Jive talkin': Why Robin Gibb wants more respect for the Bee Gees

Interviewing a Bee Gee can be a tricky business. There was the notorious incident on Clive Anderson's talk show when all three brothers Gibb strode off after tiring of their host's wisecracks. And there was the time Robin Gibb, invited on to Radio 4's Front Row to discuss his last solo album with the probing but hardly combative Mark Lawson, peeled off his mic in mid-conversation.

The Gibbs would have made good guests for Graham Norton, but the comedian scuppered that prospect by making a tasteless joke about the death of Robin's twin brother Maurice in 2003. At the time, Robin, perhaps understandably, expressed a wish to rip the presenter's head off.

It's no surprise, then, when our first appointment, due to take place at the star's converted monastery in Oxfordshire, is broken. A second meeting is cancelled, too. Third time lucky: we meet at a private members' club in Cavendish Square in London.

In March, Gibb, 58, was made President of the Heritage Foundation. The organisation, he explains, is devoted to "the recognition of achievement by people across the spectrum of British cultural life", with activities including tribute events, concerts and the unveiling of blue plaques.

Now, Gibb is heading the foundation's Bomber Command campaign. "It's 63 years since the end of the Second World War," he says. "We want the 56,000 guys who lost their lives protecting the freedoms of all of Europe to be honoured with a statue in the centre of London."

Gibb is bothered by Britons' lack of pride in their history. "We whinge about our past, but we're a greatly admired culture. We're the country that produced Shakespeare, for Christ's sake, the Brontës, Winston Churchill."

His home in Oxfordshire is "a microcosm of British history. It's 1,000 years old – older than Westminster Abbey. It survived the dissolution, and during the Civil War it was used by both Royalists and Parliamentarians. In the Second World War, the American army had a base there."

Gibb and his twin Maurice were born on the Isle of Man in December 1949; Barry, the other surviving sibling, was three years their senior. The trio were brought up in relative poverty in Manchester until 1958, when their youngest brother Andy was born, and the family relocated to Australia, where the Bee Gees first found fame.

"As a teenager growing up in Australia," Gibb says, "I realised that the Australians value British history more than the British do. Tony Blair spent a few years growing up in Adelaide and I had the same conversation with him."

Blair, "a good friend", holidayed at Gibb's mansion in Florida last year, sending the tabloids into a tizz. In 1992, Gibb's wife Dwina had been inaugurated as patroness of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, a British neo-druidic order. She and Gibb were also candid about the openness of their marriage, a mistake he learnt from. "I don't understand why the press went crazy over that," he says. "They made very unnecessary jibes at my wife. It was a personal attack on her."

Unnecessary jibes are what have riled the band in past interviews: Anderson making the obvious joke about their former moniker, "Les Tosseurs", and Lawson asking Gibb how he felt about the lack of respect afforded the band. The Bee Gees are often treated without seriousness, mocked for the big hair, dismissed as men of the Seventies.

"Nobody ever says, 'Mozart? That's so 1780s!' I think we should see people for what they've achieved. Mozart was a womaniser and a drunk, but we evaluate him on his works," Gibb says. "We've got one of the biggest catalogues in the world. There are songs we wrote in 1968 that people are still singing. Ronan Keating did 'Words', Destiny's Child did 'Emotion'. There's very few artists with that kind of history."

The Bee Gees' record sales top 220 million. The only people who have outsold them are Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson and Garth Brooks. Their compositions have shifted more units than The Rolling Stones, Abba, Elton John or U2. It's unlikely that the Bee Gees will ever be toppled from that top five, even now that the name has – probably – been retired.

Since Maurice's death in January 2003, Barry and Robin have performed together only a handful of times at charity events. The old tales of animosity between the pair are quickly dismissed. "Retiring the name is an emotional decision. We'll decide what we want to do in the next couple of years. We are planning to work together, but what shape or form that will take, it's too early to tell."

The album Gibb is recording for release later this year will, inevitably, be infused with the experience of losing his twin. "In many ways I don't accept that he's gone," he says. "I miss his presence, but it's something I have to live with."

Maurice wasn't the first family member to die unexpectedly. Andy, the youngest Gibb, was a Seventies star in his own right with a string of US solo No 1s. During the Eighties, the prospect of Andy joining the Bee Gees was much discussed, but in March 1988, he died from a heart condition. He was 30. His brothers didn't hide the fact that past abuse of drugs and alcohol had probably contributed. "Losing two brothers at a very early age is one thing, but the fact that both their deaths were unnecessary only compounds it," says Gibb.

Thirty years after its release, Saturday Night Fever is still the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Until then, the Gibbs were best known for their late 1960s ballads, like "Massachusetts". But, says Gibb: "We were dying to get into our soul influences. We wanted to do more than just ballads."

In 1976, they released Children of the World, complete with the No 1 blue-eyed soul single "You Should Be Dancing". They were working on new songs at a farmhouse in France when they got a call from Robert Stigwood. "He called from LA," Gibb recalls, "and said, 'We're making a film with this new guy John Travolta, and we're rehearsing to 'You Should Be Dancing'. Do you have any more songs?'" The rest is history.

"All those songs – 'Night Fever', 'How Deep Is Your Love', 'More Than a Woman', 'If I Can't Have You' – were written in a three-week period at five o'clock in the morning, with the only view from the window being of the cows that needed milking. They were the first to hear 'Stayin' Alive'."

Saturday Night Fever still overshadows the Bee Gees' long career. "Fever was a very important project, but the Gibb brothers were responsible for a wide range of songs," Gibb says, "from 'Islands In the Stream' for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, to 'Chain Reaction' for Diana Ross, to 'Heartbreaker' for Dionne Warwick, to 'Woman In Love' for Barbra Streisand. There's only a handful of people with catalogues like ours – the Stones, Elton, Abba and The Beatles.

"I get together with Paul [McCartney] a lot," he continues. "We talk about how we used to record. When we and The Beatles were recording we had no reference points. We just went into the studio and did what came into our minds. Many artists today just go into the studio and try to copy what's in the charts. We saw what was in the charts and said, 'Let's try to do something different.'"

Robin Gibb's 'Top 50 Music Legends' is on The Hits channelthroughout May and June