With Robin Gibb hurtling up the charts with his first solo single, Saved By the Bell, it would appear that the answer to the question, "Who was the key figure in the Bee Gees' success?" has been firmly given. If Robin had a motto it would be covered by that line from the Max Bygraves hit of yesteryear – "You've Gotta Have Heart."

Robin informed me during a recent interview. "I sing how I feel. I know I haven't got a great voice but I manage to touch something inside other people that they understand. It is an accident but the best kind of accident – one with no blood involved."

Robin quite rightly believes that his distinctive vocal style is an important ingredient in his success although he likes people to listen to the lyrics he writes as well. The imperfect, broken quality of his voice is something that he quite deliberately retains and regards the suggestion of taking singing lessons with understandable indignation.

"If I did that it would not be me, would it?" he says. "Dylan sings in the same way as me. He uses his heart as an instrument. Even I can't understand completely why this works but it does. It's not possible for any artist to jump outside themselves and see themselves for what they are. Even when you look in a mirror you get a reversed image!"

There has never been any secret made of the fact that Robin is an over-sensitive personality and he reacts like a finely strung instrument to the vibrations of life as those tensions and frustrations tear at him. He maintains that he has never objected to constructive criticism but that gossip in the press and those elements who seem intent upon prying into his private life both hurt and anger him.

"I actually like constructive criticism in the press but there is too little of it," said Robin. "The thing that really hurt me, and was the deciding factor on my splitting from the Bee Gees, concerned a feature which was conducted between a reporter and my wife. It took things entirely out of context which she had said and slandered both my character and her own. It made it look as though Molly was a bad influence on me instead of the inspiration she is."

What other inspirations does this talented young composer draw his work from?

"Perhaps because I am unduly sensitive, things like the Hither Green rail crash in which I was involved affect me deeply," said Robin. "That had a lasting effect upon me – I saw bodies and people being given the last rites. I'm frightened stiff of death.

"It also enabled me to work out who my friends were. The curious merely wanted to know whether I had seen any dead bodies – the friends were those who wanted to know how I felt.

"Sometimes things that I read touch me – writers like Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens affect me. I read this piece in one of Dickens' books where he was trying to get published an article condemning the spectacle of public hangings. The law of the day slapped a writ on him for interfering with public entertainment!"

Not surprisingly for so delicately-balanced a personality, Robin is something of a sentimentalist and unashamedly admits to seeing the Julie Andrews' film Mary Poppins no less than five times.

"I love the music they write for Julie," said Robin. "I would love to write a song for her. I tried to get Mary Poppins for my home movie projector – the Sherman brothers write beautiful songs. Rogers and Hammerstein, I like all that kind of music."

For so sensitive a person it would seem that the very idea of a solo career might have been a frightening decision – was it?

"No, I was getting too hurt where I was," said Robin. "Music to me is an adventure and I can do far more on my own. It was restricting writing for the Bee Gees but I enjoyed it until they began to judge what I was doing. I'm not going to be judged. O.K. SO I KILLED A MAN – BUT I'M NOT GOING TO BE JUDGED!"

The stars are another influence on Robin – those in the sky – not on the stage. He explains his belief in astrology thus:

"It's a fact that the moon has an effect upon our seas and tides. It is a fact that some people behave strangely during certain phases of the moon. Multiply the effects of one small asteroid by all the billions of stars and that is why I believe in the influence of the stars".

Amongst his independent projects now are a musical around the character of Dickens' Scrooge and another around the figure of Henry VIII.

"I'm a British history fanatic," said Robin. "History fascinates me – my particular hero is Sir Winston Churchill. I doubt whether there will ever be a greater man.

"I've written the songs for Henry VIII and the story can be written around those songs. It's a happy-sad story rather like most of my work. Full of pathos."

Finally I talked to Robin about the choice of Saved By the Bell for his first single. Was it a difficult choice to make and did he write the song as a deliberate single?

"Everything I write I write to the best of my ability," said Robin. "That is every song I have written could be a single – I never write A-sides that would be an insult to my ego. Mother And Jack on the flip of Saved By the Bell could just as well have been an A-side. All the tracks for my first LP could be singles."

