SOUNDTRACK FROM SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER |
As part of the great 33 1/3 series of little books about big albums, Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever is my twelfth book, and I’m chuffed to have a title in this esteemed series and I’m chuffed to get out at least this small part of a larger story – that of Robert Stigwood – that I’ve been fascinated-with to the point of obsessed-by for a fair little while.
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) it was going begging because 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. More than thirty years ago! In that context, maybe it’s not too unseemly to repeat here what one critique posted elsewhere on this site 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. And part of that understanding is that it is very much an Australian story, of the so-called gumnut mafia, which is why it makes sense as part of 33 1/3’s Oceania sub-series, which is only now getting off the ground with a few great titles that you can see here at www.bloomsbury.com/au/series/33-13-oceania/ 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 in the realtime 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 moreso 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. For me, as someone who loves a good bit of symmetry, I like it all the more because it’s coming a certain full circle, for a writer who started out as a nominal punk nearly fifty years ago and now near the end of my career is obsessing about disco… And the way I like to look at is that this little book is just the radio-edit single lifted off the full-length album still in the works on the larger, epic story of Robert Stigwood… 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 Fever.33.extras You can read a form Q&A interview with me at the 33 1/3 blogsite here at 333sound.com/33-1-3-author-qa-a-closer-look-at-the-soundtrack-from-saturday-night-fever/ The only trigger-warning is for the feeble of mind who think ‘Death to Disco’ is still/was ever a reasonable position. |