Two facts to start with - John Travolta was a big star in 1978 and I was a big fan. Most people were really - with two major films cleaning up in the cinemas and his profile going supernova, Travolta and his grin exuded an air of easy cool that I could only aspire. I'll go into my love of 'Grease' in the next post but one, but suffice it to say that Saturday Night Fever was far more a piece of forbidden fruit to me than that film; Grease was racy enough, but Saturday Night Fever came with an X certificate which put it way out of my reach. Hence, all my eggs of interest marked 'Travolta' were placed firmly in the basket marked Grease; Saturday Night Fever and everything surrounding it barely caused a blip on my radar. Apart from the music, which was pretty inescapable in 1978. Inescapable enough to puzzle me anyway as to what scenes of X rated raunch and violence could be soundtracked by those squealing, pants too tight vocals; if Kate Bush's voice was a prime target for lazy mickey taking in the seventies, then the Bee Gees were the absolute bullseye. The brothers had always sung falsetto true, but their work on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack ramped it up to a level that was borderline parody, and along with their open shirt/gold medallion look they managed to define not only what the average 'disco man' should aspire to when he scrubbed up on the weekend, but also sealed an image of themselves in aspic that came to define not only all their work that was to come, but also everything that had already been. Listen to 'New York Mining Disaster 1941' or 'Massachusetts' now and you still picture the trio singing them in their disco get up on a multicoloured dancefloor.
Which is ironic in one way, but fair enough in another; the Bee Gees in 1978 were no musical virgins. Already songwriters of note with an impressive back catalogue of hits written for themselves and other people, in turning to disco they weren't about to abandon their craft to adopt the pure dance trance of Giorgio Moroder et al. Rather, disco would come to them. In fact, it already had - they had already more than dipped their toes in the water with 'Jive Talking' in 1975, which was ahead of the game as it also appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The brace of songs they wrote following it could have been played straight in their own right, only now they were presented dressed up in the sheen of genre bells and whistles. And while that may make it all sound like a cynical cash-in, the end result managed to breathe life into a genre that was dying through it's own clichéd inertia amid a blizzard of generic recordings that sounded like the backing to some Philly soul B side run through a beat box and stretched till the elastic snapped.
'Night Fever' is a good example as any of the Bee Gees disco makeover. Sure there's the usual slick strings of disco drama, but also some timely electronic swells and throbs that punctuate the predictability with a wonderfully low key wah wah guitar chattering away in the background the whole time that keeps the groove on a slow drip like molasses from a can. And underneath beats a human heart that's simply "Prayin' for this moment to last, livin' on the music so fine" - in other words, it's 'Dancing Queen' as told from the first person instead of a bystander watching.
On that front, 'Night Fever' is a more direct and immediate song, but one that's narrower in its appeal and more difficult for non genre fans to admire. I'll be the first to admit it took an awful long time for me to overcome my initial prejudices with the whole Saturday Night Fever caboodle that had set hard as concrete since my first exposure all those years ago. And while I still don't have an awful lot of time for the film, I'm now happy enough to acknowledge a rush of hedonistic joy created by artists at the top of their game when I hear it, moreso now that the passing of time has barely taken anything away from it; 'Night Fever' sounds far less dated than the Bee Gee's last UK number one 'You Win Again' and it will retain an urgency and relevance for as long as people continue to live to cut loose at the weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment