THE BEE GEES - “Night Fever”
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? 7
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vinylscot on August 4th, 2008
I ventured back to see what response my earlier comment had prompted, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I did not get the bollocking I probably deserved.
Tom, you and all the regular posters are doing a grand job - if you weren’t I wouldn’t keep coming back.
Waldo on August 5th, 2008
“Before the pub…” “After the pub…” What do these expressions mean? I have no concept of them. Only “IN the pub”.
# 167 - Don’t be silly, Mark. Your contributions are never stupid and long live conversational drift.
Chris Brown on August 8th, 2008
Ken Bruce occasionally plays ‘Fanny Be Tender With My Love’ and you can probably guess which joke it tends to lead to.
At the risk of joining in consensus here, I tend to prefer Bee Gees songs sung by other people - Al Green being the great and surprising-to-me non-spoiler example - but those falsettos don’t half make the ballads painful. Even so, however, the fact that they wrote so many hits, and on a finite template, makes the whole thing quite wearing after a few days radio listening. And I got very tired of them during that wave of hype after they won the Brit Award (1997?)
All that said, I think I get more enjoyment from this one than ‘Stayin Alive’ now, possibly because it’s less over-familiar. Or maybe it’s the strings. BTW, I’m pretty sure I’ve started watching the film on telly once or twice but never seen the whole thing.
DJ Punctum on August 8th, 2008
“Aye, these bonnie wee popmasters the Bee Gees…”
Waldo on August 10th, 2008
Ken: “Och, The Reverend Al Green with ‘Let’s Stay Together’. What was the wee rascal doing with Miss Scarlett in the ball room just there? Errrmmm…”
Lynne Bowles: “Let’s not go there.”
Ken: “No. Let’s do ‘Tracks of my Years’ instead. All this week, we have Neil Diamond…”
Erithian on August 11th, 2008
Blimey, away for a week or two and this site got seriously feisty, didn’t it? No point in weighing in with my views on the spats after all this time, but I hope peace has broken out.
Briefly FWIW, my thoughts on the Bee Gees - it’d be churlish not to admit they’ve written some top songs, such as “To Love Somebody”, “Words” and even the likes of “If I Can’t Have You” on SNF. But their disco years and their image at the time just grated with a capital G. Not to mention their complete sense-of-humour bypass. Sorry, but I’m with Clive Anderson as far as the Bee Gees are concerned - they’ll always be Les Tosseurs to me! (Can’t believe nobody has referred to that incident yet…)
DJ Punctum on August 11th, 2008
And I’m with the Bee Gees as far as Clive Anderson is concerned, viz. “you’re the tosser, pal.”
mike on August 11th, 2008
Yes, I *hearted* the Gibbs for giving Anderson the come-uppance he so richly deserved. He was a dreadful chat show host.
Erithian on August 11th, 2008
Granted, he wasn’t exactly God’s gift to chat shows, but they did look like pillocks trailing off one after the other. Is it possible to do a walkoff and keep one’s dignity?
Billy Smart on August 11th, 2008
Michael Hestletine certainly looked like a flouncing ninny on Channel 4 News, whereas I always end up with a certain amount of respect for John Nott’s cussedness in walking out of Robin Day’s 1982 Nationwide interview: “I don’t have to put up with this!”
Erithian on August 11th, 2008
Albeit losing points for the time it took him to unhook the microphone.
Mark G on August 11th, 2008
Maurice did walk away with dignity.
And now, the Bee Gees are back.
xxxxxxx. xxx xxx xxxxx.
That’s all I’m saying.
Waldo on August 12th, 2008
Ah, John Nott! A “here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow, politician”. Indeed. And there may well be another of these coming along quite shortly.
Mark G on August 12th, 2008
yeah, which was a ridiculous thing for RobinDay to say, as politicians tend to hang on for ruddy decades.
Ironic, though, I don’t recall John Nott at all after that!
Billy Smart on August 12th, 2008
He had already announced his intention to retire to spend more time with his directorships, hence Day’s impertinent question. John Nott wrote a peculiar book a few years ago, about being an old man in search of lost youth by visiting nightclubs and lap-dancing establishments.
wichita lineman on August 12th, 2008
Re 187: Mark G, what exactly are you alluding to? Back?? Please don’t tease!
Yes, the walk-off said a lot about the brothers. Barry flouncing, the slightly less touchy Robin feeling obliged to follow, Maurice shrugging to camera as if to say “what can you do with these guys?” before exiting stage right.
If any other star was called a tosser on live tv, I wonder how they’d react.
