The pulse of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack-and the film, for that matter-was really driven by just five songs: the Bee Gees' own original contributions of "Stayin' Alive,” "How Deep Is Your Love,” "Night Fever,” and "More Than A Woman," and Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You," which was also one of their compositions. My memory is that they had roughly written the outline of 'Stayin' Alive" when they were in Bermuda with Robert before that, and they had the outlines of a lot of the songs.
We were just writing nice music that happened to work for the film. We'd never seen it and we didn't know much about it at all. Galuten affirms that much of what appeared on the final cut of the Saturday Night Fever album was already written by the time Stigwood reached them. He then asked his protégés if they would kindly scrap their project and contribute some of their newly-minted songs to the film's soundtrack. The Gibbs' longtime manager, RSO Records founder Robert Stigwood, reportedly interrupted progress on the new album with news of his decision to produce a film based on British music columnist Nik Cohn's July 1976 New York Magazine article, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night." Considered at the time to be a truthful, informed examination of the rise of life and music inside disco clubs in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn (he later admitted the work was fiction), the characters illustrated in Cohn's piece had compelled Stigwood to commit to telling their stories on screen. What they likely didn't know is that those sessions would not only add to the Bee Gees' lengthening string of hits, they would incite a musical and cultural revolution. "So 'You Should Be Dancing' and the success of that stuff-we knew that we had access, and we knew that we had a following, and we knew that the possibility for commercial success was there." "You know, I had never known failure, and Karl as a producer had never known failure," he explained to me on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. According to Galuten, the overall vibe was one of assurance that they could capably build on the success they'd earned with the past two records. The Gibb-Galuten-Richardson conglomerate began work on what was planned to be the next Bee Gees studio album in early 1977 during their residence at the Château. What began as a fascinating contrast to the Gibbs' already sterling harmonic blend soon became the primary vehicle for the band's music over the next year.
Bee gees saturday night fever live plus#
By this time, they'd scored two number one singles in the US with the perpetually infectious "Jive Talkin,'" and the urgently rhythmic "You Should Be Dancing,” plus a stack of other hits that included the Stylistics-influenced "Love So Right” and the phenomenally pungent "Nights on Broadway."Īlso in play was the novelty of Barry Gibb's falsetto voice, which made its first appearance through the encouragement of veteran producer Arif Mardin during the sessions for Main Course. Their 1975 album Main Course and 1976's Children of the World were progressive explorations of the group's long-term affection for R&B music that would reignite both public and critical interest in their catalog. The Gibbs were enjoying a return to commercial favor after a notable dry spell in the early 1970s. The temporary exile from their home base in Miami was purely financial-recording and producing in France provided a respite from the swelling tax rates in the United States. The Bee Gees, along with their co-producers Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson and band members Dennis Bryon (drums), Alan Kendall (guitar), and Blue Weaver (keyboards), found themselves in Hérouville in early 1977 to mix their forthcoming concert album, Here at Last.Bee Gees.Live, which they'd recorded at The Forum in Los Angeles in December 1976. Uriah Heep, Iggy Pop, Marvin Gaye, Fleetwood Mac, and Cat Stevens would follow suit at different points throughout the decade. Elton John was among the first notable pop musicians who crafted an album there-fittingly dubbed Honky Château.
The historic Château d'Hérouville, which was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in the summer of 1890 shortly before his death and was reportedly a residence of Frédéric Chopin, was eventually converted into a recording studio in the early 1970s. It might surprise some that the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack's inception happened rather unassumingly in an eighteenth-century estate in the French countryside, well over three thousand miles away from the Brooklyn streets with which it became synonymous. Happy 40th Anniversary to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, originally released November 15, 1977.
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