THE BEE GEES – "Tragedy"

Ha! ‘Be Here Now’ – fantastic point of comparison – biggest act in pop feels compelled to make a big-sounding comeback record. But there is a really great song embedded within this gargantuan thing, the loneliness and loss of which more or less justifies the scale of the project: lost in the strange city, unable to cope without the one who made it all make sense – the lover gone now, the singer utterly bereft. Such is dynamism and excitement with which the song builds to its choruses, though, that this can only be a very manic sort of breakdown, not a quiet wasting away that the verses sort of might imply.

What lets it down slightly for me is the middle-eight – which pads it out without taking it any further. I think that its a minute or two longer than it needs to be. For the comparative lack of embellishment and simpler feel, I actually find the 1998 Popular reappearance of the song a more engaging listen…

I’ve always been a sucker for excess in pop – and this song really over eggs the pudding. Despite, or perhaps because of, their worldwide success this communicates a great sense of impending loss – “Don’t take our pop crown – please” It’s a great melody, with the synths enriching the vocal harmonies – and in a weird way pre-figuring the synth tones and paranoia of an upcoming android who I shan’t mention by name for fear of the bunny

I bought this, aged nine, from a record shop in Birmingham called Discus. It was part of a small row of shops in the suburb of South Yardley. Thinking back to the decor (a couple of disused listening booths are foremost in my mind), the shop had clearly existed since the 60s, when music was such a big deal that a record shop was just as necessary in a small row of shops as a newsagent, grocer and a butcher.

Anyway, I digress. What I hear now is a palpable sense that things are getting a little odd in the Bee Gees’ world at this point, which extends to other songs on the Spirits Having Flown album. A sense of souls marooned in a transition that refuses to be hurried along. You also get it in the title track of the album (“How long must I live in the air”) and a certain other song penned for someone else whose Popular time has yet to come. They sounded like they were trying to sing their way out of a panic attack. Maybe they were.

Or perhaps they were trying to protect the moat around their disco castle before the tide of, um, change came in, using the only tool available to them at the time – the a cappella shriek that had helped revive their fortunes in the first place.

Never heard this before – and I kinda like it. Probably because it’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t sound to me like a #1 smash single – more like an interesting album track. I do think the accompaniment is sort of out of scale of the vocal performance – the Bee Gees’ vocals are just too thin to contribute to a true wall of sound. Frankly, I just appreciate the fact that this isn’t “Night Fever” done over again – give them that, at least!

Has this ever been prominently sampled?

Tom, spot on, though I’d mark it down a tad. I’ll echo Lee about the feeling of letdown – I remember being in hospital, no tv, trapped by the Radio 1 dj’s who were gushing over it. And I just couldn’t love it, much as I wanted to, because it was just too mono-minded. Not a hollow roar like Be Here Now, but more like a sabre-rattling Destiny’s Child number one that I’m not allowed to mention for a while.

By contrast, the title song from the parent album was an onion-layered creation that took me an age to fully get into (though I could tell it would be that way from the first time I heard it, so loved it all along).

And Until, the flip of Tragedy, is almost too heartbreaking for me to listen to; the antithesis of the A-side, it curls upwards over Manhattan in a balloon built solely out of Aero-bubble keyboards and Barry’s orphaned vocal, gently drifting over the skyline and out of sight.

But these tears were anything but dry. Just because the Bee Gees had entered (or some say inaugurated) the disco era didn’t mean they weren’t still writing tempestuous and tormented ballads. A decade previously, “Tragedy” might have been recorded at the same tempo as things like “First Of May” or “Saved By The Bell,” but double-speeded for a new age it is still easy to imagine Barry Ryan howling his way through the song’s pitiless self-torture.

As it is, it was left to Barry Gibb, in his most extreme falsetto, to negotiate the ruts of turmoil; in fact as the song opens he is already dead. “Here I lie/In a lost and lonely part of town/Held in time/In a world of tears I slowly drown.” The key changes slowly modify upwards, as was the Bee Gees’ wont and specialty, until Gibb cries “I really should be HOLDING you, HOLDING you, LOVING you, LOVING youuuuuuuu….” before the chorus crashes in, perhaps sung so speedily as to minimise the spectre of unresolvable pain which the song depicts: “When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on,” “When the morning cries and your heart just dies” – we were still six months away from the first Joy Division album at this point, but “Tragedy” doesn’t seem that far removed. Its hectic pace does a very professional job of concealing what is essentially a plea for suicide.

In truth, “Tragedy” has little to do with disco, but in terms of arrangement and approach suggests that the Gibbs had been listening intently to Abba; the electro-sequencing which doubles up in the second verse, the relationship of the agonised lead guitar lines to the song’s general processional. And Barry’s vocal becomes more emotional and desperate as the song progresses; note the clenched howl of his “aa-aa-AH!” after the second line of the second verse (“There’s a burning down inside of me”) to indicate that he is indeed burning. As the song nears its end, his grief goes out of articulate bounds, and the track and arrangement build up to a catastrophic thunderclap – or is it a gunshot? The song fades on the chorus, but that thunderclap/gunshot continues to resonate in its emotional rafters. It may well be the most extreme thing the Bee Gees ever did. And then, a generation later, a cover version turned it into a work of accidental art.

Dear God, this was woeful. “Tragedy” is about right, I would say. It might as well have been given to Pinky and Perky…. Oh, wait…it was!

