Never having read Wuthering Heights may be philistinism, but never having seen Saturday Night Fever comes close to dereliction of duty. Of course, I’ve heard the soundtrack plenty of times, and SNF has become such a cultural cornerstone, so open to reference and pastiche, that I feel like I’ve seen it. But honestly I haven’t. Luckily, the Nik Cohn essay it was based on was completely made up anyway, so in that pioneering spirit I can safely say that “Night Fever” encapsulates the film’s vision of disco and dancing: anonymous glide punctuated by breathtaking, desperate release.
Barry Gibb’s addictive, unnatural falsetto gave the Bee Gees a fantastic USP, but it also made their music weirder – the high register garbles his vocals, turning the opening lines of “Night Fever”‘s verses into compressed bat-squeak bursts. The effect is thrillingly urgent – here, as on “You Should Be Dancing” and “Stayin’ Alive”, Gibb sounds unearthly, speaking in hedonistic tongues – it’s similar to the helium effects and timestretching tech used to create the druggy pleasure-boost vocals on rave hits.
For me, those two are better songs than “Night Fever”, which after the initial rush of each verse settles into a confident shagpile groove but doesn’t seize me like the best Bee Gees, and the best disco does. It’s a fine, fine record, but far from my favourite on the soundtrack. The Bee Gees’ huge success – in the US they’d eaten the singles charts alive at this point, we got a mere echo of that – was the crest of the disco wave, the imagery of the film and their videos a potent mix of neon and chest hair which defined a moment in popular culture. (“Medallion Man” – applied knowingly to certain teachers – was half playground insult, half sneakily admiring sobriquet.)
The Bee Gees’ disco makeover had another effect, of course. To the rock establishment they were, after all, one of us or something close to it – chart semi-regulars with reasonable pop pedigree, they’d paid their dues and had the Pepper-imitating concept album to prove it. And here they were, not only adapting to this new music but dominating it completely, and becoming staggeringly rich in the process. If they could do it, many a rock star must have thought, why can’t I?
Score: 7
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I’ve never seen Saturday Night Fever either. I suppose that was an acknowledgement that “my” pop had now been left well behind and although some of the music was very enjoyable, the dance scene that went with it left me rather cold. It was largely concerned, I felt, with macho posturing. And I never really saw much in John Travolta – well not at that time anyway. That came later when he’d mellowed into something closer to My Kind of Man (whatever that might be)
As for the makeover the Brothers Gibb gave themselves, well that was the turnaround of all time. From gloomy balladeers to the epitomes of disco chic – well, it was a good move for them. The old Bee Gees churned out some perfectly acceptable tunes but they were never anybody’s “one of us”; I can’t recollect a time when they were “cool” for anybody; not in the circles I moved in.
Anyway, this is pleasant, workmanlike, disco stuff, and very much of its time, but nothing that gets me terribly excited. No more than a 5 from me.
Yeah, I meant “one of us” in the sense not that they were cool or ace faces but they were veterans, certainly not bright young things, they’d been around a bit. You could argue the fact of their C-Listness made a disco move even MORE appealing to the A-List.
Oh, there were some fantastic disco records up until this point.
From the Philly soul sounds, the GTO/Casablanca stuff, etc.
Then the Bee Gees came along, and suddenly any old UK sessionista guitar player, left behind by Punk and/or prog, could revive their glam clobber and make nice polite disco records into their dotage.
Killed the disco.
And led to the frankly racist “Disco Sucks” movement. You don’t like rubbish disco records? Hey, stand next to this guy who hates black music and black everything…
Still, “Disco Inferno” was on the soundtrack, so it wasn’t all bad.
After what seems like a very long time – almost a year, more or less – the US and UK charts align under the Saturday Night Fever (I was too young to see it at the time, then an edited for PG version came out & I saw that) all-mighty steamroller. In the US this was the third Bee Gees #1 in as many months; “How Deep Is Your Love” was the last #1 of ’77/first of ’78, followed (after a pause for the inexplicably popular “Baby Come Back” by Player) by “Stayin’ Alive” – a song that has practically hip-hop lyrics and pauses and floats and then cracks the whip…
…then little brother Andy had “Love Is Thicker Than Water” as a breather and then came “Night Fever”…#1 for two months, but it seemed to be #1 for the whole year, more or less. I know it’s cliche to talk about how big disco was in North America, but it was obviously HUGE and I never bought the soundtrack as you could turn on the radio and hear something from it almost any time of day on any station that played dance/pop music in the first place. (The flipside to this was the total domination, on FM radio, of The Eagles, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac and Linda Ronstadt.)
