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Barry Gibb: The Long Walk Alone
Barry Gibb had never done this before.
Never taken the long walk to the stage alone. Not once in a career defined by harmony, by shared breath and blended voices. For more than half a century, the Bee Gees had always entered the light together. But on this night at TD Garden in Boston, Barry Gibb stepped forward by himself.
The last of the Bee Gees was going it alone.
“I could never have imagined being the last person,” Barry says quietly. “We were glued together. Three kids who knew something nobody else knew—that one day, we would make it.”
That belief began early. Almost impossibly early. At 14, Barry told his girlfriend that if she left him, she was making a mistake—because he was going to be famous. He believed it then. He believes it still.
Together with his younger twin brothers, Robin and Maurice, Barry formed a sound that would define generations. Even in the early days in Australia, the Gibb brothers were unmistakable—three voices moving as one, yet each emotionally distinct. What followed was historic: 15 No. 1 hits written, performed, or produced by the Bee Gees, and Saturday Night Fever, a cultural earthquake that spent six months at No. 1 and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
That album was recorded in Miami, a city Barry fell in love with and eventually made home. He and his wife Linda moved there in the late 1970s. Decades later, it was Linda who pushed him back onto the stage when grief threatened to silence him.
“I was fed up with him sitting around miserable,” she admits candidly. “After Morris died, he just shut down. And I thought—he sits there singing, and he sounds incredible. What are you doing doing nothing?”
Maurice Gibb died suddenly in 2003 at the age of 53 from complications related to a twisted intestine. The loss was devastating. The Bee Gees had already buried their youngest brother, Andy, in 1988 after years of addiction and decline. But Maurice’s death fractured something deeper.
Barry and Robin drifted apart, emotionally divided by grief neither quite knew how to navigate. In a rare moment of honesty during a 2009 interview, both admitted they were afraid of each other—afraid of what continuing without Maurice might mean.
“I wanted the Bee Gees to stay the three of us,” Robin said. “I wanted that to be the only thing anyone ever saw again.”
That same year, in Barry’s Miami home studio, the brothers reunited quietly. They dusted off old songs, letting the harmonies rise once more. It was informal, unguarded. And unknowingly, final.
“I knew then,” Barry recalls. “I knew Robin wasn’t well. Everything took more effort for him.”
In 2012, Robin Gibb died of cancer.
Before his death, Barry tried to reassure him. “The dream came true,” he told his brother. “You don’t need to keep searching. It happened.”
Did the dream come true for the Bee Gees?
“Absolutely,” Barry says without hesitation.
For himself?
“That remains to be seen.”
At 67, Barry Gibb stepped onto the stage alone for the first time in his life. The falsetto—first unleashed on Nights on Broadway—was still there. He jokes that he keeps it alive by screaming in the shower. But the voice is more than technique now. It carries memory.
When considering a solo tour, Barry turned to his eldest son, Stephen Gibb, a heavy metal guitarist who now stands beside him on stage. There was vulnerability in the decision, Stephen says—a kind of nakedness.
“He wondered if people still cared.”
They did.
Joining them is Samantha Gibb, Maurice’s daughter. When she and Barry sing How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, something happens beyond performance.
“We’re healing and grieving at the same time,” she says through tears. “We both lost our dads. That song connects us in a way we never had before.”
Stephen sees something new in his father now—emotional openness he never witnessed growing up.
“When Robin died,” he says, “my dad realized it was okay to feel. He’s stronger spiritually now. People may not see it, but I see it every night on stage.”
Barry admits that seeing images of his brothers during the show is still difficult.
“I miss their voices every day,” he says. “Every night. It never goes away. I don’t know why I’m the only one left. I’ll never be able to explain that.”
Yet something else is happening too.
The audience is still there.
“It feels like a rebirth,” Barry says. “It’s therapy. You feel alive again.”
Barry Gibb may have lost his band of brothers, but he has not lost the music. Or the connection. Or the belief that first carried him forward as a boy.
The harmonies are no longer beside him.
But the song continues.