A Bee Gee in homey shades

Robin Gibb is gazing at a bear at the bottom of his garden. Glinting in the afternoon sunshine, the 6-foot grizzly is upright, poised motionless on muscular hind legs, left paw outstretched menacingly.

Just as well, then, that it is sculpted in stone. “It was a birthday present from my wife, Dwina,'' Gibb says, sipping from a mug, decorated with festive robins.

“I like the sort of juxtaposition, the mix of the modern with the historic,'' he says, pouring more tea from a cream Delft teapot that has to hold a gallon of liquid at least.

The “modern'' is an array of huge stone statues that litters the magnificent 100-acre fairytale garden of his Oxfordshire home. The “historic'' is his manor house itself, a 12th-century former monastery he has spent 20 years restoring.

“The Bishops decided Joan of Arc's fate in the chapel here. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed here in 1533 on one of their progresses. Oh, and Baroness Sophie Wenham conducted her affair with William IV here,'' he rhymes off.

“There's a very old set of stone steps outside that the Baroness used to climb into her carriage. Dwina uses them now to climb into the Range Rover. I like that kind of continuity, too: the melding of the old and the new.''

Affinity to the bygone

History, you see, is one of Gibb's passions. In fact that was what clinched his deal on the manor in the first place.

Mick Jagger saw it first, Dwina confides. He wanted it desperately.

The then owner said no rock stars and their raucous parties, thank you very much. But Gibb wasn't prepared to give up.

So impressive was his knowledge of the era and his love of the house's history that the owner accepted his offer. (He is now president of the Heritage Foundation.)

Inside is like a dimly lit Aladdin's cave. Tapestries and tarot-card tiles adorn the walls, snarling stone griffins guard the doorway, suits of armour stand in the stairway, Buddhas beckon you into the great hall, which is stuffed with mystic artefacts that festoon the ornate, 16th-century wood panelling.

Cheek by jowl, without a hint of embarrassment, sits the 21st century: DVDs of Men Behaving Badly, The Cinder Path and Eddie Murphy films.

Houses are very important to Gibb. So much so that the title of his forthcoming solo album is 50 St Catherine's Drive, the address of one of the Gibb family's earliest homes on the Isle of Man.

Then, the brothers, who were to go on to have more than 50 Top 10 hits worldwide and define disco, didn't — as Gibb says matter of factly — “have a pot to [p***] in''.

He went back recently to view the two-up, two-down terrace house of which the family could afford to furnish only one floor. “It seemed so small, as though it had shrunk,'' he says.

“The old school building opposite was still there. That is my earliest memory, standing on my cot at night looking out of the window and that was the view.''

Yet Gibb couldn't bring himself to go inside. “I didn't want to, I was nervous about seeing it again,'' he says self-consciously, fiddling with his blue-tinted glasses.

Gibb, 58, doesn't like much to be without his armour, the spectacles behind which, one suspects, he hides. “I wanted those memories intact. I didn't want to spoil them.''

The Bee Gees (Robin, his late twin, Maurice, and older brother, Barry) are custodians of an almost unrivalled catalogue of hit songs — Saturday Night Fever, Tragedy, Stayin' Alive, and the song with which Robin will be forever associated, the nasal, melancholic Massachusetts — and Gibb's personal fortune is estimated at £140 million.

Next year it will only get bigger, thanks to a planned Mamma Mia!-type Bee Gees stage show.

But to be a Gibb is also to walk hand-in-hand with loss and guilt: over the respective deaths of Maurice, in 2003, and younger brother Andy, 20 years ago.

Andy died from heart failure in Gibb's mansion at just 30 after a long relationship with booze and drugs.

His grief is ever present, he admits. “I think about Maurice at unpredictable times. I'm forever see-sawing between the two realities: one that it happened and that other that it didn't have to.''

Yet then the brothers were always close. Their father, Hugh, had little work. By night he was a drummer in a band, by day he did a variety of low-paid jobs.

The indebted family lived first in Manchester, before moving to the Isle of Man and then eventually becoming “pounds 10 Poms'' and emigrating to Australia.

The Bee Gees were born in Brisbane but after their first hit single in 1967, they returned to England. Hit followed hit and with the release in 1977 of Saturday Night Fever — the bestselling soundtrack album of all time — came the revival of disco.

Along the way, though, they became casualties of the usual celebrity addictions: Gibb took to amphetamines, for Maurice it was the bottle.

Before long the constant touring took its toll on Gibb's marriage to his first wife, Molly Hullis, with whom he had two children, Spencer, 30, and Melissa, 28.

Divorce was inevitable and Molly was granted custody of the children when they were 6 and 4. She forbade him to see them. Gibb fought a lengthy but ultimately unsuccessful court battle and didn't see his children for six years.

Pain of separation

“It was akin to bereavement,'' he says, 18 years after he and his children were eventually reunited.

“I felt as though I was on the verge of madness. There was no response to my calls, no acknowledgement of my gifts, no letters.

"Nobody would tell me anything. All the professional achievements, they mean nothing if your children are taken away. Life is empty. Emotionally, mentally and spiritually I felt abandoned.''

Eventually, when Spencer was 12 and Melissa 10, he was granted a meeting. He knew it would be a delicate balancing act. “I was too nervous for tears,'' he says.

“Re-establishing myself as their dad was slow and hard.'' The turning point came when the children would ring up saying they wanted to come and see him.

“Then it got to the stage where they would just arrive unannounced, that was the best moment.''

In the meantime, Gibb married Dwina, who had already given birth to their son, John Robin, with whom Gibb has written several songs. His life, he says, has settled into a sane, domestic routine.

Gibb is a well-known Labour supporter and close friends with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He is clearly uncomfortable with any criticism of either man and, changing the subject, returns to the subject of Britain's heritage: “Few have respect for it. We have a proud culture.''

Is he, I wonder, thinking of his own contribution? Does it become tedious, forever being the butt of put-downs, being told that his music was cheesy and manufactured?

“Nope,'' he says cheerily. “Take Mozart. No one these days ever says, ‘Oh, he is so 1780s.'''