The forgotten brother of the Bee Gees
When Barry Gibb paid tribute to his late brothers Maurice and Robin at his investiture, there was one startling omission: his youngest sibling Andy, who died 30 years ago from drug-related heart failure aged just 30
WHEN the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb collected his knighthood on Tuesday, he paid a moving tribute to his late twin brothers and fellow band members Maurice and Robin. But there was no mention of the family’s other musical star Andy.
It may be hard to believe now but the youngest brother was once considered the Gibb most likely to become a major star. Andy was deemed to be so talented that he was dissuaded from joining the Bee Gees on the grounds that he had what it took to make it on his own.
And for a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s it looked as if the advice was good. Andy was just 19 when his first single, I Just Want To Be Your Everything, hit the top of the US charts in 1977. He was nominated for two Grammys and made nearly $2million that year and had sold 15 million records worldwide by the time he was 21.
What’s more, having divorced the 18-year-old receptionist he had married just before fame struck, he embarked on a relationship with Victoria Principal, the actress then riding high in the blockbuster TV series Dallas.
But it was too good to last. From these giddy heights Andy’s life took a now familiar trajectory. His dabbling in cocaine became a fully fledged drug addiction. His celebrity girlfriend gave him an ultimatum – the narcotics or me – and ditched him when he failed to get help. Anguished by her rejection, his drug use spiralled, the hits stopped coming and by 1987 he had been declared bankrupt.
While he did eventually go into rehab, the damage had been done. On March 7, 1988, he checked into Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital complaining of chest pains. On March 10, at 8.30am, his doctor walked in and told Andy that more tests were needed. “Fine,” said the patient, but a few moments later he slumped into unconsciousness and within a few minutes his heart failed and he was dead. It was five days after his 30th birthday. It was a tragically early end to a career that had promised so much.
To understand why Andy crashed and burned so spectacularly it’s instructive to look at his upbringing.
The youngest child of Hugh, a drummer, and Barbara, a big-band singer, Andy was born in the UK but his parents moved the family to Australia in 1958 when he was just six months old. More than eight years younger than Maurice and Robin and almost 12 years younger than Barry, Andy was not even a teenager when his brothers hit the big time in the late 1960s, with songs such as I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You.
On the back of the Bee Gees’ success, the Gibbs decamped to the party island of Ibiza and the young Andy would be ferried to school and back by Rolls-Royce – much to the chagrin of his classmates.
Barry gave him a guitar and, bored with school, Andy quit the education system for ever at the age of 13 to play in a local bar. He later said: “Everybody said I’d regret leaving school so young but there was nothing else I would rather have done.”
That said, he had always assumed he would become the fourth Bee Gee but his voice was so appealing that in 1975 – at the age of 17 – his family urged him to strike out on his own Down Under.
After one hit in Australia he was signed up by his brothers’ manager Robert Stigwood and Barry and Maurice each produced an album for him in the Miami-disco style of their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever.
From the moment Andy exploded on to the world stage he was called the “Baby Bee Gee” and the truth is that he was always in awe of his older brothers and doubted his own talent. “I feel I’ve done very little,” he once said. “I know I’ve been lucky and wouldn’t have got as far as I have so quickly if it hadn’t been for my family.”
By now he was married to his teenage sweetheart Kim Reeder and they had moved into an apartment in West Hollywood. But it wasn’t long before a drug nicknamed charlie became the third person in their marriage.
“Cocaine became his first love,” Reeder said later. “He became depressed and paranoid. He wasn’t the man I married.” By the time Reeder discovered she was pregnant with their daughter Peta, the couple had split up.
She flew back to Australia to give birth and filed for divorce in 1980. By that time, in the words of one commentator, “disco was as dead as their marriage”. Romance, however, was not dead. In 1981 the US STAR: Andy Gibb in the early 1980s and with Dallas’s Victoria Principal talk show host John Davidson introduced Andy to Victoria Principal live on air after reading that he had written her a fan letter. The 23-year-old was immediately smitten despite their seven-year age gap and the relationship lasted more than a year before the Dallas star decided enough was enough.
Andy was devastated. “I just fell apart and didn’t care about anything,” he once said. “I started to do cocaine around the clock – about $1,000 a day. I stayed awake for two weeks locked in my bedroom. The producers kept calling up, sending cars for me, but I refused to go… I really think the major reason I fell from stardom was my affair with Victoria.”
IN the spring of 1982 he was duly fired from his job as cohost of Solid Gold, a syndicated TV musical variety show, for missing too many taping sessions and when the LA production of the musical The Pirates Of Penzance – in which he had been starring – went on the road, he was left behind thanks to his abysmal attendance record.
And when the producers of the hit Broadway musical Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat took a risk on him it didn’t end well. Within six weeks of starting his engagement in 1982 he was fired for an “inability to perform’’ after missing 12 shows.
Andy finally sought treatment for his drug issues at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1985 and in the last two years of his life his brothers supported him both emotionally and financially, furnishing his apartment and giving him a $200-a-week living allowance.
In December 1987 Barry even took Andy to meet executives of Island Records and he signed his first record contract in 10 years. “This is an opportunity for me to make a fresh start,” he said enthusiastically. “Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can lift your head up again and get back on the right track.”
The next month, hidden away on Robin’s 16-acre estate, Prebendal, in Oxfordshire, he began writing songs for his much-vaunted comeback. Alas, it was not to be.
“Andy was too sensitive, too delicate,” Freddie Gershon, a former president of Stigwood’s record label RSO once said.
“Superstars usually have a tough hide from having doors slammed in their face and hustling. Andy never built up those layers because he never had to. Andy grew older but he didn’t grow up. He froze in time at about age 17.”