessa, 1969)
•Alone Again (from 2 Years On, 1970)
•Come on Over (from Main Course, 1975)
•Bodyguard (from One, 1989)
Shared
lead vocals on Bee Gees songs:
•How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (from Trafalgar, 1971)
•Run to Me (from To Whom It May Concern, 1972)
•Too Much Heaven (from Spirits Having Flown, 1979)
Solo
career:
•Oh! Darling (from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band soundtrack,
1978)
•Juliet (from How Old Are You, 1983)
•Boys Do Fall In Love (from Secret Agent, 1984)
•Robot (from Secret Agent)
•Toys (from Walls Have Eyes, 1985)
Robin Gibb: A Bee Gees Voice Filled With More Than Just Disco
(By
Randall Roberts, L.A. Times, May 21, 2012)
Their hits could fill an entire Saturday night, last until the
first church bell rang on Sunday morning and provide a sweat-drenched workout
on the dance floor that broke only for the slow numbers. Even more remarkable
was that each classic gem of the Bee Gees, whose co-founder Robin Gibb died
Sunday after a long battle with cancer, would be packed with feeling. There’s “Jive Talkin’,” the group’s frenetic
ode to a lying lover, which highlights a skeptical Gibb’s sweet tenor. “How
Deep Is Your Love” finds Gibb, who co-founded the Bee Gees in 1958 with
brothers Barry and Maurice (Robin’s fraternal twin), describing him and his
lover “living in a world of fools breaking us down,” when they should really
just leave them alone. That song alone was responsible for countless
dark-corner slow dances. The climax, of
course, would hit with the first few notes of “Staying Alive” from “Saturday
Night Fever,” the 1977 double-album soundtrack that made Robin and his brothers international superstars and helped define
disco — and the 1970s.
The song, with its heaving R&B rhythm, captured the spirit of
1977, when the dance music born in New York, Philadelphia and Miami was being
translated by poppier groups such as the Bee Gees and dipping into the
mainstream. Younger brother Robin’s midrange tone tethered Barry’s wild
falsetto, and they combined to create one of most instantly recognizable vocal
teams in pop music. Studio 54’s
cocaine-fueled evenings became “Today” show fodder, and the Bee Gees’ feathered
hair a look half the planet strove for. “Night Fever,” “More Than a Woman,”
“Nights on Broadway” and “You Should Be Dancing” all became songs that could
pack the dance floor.
But the group’s sound was more than just “disco.” There’s a
misconception that the Bee Gees made their move into music with “Saturday Night
Fever,” but it’s more accurate to say that disco became a name for the style of
music the band had been migrating toward for half a decade. Long before a white-suited John Travolta
shuffle-stepped his way across a lighted dance floor, Robin, Barry and Maurice
were experimenting with the R&B sounds coming out of the gay and straight
discotheques in urban centers and combining them with rhythms so far removed from
the group’s earlier hits that it might as well have been a different band.
In a sense, it was different bands. After a successful career in
the ’60s rising alongside the British Invasion acts and finding success, Robin
left the Bee Gees late in the decade, a symptom of a sibling rivalry that would
drive their energy for the rest of the 1970s and ’80s. He pursued a solo
career, one that yielded the baroque pop gem “Robin’s Reign” in 1969. He returned to the Bee Gees in 1970, but
while many of their post-British Invasion contemporaries continued along
predictable paths, following the Beatles’ lead in the late ’60s, then moving
into harder rock or country rock, the Bee Gees in the early 1970s, under the
guidance of influential British music impresario and film producer Robert
Stigwood, dived into the dance-floor sounds being born in America. Recording at
Criteria Studios in Miami, the band stitched complicated Caribbean rhythms —
and cowbell — into its innate pop sensibilities and the soul and funk of Curtis
Mayfield, the O’Jays, MFSB and James Brown.
It was this distillation that half a decade later resulted in “Saturday
Night Fever,” the double album released in November 1977 that went on to
generate at least 10 disco classics, sell more than 15 million albums and
transform the entire pop landscape. Working with those joyous, exuberant
harmonies in service of long, life-affirming grooves like on “You Should Be
Dancing,” the trio became the voice of Saturday night.
That influence continues. No matter how hard critics and the rock
establishment tried to kill disco, after the Bee Gees’ peak success — shattered
by the debacle that was their film version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band” and too many cheesy Rod Stewart crossover songs — the music went back
underground, rising from time to time as a reminder of its spirit. In 2012, the
beat-driven genre is cited by artists as an influence just as often as punk
rock, which supposedly “killed” disco. It
didn’t. The evidence lies within the grooves that Robin and his brothers
created, as vital, life-affirming and human as ever.
