Reprinted from AO Deadpool (click here for May updates and scroll down)

Now which Bee Gee was Robin? Toothy, big hair and falsetto? No, that was Barry, and he’s still with us. Married Lulu and wore a hat to hide his baldness? No, Maurice died in 2003. Robin was the other bald one — terrible wigs and tinted specs. In their first period of success he was the voice of the Bee Gees. The one who sang the lead on “Massachusetts” and a dozen other late-sixties hits. He had hair, girls loved him, and a million guys got lucky.

But the hits got smaller, his hair fell out, and Barry took a bigger role. Robin felt sidelined, and in the early seventies he tried to break up the band. Until Saturday Night Fever — sales never dried up after that. Rock stars came and went, but the Bee Gees went on and on. It was a long time in the public eye, and the brothers quarrelled endlessly with each other and with their managers — mainly over money. They had a lot of it. According to Wikipaedia only Elvis, the Beatles and Michael Jackson outsold them. Robin also dabbled in New Labour to the point where both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown claimed him as a friend. Quite an achievement!

He married twice. His second wife Dwina, a painter, made him a vegan. Perhaps she thought it would prevent him getting the family disease of bowel cancer — red meat and all that — but he succumbed like his brother and three uncles, so maybe it was in the genes. Dwina was allegedly a bisexual druid priestess, and happy with an open marriage, which must have helped when towards the end of his life it emerged that he’d been having an affair with his housekeeper for a decade or so. Claire Yang was 26 years younger, and three years before his death had a daughter by him. That’ll complicate the reading of the will.

While Robin and Maurice
Couldn’t stop themselves balding
Barry had the big hair
And couldn’t stop smiling

They made a lot of money
From a film with John Travolta
But that made Robin quarrel
With one or other brother

Robin befriended Blair and Brown
And wed a druid priestess
The marriage was an open one
So he kept a Chinese mistress

Perhaps she fed him red meat
Or vegans still get cancer
But now he’s dead as well as bald,
From Saturday Night Fever.

— Jim Thornton
August 2012