Besides “More Than A Woman” this is more or less the happiest song in the movie and it captures the bliss and forgetfulness of actually getting out and dancing and forgetting about your craptastic life in a paint store.
“On the waves of the air, there is dancing out there;
If it’s something we can share, we can steal it.”
The Bee Gees’ gradual conversion to soul and R&B may have had its genesis in the feelings and emotions which their songs provoked when reshaped and reinterpreted by black artists; thus Nina Simone turns “To Love Somebody” into a formidable roar brimming with subtexts (“YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE!” – and never likely to know, either) while Al Green converted and deepened the post-flower power doowop-lite of “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” into a six-minute-plus elegy of quiet but intense grief-stricken torment, as though he had only just embarked on his forty days and nights in the wilderness.
There wasn’t much of a buyers’ market for melodramatic psychedelic ballads in the early ’70s – not that the Gibb brothers stopped writing or recording them, they simply updated their surroundings (see their next number one for proof) – but, astute as ever, Arif Mardin gradually persuaded the group of the merits of absorbing and refracting the kind of blue-eyed soul which Hall and Oates had already begun to perfect. Certainly 1974’s Mr Natural, though yielding no hit singles, is worthy of balladic comparison with Abandoned Luncheonette; but it was with the following year’s Main Course, and its attendant comeback smash single “Jive Talkin’,” that the Bee Gees found a new lightness of touch – they were by now resident in Florida, and the influence of the Miami sound cannot be understated – and a new environment in which they could thrive more prosperously than they had done before.
The fact that “Night Fever” was the only UK number one single which the Bee Gees had, either as performers or writers, during 1978 seriously underestimates their near-total domination of that year’s charts; the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack dominated the album chart for most of 1978, and in the singles chart they were omnipresent, as themselves but also as writers and producers of hits for Yvonne Elliman (“If I Can’t Have You”), Tavares (“More Than A Woman”), Samantha Sang (“Emotions”) and even Frankie Valli (“Grease”). In America the number one single slot was more or less continuously occupied by the Bee Gees, or by doomed kid brother Andy (who had some reasonable success in Britain that year, but nothing approaching his status of idolatry in the States). They ruled pop and knew it; in terms of the pure mechanics of constructing a pop song and a pop record, Abba were their only serious competitors.
Moreover, their work for SNF, though not, strictly speaking, initiating the disco boom, certainly brought it into sudden and sharp focus; so while there was some criticism, encapsulated in the two lines quoted above, about white boys yet again stealing the thunder of the black folks who invented the damn thing (but then, think of Moroder and Kraftwerk; the traffic was two-way). Nevertheless the Gibbs and Travolta opened the gates of flood, paving the way for a river of classics which I loved and still love – the lithe and sprightly lament of the full-length 12-inch version of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame” (which managed to sell 300,000 copies despite never climbing higher than #39), the sunny synthesised paradise of Sylvester’s immortal “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real,” Donna Summer’s astonishing 17-minute-plus reclamation of “Macarthur Park” and, best of all, the discreet yet divine emergence of Chic, the Beatles of disco and one of the greatest and most artful of all pop groups.
With due respect to all of this, “Night Fever” is a relatively subdued record; from its key-turning-the-lock wah-wah intro it moves into a room of limelit classy elegance. The Bee Gees do not emphasise the beat, but rather relax in it, hold back on it, in the full knowledge that they know exactly where they are driving the vehicle. “Stayin’ Alive” was a startling loop of urban torment, and itself showed that the days of Odessa were not quite behind them (“I’m going nowhere/Somebody help me, yeah!”). The record sums up the grim and unrelenting tenor of the film (which my parents took me to see in Glasgow at the time, despite its X certificate status; fortunately at 14 I was tall enough and just about nonchalant enough to get in there); again there is something of the Aspergic about Tony Manero – he cannot realistically or usefully communicate with anyone (family, employer, would-be partner) on a workable level. As a consequence he is treated with undisguised contempt by the Real World, and it is only when he dons the costume and dances that he becomes alive; he only truly lives during these transient moments – suddenly he is transformed from no-hoper to god, revelling in the one thing in life he can do right. Even this holds no refuge, though; before the film ends, one of his friends has committed suicide and he has surrendered his competition prize to the black couple whom he knows have outdanced him. In the end he crawls back, via the circular nocturnal subway (“How Deep Is Your Love?” in this context is like his conscience demanding to address him), to a future…but will that continue to dwindle in concentrically decreasing circles until he has no option left other than to become Vincent Vega?
