Philadelphia Daily News,Monday June 5, 1978:
Glib Andy Gibb
"I'm not a party person.""Susie is a very close friend, but we never touched on a serious relationship," says Andy. "She helped me in my marriage problems when my wife left."
That dissolved marriage is itself the subject of some particularly nasty gossip. Ex-wife Kim Reeder, now back in her native Australia with their baby daughter, Peta Jaye,was recently quoted as claiming that Andy had withheld financial support. She alleged that she struggled to stay alive on a $45 a week welfare check.
The gossip still doesn't stop. Recently, eyebrows were being raised over Andy's stay in Hawaii, where the Osmond family was filming its "Aloha, Donny and Marie". The columns had Andy and Marie carrying on a passionate romance, to the horror of her strict Mormom parents.
"All that talk really got me down," says Andy. "There is so much nonsense to that. My mother came with me to Utah when I did the first taping of the :Donny and Marie" show. The families got to know each other and we became very good friends. We had dinner twice, with the familes, and that was it. It was no big thing and never has been."
If Andy's saintly claims are true, he has changed a lot since his younger years. After the Gibb family moved back to England, his birthplace, after nine years in Australia, Andy became quite a hell-raiser. ":I was a skinhead in a skinhead gang," he recalls sheepishly.
"With the skinheads, the main thing was football matches. You take a hammer into the staduim and throw it as high as you can into a capacity crowd of 30,000. And wherever it lands, it lands. We were really very nasty."
By age 13, Andy knew he wanted to be a singer. His first single, "Words and Music" was released in Autralia when he was only 16. In 1977, three years later, Andy's funky falsetto pushed "I Just Want to be Your Everything" to the number one spot on the U.S. charts. It wasn't long before his first album, "Flowing Rivers", went gold.
That first single sounded suspiciously like a Bee Gees tune-and for good reason. Barry, 11 years his senior, wrote and produced it.
Andy's success is still growing. The hits keep coming, and so do the fans. As he speaks, a screaming young lady begins banging on his living room window.
Andy shrugs and reminds himself, "I have to put down that blind." Like the constant gossip, these intrusions are something he's still not used to.
