Maurice Gibb - Personal Life

Personal Life

Gibb was married to the Scottish pop singer Lulu from 1969 to 1973. Their careers and his heavy drinking forced them apart and they divorced, childless, in 1973. Gibb later stated they both drank: "We didn't have any responsibilities, we'd just party." He married his second wife Yvonne Spencely Gibb on 17 October 1975. They had two children: Adam and Samantha. Their marriage lasted until his death.

Maurice's alcoholic nadir came in 1991, when he pulled a gun on his wife and kids after a month long bender. She left him and immediately went over to brother Barry's house, refusing to come back until he had done something about his drinking. Maurice went into rehab, calling Yvonne telling her he was going to stay because he really wanted to stop drinking. She said that was the call she had been waiting for.

Gibb said he had battled the booze since the seventies when John Lennon gave him his first drink, which was a Whiskey and Coke: "If he had given me cyanide, I would have drunk the cyanide, I was so in awe of the man." With Ringo Starr as his neighbour the two of them would go out drinking. It got to the point where he became unreliable and prior to going onstage would have to feel his way along the wall to get there, according to Barry.

One factor in Maurice's recovery was the active intervention of his brothers, who had recently lost youngest brother Andy Gibb. In an interview, Maurice acknowledged that his own final years of alcohol abuse had been driven by his own failure to reach Andy before his death, and his guilt at that failure.

After rehab Maurice started to rediscover his family again, spending quality time with them. To celebrate this, he and Yvonne renewed their wedding vows in 1992. The ceremony was attended not only by many members of their families but many of the friends Gibb made whilst at the rehabilitation centre.

Gibb also loved the sport of paintball, and had a team which he called the Royal Rat Rangers, a reference to his being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and to his time at the Little River AA group, where the members referred to each other as "river rats." He promoted the sport at every opportunity, and opened a paintball equipment shop, "Commander Mo's Paintball Shop," in North Miami Beach, Florida.