“Stayin’ Alive” was a huge hit in Britain – it peaked at #4, behind the aforementioned holy trinity of “Wuthering Heights,” “Denis” and “Baker Street” – but “Night Fever” was the one which went all the way, and it bears the calm restraint of someone who knows that they have made it, have penetrated the citadel. Even here there are unexpected key modulations from verse (and within verses) to chorus, and from middle-eight to chorus, sudden changes of focus from Barry Gibb’s forceful falsetto to dreamier, two-octave-down harmonies. It might be the ideal at which Abba’s dancing queen was aiming; sophisticated and utterly assured. The video, such as it was, consisted of the sequence from SNF where Travolta is line-dancing, coolly swivelling hip and finger at crucial moments, like Elvis in one of those corny old barn-dance hoedown routines in his first films; ostensibly part of a group, but not even needing to know that he is king, with or without that Kane/Kafkaesque capital K.
Funny to think this comes nearly three years after ‘Jive Talkin’ (or even ‘You Should Be Dancin’ which with it’s higher tempo I can hear alongside the disco-tinged strain of the late 70s and even into the 80s inc at least one future #1) which to me sounds a little more like it should be the more recent of the two. Time I read up more on the entire scene really.
I did go and see ‘Saturday night fever’ at my local fleapit cinema and found it surprisingly enjoyable – the first 18 or X film that I had seen legitimately – I agree that Staying alive’ is a more compelling song – this has a bit more of a soundtrack quality to it but still has a pleasant groove. And the A list weren’t too far behind, with ‘Miss you’ by the Stones released only a few weeks later.
This is worth more than a seven to me. But Tony Manero was the epitome of cool to me as a child. My Mum tried to take us to see Saturday Night Fever, not realising it was A rated*. As such I lived off the soundtrack until about 1982 when I was allowed to watch it on TV. And to me Night Fever, being in the title, was the key record in the film for me. (Also there is a better version of Stayin’ Alive since).
Everybody had this album, and its bouncy castle version – the Grease OST, and thus the next five years I probably played musical bumps / statues and pass the parcel to all of these records over and over again. So my abiding memory is “Night Fever, Night Fev-“, mad dash, scrabble for chairs, elbow in face, tears before bedtime!
Saturday Night Fever is a terrific movie, it was when I was nine and still is now. Its kind of my version of Taxi Driver, this intensely urban and adult film (thought the A rating possibly skewed my understanding). I love it. An eight or nine from me.
*She made this mistake with Private Benjamin too. Much of my early life involved being turned away from the cinema. Read something into that.
“suddenly any old UK sessionista guitar player, left behind by Punk and/or prog, could revive their glam clobber and make nice polite disco records into their dotage”
i’ve been trying actually to name some other names: who else successfully made a beegees-like move? unless you count bowie haha
honestly, if green gartside could ONLY sing like a gibb, i think his endless candy-pastel dabbling in modern studio r&b could have been redeemed
SINKER AND GROUT MY OFFICE TOMORROW 9 AM SHARP SEPARATELY NOT TOGETHER
There is one other name which comes immediately to mind but long-term Spoiler Bunny prevents me from naming him, or her, or them.
Shall we leave the HeeBeeGeeBees to next time? Yes, let’s.
There is a tremendous pay-off between the naffness of the Bee-Gees, and the supple dancability of these records – one which would be endlessly mined by Kenny Everett and the HeBeGeeBies (and I daresay the Baron Knights). But like many mainstream takes on an underground dance style it both gets disco a bit wrong, and adds something ineffably timeless to disco at the same time. Certainly stacked against Disco Inferno, none of the Bee Gees tracks has that kind of raw infectious energy. But neither are they overproduced to the point of anodynity (for that, listen to the Grease OST – if you can record in soft focus, that certainly is). Is the falsetto magical (hey Kate Bush), silly or just funny. Its all three, and that is the secret.
Sorry. Angus Deyton, back in yr box!
Never mind Angus, less talk about the Grease OST please!
Sorry, its all tied up for me! But its time will come.
Here, have a video of Night Fever from Saturday Night Fever. Ladies, beware of Tony Manero’s pants. Imagine him playing Musical Bumps!
(xpost)
We pretty much exhausted Deyton and Pope when we wuz discussing The Quo innit.
Is the disco scene in Airplane off limits? I can’t hear “Stayin’ Alive” now without thinking of that scene.
Which may also be one of the reasons why I enjoy “Night Fever” more these days.
sir it was grout sir he made me
(and b.gibb’s voice IS tons better than green’s, it just is)
Everything about the Bee Gees makes my skin crawl, I remember this as a very early musical memory (think I saw them on TOTP2 or something) and it still holds true. The awful falsettos, the image…yuck.
Green is much better than Gibb.
It even goes for Toothpaste as well.
I have no idea what that means!
Hey, did somebody say “I need to read more about this whole scene”? I heartily recommend ‘Love Saves The Day’ by Tim Lawrence as a history of Disco that’s serious and itself and its subject.
(which is the main thing I demand from books these days – I’m sick of picking up a could-be-interesting book about a little-discussed subject and feeling the wave of disappointment as it turns out to be a jokey self-depreciating piss-take whereby some thirty-two-year-old media piglet can shout ‘Look at this cultural moment hah hah sucker fooled you now LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME ME ME ME MEEEEEEEE’ – anyway, more a topic for the brown wedge)
let’s kill all the 32 year olds
Tom–there’s a really good history of SNF in the new Da Capo compilation (that you’re in w/ABBA, yay).
(Punctum: the couple was Puerto Rican, not black)
matos! d00d!
not the best bee gees on snf (which you should see if only as a representation of how pop works in most peoples’ lives as well as a representation of how disco probably actually was experienced by most people in america and how/why it got SO huge in the us – disco’s huge success (w/ snf lifting it into another stratosphere beyond the years of hits the us had already seen from george mcrae, the o’jays, donna summer, kc and the sunshine band, etc) being at least as big a stimulus for the ‘disco sucks’ movement as the obv racism and homophobia (ie. the eagles and the doobie brothers hated donna summer for the same reason frank sinatra hated elvis)) but dear god that bridge may be the best moment on the whole album.
and ‘love saves the day’ recommendation strongly seconded – by many miles the best disco book i’ve read (much much better than turn the beat around which i found very disappointing) and almost definitely my fave music book period. very wisely focuses alot more on the people playing the records and the people dancing to them over the people making them.
Probably my least favourite of their “disco” singles, a bit too smooth and swishy compared to the more funky ‘Jive Talking’ or ‘Staying Alive’ but Lordy, how many great songs were pouring out of these guys back then? I remember reading a review of their ‘Spirits Having Flown’ album which said that with their voices and image they should be ridiculous but the songs were so strong they made you forget all that.
Another thumbs-up for the SNF movie here too, it’s got all the urban grit of the best 70s cinema. Like ‘Mean Streets’ in tight polyester shirts.
Some songs on Popular are monolithic because they are of obvious massive cultural significance and are also tremendous, shaking, experiences to listen to (Dancing Queen and I Feel Love) and some songs are monolithic just because they’re always there. It’s hard to imagine there ever being a time over the rest of my life when I won’t be inadvertently hearing this all of the time, coming out of radios and televisions.
And this ubiquitousness has rather blunted any excitement that I might have derived from the big Bee Gees songs. I know that they’re really good, and I once felt this when I first got my charity shop Saturday Night Fever OST. But its only when I listen to the less-played stuff – ‘Spirits (Having Flown), for example – that the comparative unfamiliarity opens my ears to how good the Bee Gees were.
Part of the problem might also be that I’ve never found them to be memorable lyricists at all…
Maybe the day when I eventually see the film will be the one when I listen to this song with renewed enthusiasm.
