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The 79-year-old is alive and well, his family reported.
Despite what social media says, Barry Gibb is stayin’ alive!
The internet told a different story over the long weekend, when a Facebook page titled “R.I.P. Barry Gibb,” featuring a false message about his death, received nearly a million likes, per TMZ.
The outlet reported that Barry’s family said the musician is “healthy, happy, and living life at his Miami-area home,” amid the rumors of his death.
While the main page appeared to have been removed by late Tuesday, a search of the phrase on Facebook turned up multiple posts claiming that he had died: “BREAKING NEWS: Family mourns the passing of Barry Gibb” and “With a heavy heart, The family brings sad news about Bee Gees singer Barry Gibb.” There were a lot more — some from as long as 48 weeks ago. Many of them were accompanied with what appeared to be AI-created images of the singer in a hospital bed or even a coffin.
Celebrities are, of course, regularly the subject of death hoaxes, and some of the ones about Barry were nearly a year old.
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and to a rep for Barry Gibb.
He rose to fame as part of a trio with his brothers, Maurice and Robin, who died in 2003 and 2012, respectively. (The youngest Gibb brother, Andy, was not part of the band, but enjoyed solo success as a singer and died in 1988 at age 30.)
Now 79, Barry is the last surviving member of the group that brought radio listeners hits such as “To Love Somebody,” “Night Fever,” “You Should Be Dancing,” and many more to audiences beginning in the ’60s. Their sound will forever be linked to disco — they helped make the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack the smash that it was — but their catalog extended to soul music and beyond.
He has explained the intense pressure that he and his brothers experienced at the height of their careers.
“There’s fame and there’s ultra-fame and it can destroy,” he told The Guardian in December 2020. “You lose your perspective, you’re in the eye of a hurricane and you don’t know you’re there. And you don’t know what tomorrow is, you don’t know if what you’re recording will be a hit or not. And we were kids, don’t forget.”
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