Tainted Love

Marilyn Comes Clean, Spills The Dirt On Tragic Romance With Gavin Rossdale

Marilyn, then and now
Marilyn, then and now

In a new interview with the UK’s Mirror Online, 1980s pop star Marilyn, whose career peaked with his participation in Band Aid’s 1984 megahit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, says he spent much of the last three decades doing drugs, watching Alien movies, and trying to recover from a 1986 arrest and his failed relationship with Gavin Rossdale, the Bush front man currently married to Gwen Stefani.

The 52-year-old former gender bending pop star, whose real name is Peter Robinson, calls his trial for heroin possession “a horrible part of my life” that began a snowball of financial and social problems — not to mention a nervous breakdown — that killed his career and nearly cost him his life. “If it had been one or two things, that would have been OK,” he says, “but it was everything at once.”

One such devastating factor was the end of his relationship with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, who Robinson has called the love of his life. Though Rossdale initially denied having a relationship with Robinson, he later admitted to indulging in a “one-time experimentation” with Marilyn.

Robinson remembers it differently: “He was a fan of mine. He’d follow me around the clubs everywhere and I was vile to him so he would stop. But he never did. One day I saw him in a club and told him it had to stop. He had his car outside and asked to speak to me somewhere quiet. He told me he loved me, which I said was ridiculous because he didn’t know me. But after about an hour-and-a-half we were both crying and ended up in each other’s arms. And that was it. We were a couple.”

Marilyn and Rossdale during happier times
Marilyn and Rossdale during happier times (Photo)

Though Robinson was found not guilty of the drug charge, he says he “cried every day for 10 years” following his and Rossdale’s breakup and spent the next two decades as a near-recluse. Along the way, he says, he lost nearly £1 million and ended up living on government assistance in his mother’s home, seeking solace in sci-fi. “I had the Alien box-set and would watch them in my room one by one, then start all over again. That went on for ages.”

It took a near-death from a lung infection to turn things around. “I realized I had nowhere else to go,” he says. “It was either death or trying to come out of this horrible place.”

Robinson, who’s writing a memoir, says he’s been drug-free for four years and celibate (“I’ve not even kissed anyone”) since parting ways with Rossdale.

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