This was the bit where the Bee Gees stopped singing like sheep and began offending our lugs with their girly squawks. I could never understand why this was supposed to get women excited and I’m saying this without the benefit of hindsight, something which any cynic, coward or fool can hide behind. Basically, the Bee Gees had become tarts and deserved to be lampooned to friggery, which they of course were. That’s all very well but this was 1978 and this was the Disco craze gripping the UK and particularly the US. Some of the music spawned from this new genre was excellent but I thought the Bee Gees were a joke. Without the umbilical cord of the popularity of Disco, they could not possibly have lived. I looked on with a mixture of incredulity and contempt, thought that the Gibb brothers were actually in fancy dress (dressed as dickheads), now looked not unlike The Banana Splits (Barry was a ringer for Bingo) and qualified for a good toeing from Regan and Carter before being hurled bloodied and beaten into the back of a piggy van and driven back to the factory for another quality seeing-to from the Squad.
Prats.
Oh, and I haven’t seen SNF either.
The opening chapter of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich’, when Harry Rabbit Angstrom listens to Donna Summer and The Bee Gees on his car radio in 1979, gives a very good sense of their absolutely central place in the spirit of the times.
Green toothpaste? There’s a PiL/BEF-style product branchout that he hasn’t considered yet!
B Gibb’s voice being better than Green is like saying that Ernesto Lecuona cuts Mary Lou Williams.
waldo you totally should see snf, it’s good — not at all what you expect it to be, given the way people talk about it (who haven’t seen it)
“He hit my hair!”
One of those songs that doesn’t really make much sense without its visual accompaniment – the first three minutes of SNF, for me one of THE great cinematic opening sequences. 7 is about right.
Except that was “Stayin’ Alive.”
# 32 – mark id rarver totally fucking dye and won day i shall (dye not see snf)
The Stayin’ Alive sequence is unforgettably recreated by Tim Brooke Taylor in a 1980 episode of the Goodies.
God, were they still going in 1980? Was that after they’d moved to ITV?
No, that was before.
That “SatNightFever/Grease” take off did feel like “Oh, we never did this one”, and it’s not bereft of ideas, just that the whole idea was way after the event.
I agree completely with Waldo @29!
1980 was the last BBC series (it features a memorable parody of a 1979 number one, too). They couldn’t make one in 1981, because they were the most expensive comedy show to do, and the lion’s share of that year’s comedy budget went to The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Garden and Oddie both had expensive alimony payments to pay at the time, so they got a better deal at LWT. The ITV series was in early 1982, but they didn’t take up the option to make a second one, and because they were under contract to LWT, The Goodies couldn’t do any more shows for anybody else.
The ITV series has its moments, but is pretty patchy. And you’re very aware when you see it that LWT didn’t have the same resources to achieve funny effects and stunts that the BBC did.
As you say, ITV did not take up the option of the second series, but paid them in full for it anyway.
And, I don’t think it was because they were still under contract, but what tends to happen is, you leave the BBC for more money, they tend to go Oops Bunny, we don’t want you back.
Funnily enough, the Christmas special, which was the first ITV show, was the last one they filmed together.
Yes, I’ve got the book. £5 in “The Works” back last year…
Has anyone ever gone over from BBC to ITV and improved? Hancock, Morecambe and Wise, even Mike Yarwood – their careers all more or less went crashing through the basement after they moved.
Frank Skinner, his chat show particularly.
Not for me, I’m afraid.
“Ith Funtime Frankie” – no, ith NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST IN FIVE SECONDS
“Stayin’ Alive” (too bad Maurice didn’t) was also ripped to threads on one of the Airplane movies, of course. I’m sure there are others. The Goodies’ dig was indeed particularly memorable.
And cheers, lex. I’m glad I’m not out on a limb here over these pillocks.
#46 well, his career certainly didn’t “nosedive”. I assume he’s counting the money right now…
#47, how about Johnny Rubbish? “Santa’s Alive”.
Not heard it myself, so can’t comment.
Re: 44. Not comedy, but you could make a plausible claim that 1979’s ‘Six Plays by Alan Bennett’ is his best work for television.
The Goodies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXBPtRo5S1Q