An Introduction to the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack

Clinton Walker introduces his addition to the 33 1/3 Oceania series: Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever. He told us more about where his obsession with the Bee Gees began and why Saturday Night Fever should be considered one of the great disco albums.

By Clinton Walker

It helps to be a bit obsessed. And I’ve been quite obsessed with the Bee Gees, their manager Robert Stigwood and their collective great opus Saturday Night Fever for a good little while now.

In 1990, when I was working at one of the rare actual full-time journalism jobs I ever had, a copy came into the office of the Bee Gees’ new 4CD box-set Tales of the Brothers Gibb. It was still the early days of CDs and box-sets, and I snapped it up. This was because a) nobody else was interested anyway, and b) I was, as an erstwhile teenage Bee Gees’ fan who’d really not paid them a lot of attention since, well, Saturday Night Fever – but was delighted at this opportunity to re-acquaint myself with them. And I fell in love all over again.

After Best of the Bee Gees (latterly suffixed Vol. 1) was one of the first albums I ever got, in about 1971, I played Tales of the Brothers Gibb to death on my new Sony disc-man, which I wired into my old analogue Marantz amp – and you could say that that was ground-zero where this book was born, or at least where a long, long-gestating seed was first planted.

In that context, maybe it’s not too unseemly to repeat here what one critique said of my 2000 book about Aboriginal country music, Buried Country: “Like many of Walker’s projects, Buried Country was at least a decade ahead of its time.” I only flirt with such self-aggrandisement because, uncannily, this book about Saturday Night Fever was first proposed to 33 1/3 exactly ten years ago! If it was rejected at that time, I took it as just another rejection among the many that most writers have to wear, and I got on with things…

One of which ideas was, further to the idea rejected, a book like a dual biography of the Bee Gees and their ‘gay dad’/Svengali figure Stigwood: A project that certainly ticked some boxes for me as having a) a very Australian base, and b) one that isn’t properly appreciated. In other words, an untold story from the annals of Australian music, which in a word is my bailiwick.

I chipped away on that project for years on and off – and it went through several convolutions of its own – but it wasn’t till 33 1/3 launched its Oceania sub-series that the idea returned for a book like this one. It was a blessing for me to find, now, such a receptive publisher, and I can’t thank enough the Oceania Series Editors, the Two Jons, Stratton and Dale.

And maybe, in a weird way, it was a blessing that this book took so long to come to fruition, because in that time I came to a much, much better understanding of the subject.

Saturday Night Fever was always beset by a disjunction – on one hand it was one of the most successful film musicals-cum-soundtrack albums of all time, and on the other hand was as reviled and loathed a pop phenomenon as any that’s ever been. To me, of course, this was just red rag to a bull. I mean, what writer wouldn’t revel in a story that doesn’t require you to beat-up tension and conflict?

I was always shocked – and appalled I have to say – that among serious and long-standing music people and friends I told about this interest of mine, so many said, ‘Oh yeah, I love the Bee Gees – but only the early stuff’. That is to say, not the disco stuff.

It’s true that when Fever fever exploded in 1978, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, at least to the extent it was possible to avoid its vast overweening spectre. It’s true that in the culture wars of the era, between punk and disco, I was on the other side of the divide, if only nominally. Nominally because, well, let me put it this way: When the rally-cry ‘Death to Disco’ came out, I hated it. Maybe the only thing I hated more was another rally-cry that came out only a little later – ‘Punk’s Not Dead’. Having grown up in Brisbane and suffered at the hands of the Queensland Police busting up the punk gigs we organised in suburban halls, I knew what the stench of book-burning smelled like, and that was exactly what ‘Death to Disco’ smelled like. Whereas ‘Punk’s Not Dead’ was just a vote for that horrible Doc Martens’n’mohawks idea of hardcore punk which I hated. For me, as much as I was a chronicler of Australian post-punk in the 1980s, I spent a lot of that time on the dancefloor, getting down to the sounds of lost-disco/post-punk/pre-EDM. And so when that Brothers Gibb box-set landed on my desk in 1990, I was very well-disposed to listening closely and deeply to that Fever-era Bee Gees and found that, well, it moved me as much if not more so than revisiting all their stunning, earlier-era ballads.

Disco, or at least Fever-era disco, got shot by both sides. The disco mystics and purists hated it for selling out the apparent noble soul/roots of the form as much as the ‘Death to Disco’ crowd hated it for more odious reasons. Even when disco enjoyed a reappraisal in the 90s with such great, great films as Boogie Nights and The Last Days of Disco, and some fine, fine books, Saturday Night Fever remained largely a bogeyman.

And (like Alice Echols – props!) I refused to accept that, because I couldn’t credit it, because the evidence – the music – doesn’t bear it up. The music is too good. And so that’s what this book is about, fighting a rearguard action.

I’ll say no more here now for sake of avoiding spoilers. If you want to see, meantime, some extras that still strongly suggest the story, see: https://www.clintonwalker.com.au/fever33extras.html. The only trigger-warning is for the feeble of mind who think ‘Death to Disco’ is still/was ever a reasonable position.