The reason behind the Bee Gees’ fall from grace revealed
It’s hard to think back on the ‘70s without thinking of the Bee Gees. The Australian trio of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb enjoyed a string of worldwide number-ones for years, but by the time the ‘80s came around, their spectacular success had well and truly faded.
Now, in the new tell-all book Staying Alive: The Disco Inferno of the Bee Gees by Simon Spence, the reason behind their decline has finally been revealed.
In 1979, a year after their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack racked up a staggering 24 weeks at number one on the US charts, the Bee Gees were at their peak. Playing to crowds of 60,000 across America at the height of the disco craze, there was no stopping the Gibb brothers.
Yet mere months later, that’s exactly what happened. Disco was dead, and to the US’s most popular radio stations, so were the Bee Gees. “Nobody wanted to touch them,” writes Spence. “What happened to them was unprecedented in popular music.”
After the success of Saturday Night Fever, by 1978, 200 radio stations around the US were devoted to disco – something that didn’t sit right with many, particularly white men between the ages of 18 and 24. This demographic, Spence believes, loved rock and therefore “felt excluded, even threatened, by the disco scene. The phrase ‘disco sucks’ was a clear pejorative term.”
By 1980, Billboard reported that the stations which had once played disco exclusively had virtually banned it. To Barry, the backlash seemed to come out of nowhere. “It was almost like people were angry with us and it was more interesting to make fun of us than to actually try and understand or appreciate what we had done.”
According to Robin, however, the reason was much simpler. “The public had OD’d on us.”
“The exhaustion of being the Bee Gees set in, and we couldn’t see what tomorrow was going to bring,” Barry agreed.
Barry, now 71, is the only remaining Bee Gee. Despite once saying of “Stayin’ Alive” that he wanted to “dress it in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire,” these days, he’s made peace with his demons. Two months ago, he even performed all the Saturday Night Fever songs at the UK’s Glastonbury Festival – and the crowd loved it.
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