For 30 years, he sang to the world about love. And for the last 30 of those years, he was living two completely different versions of it. A secret life so carefully constructed that even the people closest to him never saw the full picture until it was too late to ask about it.
He was born Robin Hugh Gibb on December 22nd, 1949 on the aisle of man. His father was a band leader. His mother had sung professionally. Music wasn’t something the Gibb children discovered. It was the air they breathed from birth. Robin, Barry, Maurice, three brothers and one sound that didn’t sound like anything else.
By 27 Saturday Night Fever had made them inescapable. How deep is your love? Stay in Alive. Too much heaven. Song so embedded in culture that entire generations have never known a world without them. But behind the voice that sold 220 million records, a man was quietly building a life nobody fully understood.
His first marriage was to Molly Hullis in 1968. two children, Spencer and Melissa. Then fame arrived like a flood and swept everything in its path. Robin moved to America. Molly didn’t follow. The distance did what distance always does. Divorce came through in 1982. Molly was granted full custody. For years, Robin had almost no access to his own children.
No response to his calls, no acknowledgement of his letters. He said it himself. I felt as though I was on the verge of madness. All the professional achievements mean nothing if your children are taken away. Life is empty. Eventually, when Spencer was 12 and Melissa 10, he was granted a meeting. He was too nervous for tears.
Reestablishing himself as their father was slow and hard. The turning point came the day they started arriving unannounced. That was the best moment, he said. By 1985, he had married again. Her name was Duina Murphy, Irish artist, self-described neodyruid and devote of Hindu spiritualism. They lived in a converted monastery in Oxfordshire.
Hosted druid rituals in the grounds. Claimed to communicate with spirits. Robin called it the most honest relationship of his life. They gave each other complete freedom. Duina was openly bisexual. Her girlfriend stayed in their home. Robin knew. Robin accepted it. He said it himself. We don’t go round joined at the hip because we’re married.
We’ve been liberal-minded. From the outside, it looked unconventional. from the inside. According to both of them, it worked until 2009. Their living housekeeper was a woman named Clare Young, younger than Robin by decades. That year, a daughter was born. Her name was Snow Evelyn Robin Juliet Gibb. Her father was Robin.
When the truth came out, Dwina was furious. Friends said she hit the roof. She felt betrayed in a way their open arrangement had never prepared her for. This was different. This was a child. Robin quietly moved Clare into a house nearby, an £850,000 property he transferred into her name 4 weeks before he died. He left Snow 6.
2 million in his will. He never denied her. He just never found the right moment to explain how it had happened. In 2010, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He fought longer than anyone expected. His twin Maurice had died in 2003. His younger brother Andy in 1988 at just 30 years old. Robin was the third of four Gibb boys their mother Barbara would outlive.
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On May 20th, 2012, Robin Gibb died in a London hospital. He was 62. Dwina was at his side. So was their son Robin John. So were Spencer and Melissa, the children he had spent years fighting to get back. Barry posted a tribute on YouTube that went viral within hours. The double life Robin Gibb lived was never simple enough to summarize.
Open and secret at the same time, honest in some directions and hidden in others. A man who wrote songs about love with complete sincerity while living in arrangement the world had no easy word for. Snow Gibb is 16 now. She carries his name. And somewhere in Oxford shear in a converted monastery full of stone sculptures and old beliefs. Dwina still lives.
She never left.