Robin Gibb's Unconventional Family
(By Luchina
Fisher, ABC-Go.com, April 19, 2012)
As Bee Gee Robin Gibb remains gravely ill in a coma, his devoted
wife, Dwina Gibb, has remained steadfastly at his bedside. The couple once avowed their open marriage --
he fathered a child with their former housekeeper and she openly stated her
preference for women -- but their love and loyalty for one another is still
apparent after 28 years. "However
absurd their relationship may appear, there's never any question that they are
very, very bonded," writer and film professor David N. Meyer, who is
writing an unauthorized biography on the Bee Gees, told ABCNews.com. "He
has relied on her in a number of ways. She is no joke to him. Their love for
one another is very tight."
"They are an example of a very modern family -- maybe a
little too modern," Us Weekly's music editor Ian Drew told ABCNews.com.
"They are both very artistic souls, very open-minded. They get each other
and they get a kick out of each other."
Their lifestyle, though, has raised more than a few eyebrows -- most
recently, in 2009, after Robin, 62, fathered a baby girl, Snow Robin Gibb, with
their live-in housekeeper, Claire Yang, a woman nearly half his age. Despite their unconventional marriage, Dwina
Gibb, 59, an artist, writer and druid priestess, was said to have "hit the
roof."
"When the truth came out, Dwina was furious. To say she hit
the roof is an understatement. She felt betrayed," a friend was quoted
telling the Sunday Mirror. "It's
very funny that she was upset," Meyer said. "Maybe it goes to the
king splitting his estate." Robin
Gibb, whose estate is reportedly worth more than $140 million, and Dwina Gibb
have one son, Robin-John Gibb, 29. Robin Gibb also has two older children -- a
daughter, Melissa, 37, and a son, Spencer, 39, with his first wife, Molly
Hullis.
His 12-year marriage to Hullis, a secretary in former Bee Gees'
manager Robert Stigwood's office, almost immediately fell victim to the rise of
the Bee Gees. "Almost as soon as
they got married, Robin moved to America and they almost never saw each
other," said Meyer, author of "The Bee Gees: The Biography," due
out this fall. "She refused to bring the kids to live in America." She also won custody of the children and, for
many years, Robin Gibb did not see them.
"It was akin to bereavement," he told the UK newspaper The
Telegraph in 2008. "I felt as though I was on the verge of madness."
Eventually, he reunited with his children when they were 12 and
10. By then, he had married Dwina Gibb, his second wife, whom he met through
her cousin in 1980, when she was running a beanbag factory in London while
trying to make it as an artist. "I
showed him my drawings," she is quoted saying in a 2006 article in the
U.K.'s Daily Mail. "He asked me to come house-hunting with him and we
scampered in and out of houses together, getting to know each other. We had a
lot in common. We are both interested in history, mythology, old churches and
buildings. We even share the same birthday." Raised in Northern Ireland, Dwina Gibb has a
lifelong interest in Irish history and mythology, according to her website, and
has published two volumes of poetry and two novels. She's a devotee of many
religions, including a Hindu sect called the Daughters of Brahma, whose members
are meant to be celibate, and the order of the druids, an ancient pagan
practice, for which she was ordained a patroness in the 1990s.
The couple live in the Biscayne Bay mansion once owned by
President John F. Kennedy and a 100-acre Oxford, England, estate, where
tapestries and tarot-card tiles adorn the walls of their 12th century converted
monastery and the Gibbs built a druid place of worship. The estate was also where Robin Gibb's
younger brother, pop star Andy Gibb, spent his last days before he was rushed
to a hospital, where he died of a heart ailment. And it was where Robin Gibb
carried on an affair with the housekeeper, until his wife learned about the
pregnancy. Yang and her daughter now
live in a converted barn not far from the estate and, Meyer said, Robin Gibb
provides financial support.
Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, who separated
after news that he had fathered a son with their housekeeper became public, the
Gibbs remain committed together -- in love. Since the birth of Snow Robin, they
have also backed off from earlier statements they made about their infamous
lifestyle. In the 1990's, Robin famously
told Howard Stern that he and his wife "like to cruise and we like to
watch." Amid talk about threesomes,
he declared, "My wife is a lesbian and I love it."
But in a 2010 interview with the Daily Mail, the couple disavowed
their previous statements. "My
earlier life was kind of wild, interesting and experimental, but you go past
the experimental stage and start living," Dwina Gibb said. "You get older and other things are more
important," Robin Gibb said, adding that he had never actually seen his
wife "indulge in a bisexual lifestyle."
"We actually have a very conservative relationship -- more so
than the average couple. We don't drink or smoke. We're not partying all the
time," said Robin Gibb, who has been sober and a vegan for decades.
"Look, we're not stuffed shirts. We have a free relationship. We give each
other time and space to pursue activities -- that doesn't mean other
people."
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