1979 Bee Gees: Tragedy

It's a fair question I suppose - how do you follow up a runaway, multi million success like the 'Saturday Night Fever' soundtrack? To take the example of the other act tasked with following up a widely popular album in 1979 - all the world wanted from Fleetwood Mac was 'Rumours Part 2', but in 'Tusk', Lindsey Buckingham gave them an album that was hell-bent on providing anything but.

With 'Tragedy' (and in the 'Spirits Having Flown' album), the Bee Gees weren't about to throw the baby out with the bath water and it ploughs the same furrow they ploughed at the discos in 1978, only moreso. A hell of a lot moreso in fact. The playful lightness of touch on the 'Saturday Night Fever' songs is gone, replaced with a dense carpet bomb of sound that paints the break-up of a relationship as scene from the book of Revelation. "Here at night in a lost and lonely part of town, held in time in a wad of tears I slowly drown" - it's a heavy duty palette of angst spread thick by those falsetto vocals that no longer swoop around the melody like birds in flight but squeal like animals in pain. "It's hard to bear, with no-one to love you you're going nowhere" - there's a desperation there, but it's more the desperation of the Gibbs trying to convince their audience that the scale of this 'tragedy' is worthy of the Wagnerian bombast.

But in fact it isn't. It's too much and too self indulgent. I like 'Tragedy', like it a lot even, but I can't honestly say it's a truly enjoyable listening. I can do overwrought angst as much as the next man, but whenever I'm in the mood for a bit of self indulgent misery there are other artists on whose door I'll knock long before I arrive at the Bee Gees. For a pop cum disco track it's too long, too dense and too serious; there's nothing ironic or playful going on here, and while there's undoubtedly a fine song in there amongst the debris, the real irony is that it took the no nonsense pop assault of Steps to sift it out. As performed by the Bee Gee's, it's the sound Nero should have produced on his fiddle as Rome burned around him.