DJ Punctum on August 12th, 2008
Also, at one remove:
xxxxx xx xxxx
and
xxxxx xxxxxxxx
not to mention
xxxxx
and
xxxxxxx
and
xxx xxxx xx xxxx xxxx
wichita lineman on August 12th, 2008
What is this, Ask The bleedin Family??
Billy Smart on August 12th, 2008
Re 191: ‘Clive Anderson: All Talk’ was prerecorded, not live.
I was in the studio audience for his first ever Channel 4 show, in 1989 in Teddington, the series when he had Tony Slattery as second banana. His guests were Ben Elton and a penguin.
wichita lineman on August 12th, 2008
Either way, being called a tosser by Clive Anderson on tv, in front of cameras and an audience (presumably including a fair few people you know), how would most people react? I think I’d probably say “and you’ll always be a c*** to me, Clive”.
I once hailed a taxi in Islington and Clive Anderson tried (and failed) to pinch it from me. He was taller than I expected.
Pete on August 12th, 2008
In the interest of full disclosure, for people who have never seen the Clive Anderson piece, its here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvfmGPDVkk
For even more full disclosure and from way on up, here is the most famous Kenny Everett Bee Gee sketch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpEkugItKQI&feature=related
Erithian on August 12th, 2008
For anyone who can’t access YouTube, the context of the “tosser” bit was that Barry Gibb told Anderson the band had once, back in Australia, gone by the name of Les Tosseurs. Hence Anderson’s “you’ll always be Les Tosseurs to me”. Earlier on he’d called them “hit songwriters - well, only one letter out”. Many guests would give as good as they got in response to this - it was the trademark of the show after all - but not Barry. “Ah, we’re getting on a storm, aren’t we Clive? In fact I might just leave…”
wichita lineman on August 12th, 2008
Senility’s a terrible thing. That’s not how I remember it at all. I thought the ‘tossers’ line was immediately before the walkout. I mean, I can’t stand Clive Anderson but you’d really think Barry would get the gag about Don’t Forget To Remember.
Yes, they look stupid.
Mark G on August 12th, 2008
It was a bunch of rubbish jokes pitted at the Bee Gees, to be fair. Barry at least looked like he’d actually had enough, Robin always looks like he should be treated with maximum respect at all times, Maurice was tempted to stay on…
thevisitor on August 12th, 2008
Clive Anderson’s treatment of the Bee Gees singlehandedly turned me off him and everything he stands for. What really left a bad taste was his inability to grasp that their work had any musical merit. Even though two decades had passed, you suddenly sensed the anti-pop snobbery of a coterie of Oxbridge-educated Genesis and ELP fans (remember Anderson’s chums The Heebeegeebies?) attempting to reassert itself in an era when those musical battle lines were far more irrelevant than he believed the Bee Gees music to be.
The sad thing about it was that it probably made the Bee Gees think that the world’s attitude towards their music was pretty much the same as it had become in the post-‘Disco Sucks’ early 80s. Perhaps the surprising thing here is that Barry was the first to walk out. Robin is usually the more volatile character – and has walked out of at least two interviews since the Clive Anderson thing, perceiving slights where (unlike the Clive Anderson show) none were intended.
I think they were absolutely right to walk off. There’s good-natured ribbing and there’s calling someone a tosser and expecting them to sit there and take it. It would hardly have been funny if he’d adopted that tack with a Big Brother evictee, but in 1978 alone, Barry Gibb made a far greater impact on the world than most of us make in a lifetime.
The Kenny Everett thing was fairly good-natured whimsy by comparison, and interviews with them suggest that they found it pretty funny. Mass-a-chew-sets indeed.
thevisitor on August 12th, 2008
Re 198: “Yes, they look stupid”
I think that once you’ve been on the receiving end of a huge backlash, you’ll never be able to lose that brittleness (bordering on chippiness) that comes of never quite knowing if the world is laughing with you or at you.
wichita lineman on August 12th, 2008
You’re right, Visitor. The youtube clip skips the “hits with one letter missing” line, which - like the tossers line - isn’t a joke in anybody’s book, just a poke at a very soft target. It seems that Barry had just calmed himself down and was joining in the conversation again, when he finally lost his rag over a very innocuous joke.
I saw the Bee Gees at the start of the nineties and they did a medley of SNF-era songs as if it was comedy relief, getting them out of the way as quick as possible. Very sad.
FT's Conrad on August 15th, 2008
200, I agree wholeheartedly. Anderson thought he’d found a soft target, belittling talented and successful, albeit terminally uncool, musicians.
Shame he didn’t interview Grace Jones…
DV on August 24th, 2008
Not seeing SNF is entirely reasonable, it is a miserable and depressing film, totally out of synch with the uplifting music it spawned.