Bee Gee Robin claims PM is big fan

7:36pm Friday 16th May 2008

Does Gordon Brown let his hair down after a hard day running the country by turning on the stereo and blasting out the disco classics of the Bee Gees, as the band's Robin Gibb suggested?

Downing Street was maintaining a discreet silence on the issue, after Gibb claimed that the Prime Minister was a big fan of the group, best known for their falsetto harmonies on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever.

"The Prime Minister listens to a wide range of music," was all his spokesman would say when grilled by reporters at their regular daily briefing in Westminster.

Mr Brown has doubtless learnt that it is best to keep his musical tastes to himself, after enduring merciless ribbing for suggesting he listened to the punky guitars of the Arctic Monkeys to wake himself up in the morning.

But Robin Gibb saw no need for such discretion, telling The Times: "He listens to our music every day. Gordon likes our music and I like Gordon."

Gibb is a long-standing Labour supporter, appearing on party platforms at the last election and inviting Tony Blair to stay at his Miami home. The pop star said that he gets on with the former PM "like a house on fire" and made clear he is on equally cordial terms with his successor.

"I was with him at a dinner recently," he said, adding that Mr Brown likes the Bee Gees' music "because it talks about human relationships and experience rather than specific events and reaches out across the decades".

He said the Prime Minister described the Gibb brothers' songs as "absolutely timeless", but did not reveal which of their many hits were his favourites.

Given Labour's dismal showing in this month's elections and Mr Brown's difficulties over the 10p tax, many might think that the appropriate soundtrack to the last few weeks would be the Bee Gees' 1979 hit Tragedy.

But surely Mr Brown, who has spent the last few days loudly insisting that he is the right man to lead Britain through economic hard times, would be more tempted to give a spin to a different tune to show that he is very much Stayin' Alive.

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