#10 – There’s also a lovely cover of “Love You Inside Out” (the relatively under-performing follow-up to “Tragedy”) on Feist’s 2004 album Let It Die, which to my mind did a far more sympathetic rehabilitation job than That Other Cover Which We Must Not Mention.

With this, did the BeeGees beat everyone else to the parody? We were still a year away from Dobbin, Garry and Norris, but this sounds every bit as ridiculous as their “p***take”.

I think it’s the “bombast”, for want of a better word, which does it. The sound is just so OTT – thunderclaps FFS! And what on earth made them think it was acceptable to sing like that?

If the remainder of their album hadn’t been so consistent with the SNF stuff, you could imagine this being the Gibbs trying to get their “rock” mojo back, something which had probably been missing since the very late 60s/early 70s and their (not very good) forays into concept albums etc.

Now I don’t mind hearing this as apiece of random background noise; I may even stop and listen to it when I hear it; but I never ever have the urge to hear it again after I’ve heard it once.

I don’t think this would have been a #1 without the SNF bandwagon still following them; it would probably been one of their occasional mid top-tenners, and I would have thought that would have been about right. At a push a 6.

This is the one Bee Gees disco record I really love. To suggest this only made number one because of saturday night fever is somewhat naive, as the previous single had stalled at number 3. It was almost a year since “Night fever”.

It’s a fantastic pop song, timeless as proved by its mega success when re-recorded by Steps years later.Most of Steps records were spending 10-14 weeks in the charts and their version of this spent 30 weeks in the charts (forget the other side of the single “heartbeat” that was crap).

Basically it got them back to the top of the charts. It held Abba off number one which is no mean feat either.

I have to disagree with comment #19, which sggested I was rather naive to consider that this only made #1 because of the SNF factor.

The reason that “Too Much Heaven” only made #3, despite the SNF factor, and eagerly awaited as it was, was that it was a disappointment, an uninspired and uninspiring dirge. Without SNF hype it probably wouldn’t have made the top 10.

“Tragedy” was better than that, but so were most things. It does not rank among the BeeGees finer moments; I have a colleague who has been a fan since the 60s and he agrees (not that that proves anything).

I would actually turn this around and say one would need to be quite naive not to factor SNF into its success.

It’s difficult to reinforce this without aggravating young Mr Bunny, as discussions on the song’s merit will undoubtedly cause him to spring into action, but suffice to say I stand by my original point.

calling mr bunny “young” is like calling alecto, tisiphone and megaera the “kindly ones” — ie IT WON’T SAVE YOU IF YOU TRANSGRESS

By not looking for the big shiny lights when they cross the road.

Yes. They’re not artful enough to dodge the traffic

Well, consider all those BG singles that flopped, before the SatNavFiver…
Pick the bones out of these..

“Charade” · “Jive Talkin'” (1975) · “Nights on Broadway” (1975) · “Fanny (Be Tender with My Love) (1976) · You Should Be Dancing (1976) · Love So Right” (1976) · “Boogie Child” (1977) · “Edge of the Universe (Live)” (1977) ·

So, there you have two hits proper, a couple that made the lower regions, and some flops. Now, how many of them would have been hits if they’d come after SNF? At least two…

I’m waiting for Dale to play “Edge Of The Universe (Live)” as one of the exciting new releases we all went out and bought this week in 1977…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7886103 – disco saves lives!

@Mark G # 29:

Yes, there’s no doubt that SNF popularised and consolidated The Bee Gee’s as an international act. It’s worth pointing out that if you transposed those hits to the US you get a very different chart story: Two # 1’s, a # 3, a # 8, two # 12’s and a # 26 (live). All predating SNF. The film may have cradled them internationally, but they were on a hit-making roll before it.

@ Vinyscot # 21:

‘Too Much Heaven’ is a dirge? Ok, it isn’t ‘How Deep is Your Love’, but in my opinion it is a very good ballad. And ‘Tragedy’ was always going to hit the top (or near top) of the charts even without SNF. It has exactly what a big pop hit needs. They might not have been as consistent before SNF, but ‘Jive Talkin’ and ‘You Should be Dancin’ proved they could take a song high up the charts on hooks alone. And unlike those two, ‘Tragedy’ was a song that 12 year-old’s could immediately understand.

It felt an event single, but Tragedy wasn’t the first single from Spirits Having Flown – that was Too Much Heaven. Which, for the record, I reckon channels Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson through a Gibb filter. I find it spiritual in the same way I find many Beach Boys recordings spiritual, and it’s not a word I bandy about very often.

Can I nominate the blackest Gibb lyric? Robin’s solo 45 One Million Years:

“We wed, I knew she’d stay
Then I passed away”

I hope posters will forgive me from plonking a genuine tragic dampner here but we’ve just received the news that one of our colleagues at Gatwick Customs has been killed by a gunman in Afghanistan, having being seconded to a contractor out there. Dave Chamberlain was one of those larger than life bonkers characters and will be missed by us all. RIP, Riggy.

Thanks.

Again I’m in agreement about the “Meaningless Songs in Very High Voices”, but this is still my favourite number 1 from the Hee Bee- er, I mean Bee Gees and, like everything else ***** did, the cover was, er, a tragedy (might as well get that gag in now before anyone else does). I give the original 7.

I was referring to the title of the song by the parody band Hee Bee Gee Bees (Angus Daeyton et al) to refer to the point that most were making that they were overusing the falsetto voices by this time – like I said I do like this one.

Critic watch:

1,001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die, and 10,001 You Must Download (2010) 1002
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)
Giannis Petridis (Greece) – 2004 of the Best Songs of the Century (2003)