Though the Bee Gees are actually established as some of the well-liked music acts ever, with estimated gross sales of greater than 200 million information worldwide, their disco hits got here at a time when the band was struggling. “You’ve got to remember, we were fairly dead in the water at that point,” Barry Gibb, the eldest sibling, admitted in 2013. “The Bee Gees’ sound was basically tired. We needed something new. We hadn’t had a hit record in about three years.”
The band’s supervisor Robert Stigwood purchased the movie rights to {a magazine} article entitled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” and employed John Travolta to star in a Hollywood adaptation. “The Bee Gees weren’t even involved in the movie in the beginning,” mentioned Travolta as soon as. “I was dancing to Stevie Wonder in rehearsals.”
When Stigwood bumped into issues utilizing Marvel’s music, he rang the Bee Gees, then residing on the Isle of Man for tax causes, and requested them to provide you with songs for the film, sending them a tough movie script. They by no means acquired spherical to studying the early screenplay, nevertheless, as a result of they instantly headed for the Chateau D’Heuroville studio, in France, to combine a dwell album known as Right here at Final… Bee Gees… Dwell, which they’d recorded in Los Angeles simply earlier than Christmas.
Interested by the tough temporary from Stigwood to provide you with songs “about this guy who works in a paint store and who goes out on Saturday night,” the group used a free weekend to write down 5 extraordinary new songs: “Night Fever,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “More Than a Woman,” “How Deep Is Your love,” and “If I Can’t Have You.” “These songs were gold dust. I can’t think of any other composers you could have asked that of and had them come back with that, having not read the script,” Invoice Oakes, the producer who received a Grammy for the soundtrack to the movie, mentioned within the 2020 documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Damaged Coronary heart.
“More Than a Woman,” which was co-written by all three brothers, was one of many movie’s romantic highlights, offering a transferring musical background to a dance between Travolta and his love curiosity, because the band’s hovering emotional lyrics – “Here in your arms I found my paradise/My only chance for happiness/And if I lose you now I think I would die” – play within the background.
The recording
After the preliminary discussions, Stigwood and Oakes flew to France to take heed to demo variations of the 5 songs. The Bee Gees began recording in February 1977 at Chateau D’Heuroville, with Albhy Galuten performing as co-producer. Barry Gibb and Galuten labored painstakingly on the drum a part of “More Than a Woman,” finally utilizing the identical loop on the track that they’d devised for “Night Fever.”
When Oaks arrived in France, he was shocked on the state of the recording studio. “Elton John had done his album Honky Château there. I thought, ‘Well, how bad can it be?’ When I got there, I was appalled, it looked like a garage.” Nevertheless, when he and Stigwood heard the tough demos, with the Gibb brothers recorded collectively utilizing only one mic, they had been delighted. “They flipped out and said these will be great, even though we still had no real concept of the movie,” mentioned Barry Gibb.
The Bee Gees honed their model of “Night Fever” at Criterion Studios in Miami, in April, by which era it had been determined to provide “If I Can’t Have You” to Yvonne Elliman. “More Than a Woman” had additionally been given to an R&B/funk group known as Tavares, so the Bee Gees model was left unfinished. The movie studio then determined that each variations of “More Than a Woman” would seem on the soundtrack album so, in September 1977, the Bee Gees rapidly put the ending touches on their track at Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles, earlier than mixing it.
In that closing model, the Bee Gees underpinned their beautiful falsetto harmonies with a gradual disco groove from Maurice Gibb (on bass guitar), Barry Gibb and Alan Kendall (guitars), Dennis Bryon (drums), Blue Weaver (keyboards), and Joe Lala (percussion). Additionally they added strings, courtesy of preparations from Wade Marcus.
The reception
The soundtrack album to Saturday Evening Fever was launched on November 15, 1977, and rapidly turned one of many best-selling albums in historical past, with greater than 40 million copies of the double album offered worldwide. It received the Grammy for Album of the 12 months and, in 2013, was added to the Library of Congress’s Nationwide Recording Registry.
Though the only to “More Than a Woman” was by no means launched within the UK or the USA, it was issued in Italy. The track has stayed well-liked within the digital period, with greater than 17 million streams within the UK alone by early 2021. The track, which was a staple of the group’s dwell units till Maurice Gibbs’s loss of life in 2003, was additionally coated by one other all-male trio, boy band 911, who took it to Quantity 2 within the charts in 1998.
Though “More Than a Woman” has its personal particular place within the historical past of disco, for Maurice Gibb it was all the time only a “beautiful ballad” that struck a chord with the general public. ““More Than a Woman” was a track we wrote with unimaginable outcomes,” he mentioned. “Tavares had a big hit with it. It was one of the songs that made Saturday Night Fever such a success, and then the whole world was dancing.”
For extra Bee Gees, try our record of the most effective Bee Gees track ever.