His big brother Barry wrote the bigger hits, and his twin brother Maurice hung out with Ringo Starr and Oliver Reed, but Robin Gibb has always been my favourite Bee Gee. In their pre-disco days, Robin always had his hand cupped over his ear and, with his spaniel hair, cut a wan figure on stage. Barry could soften his voice, go gooey and breathy on a song like Words, but Robin's voice was loud, quavering and intense. It sounded unhappy; it sounded like no one else before or since.

I've always been drawn to pop's unlikely outsiders, ones who make a mark without resorting to any of the usual rock'n'roll behaviour, whether they be Del Shannon or Vic Godard or Adam Ant, and Robin Gibb fits the bill perfectly. There's the childhood story about him picking up the fire bug. Aged eight he became a part-time pyromaniac, and quickly progressed from bedclothes to advertising hoardings. One day a member of the Manchester constabulary came knocking and gently suggested the family should consider emigrating. Manchester's problem became Australia's, but Robin started to channel his pyro activities into vocal harmonies – with no New York subway stations available, the brothers practised their art in public conveniences.

While Barry Gibb was the pin-up, and the group's leonine leader, Robin struggled to assert himself, even though he was as prolific a writer as his big brother. The Bee Gees' manager Robert Stigwood, he felt, favoured his prettier older brother when it came to A-sides. He was also dogged by incredibly bad fortune. In 1968 he was returning to London from Hastings with his fiancee Molly when the train carriage they were in came off the rails just outside Catford. The Hither Green train disaster killed 49 people. The desolate Really and Sincerely ("My mind is open wide/ I'm on the other side") was the first song Robin wrote after the crash.

Robin and Molly married a few months later. Honeymooning in the Alps, in a tiny cabin, they were snowed in by an avalanche and weren't discovered until four days later. From this point on, he was always more likely to write an elegy – like 1970's Sincere Relation – than Jive Talking.

At least Robin's perceived second-billing was subtly avenged over time – Barry never had a sizeable solo hit, but Robin had a huge European hit with the Dickensian angst of Saved by the Bell (a UK No 2 in 1969) during a brief split from his brothers. In the early 80s, when the Bee Gees brand was almost unmarketable in a post-disco world, he pulled it off again with Juliet, a melancholy slice of upbeat electropop that again hit top 10s everywhere in Europe apart from Britain, reaching No 1 in Germany.

While Barry has always kept the Gibb family unit tight, with brothers, spouses and parents all living within walking distance of each other in Miami, Robin has always rebelled. So when Barry and Maurice were making the hapless TV comedy Cucumber Castle in 1969, Robin set out to show he was the group's renaissance man. He may have seemed a delicate flower on stage but he didn't lack for ambition. That summer the NME reported that he had "completed a book called On the Other Hand which is to be published soon … I'm a great admirer of Dickens." In the few weeks between leaving the Bee Gees and hitting the chart with Saved by the Bell he wrote more than 100 songs.

"I'm also doing the musical score for a film called Henry the Eighth," he told Fabulous, "and I'm making my own film called Family Tree. It involves a man, John Family, whose grandfather is caught trying to blow up Trafalgar Square with a homemade bomb wrapped in underwear." In July 1969 the NME announced Robin was "fronting a 97-piece orchestra and a 60-piece choir in a recording of his latest composition To Heaven and Back, which was inspired by the Apollo 11 moonshot. It is an entirely instrumental piece, with the choir being used for 'astral effects'." Robin Gibb was still only 19 years old.

He was also obsessed with British history. In 1984 he bought a 12th century house called The Prebendal in Thame, Oxfordshire; while Barry and Maurice seemed more at home sunning themselves in Miami, their brother was proud to tell visitors that Elizabeth I and Henry VIII had both strolled around his dark, oak-lined home.

Age barely mellowed his eccentricity. In the 90s he left his brothers speechless when, during an interview with all three of them on Howard Stern's show, he announced his wife Dwina was bisexual and they enjoyed threesomes. He quickly said it was a joke, then changed his mind again a week later. With their cocooned, peripatetic upbringing (Isle Of Man, Manchester, Australia), the Gibbs never had an instinct for cool pop moves. And Robin Gibb's music - untutored and isolated (I can picture most of it being written on a harpsichord in a dimly lit 12th century living room) – has come out without any of the usual dulling rock'n'roll filters. Who else could have written Odessa (City on the Black Sea) about a man stranded on an iceberg, writing a letter to his wife who loves "that vicar more than words can say"? Frankly, no one.

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