Nick Hoad

Saturday Night Fever is a collection of 70s disco, all featured in the movie of the same name. Despite featuring on the album cover along with a very awkwardly posed John Travolta (it’s so weird, he looks like a Ken doll that was abandoned halfway through playtime), and being listed as the sole artist on the poster, only 6 of the album’s 17 tracks are actually by the Bee Gees, 8 if you count If I Can’t Have You, performed by Yvonne Elliman and the alternate version of More Than A Woman performed by Tavares.

It probably says something about my age that, apart from a few really ubiquitous ones, the thing I associate a lot of these songs with is TV shows from the 00s. I can imagine many of them accompanying footage of Jeremy Clarkson rolling up in an old Lamborghini which would go on to break down at least three times while Hammond and May laugh mockingly from their own equally unreliable relics.

The multitude of different artists is a great thing; there are only so many different ways a single artist can interpret a genre like disco. After the first five tracks, it seemed as though the Bee Gees were about to run out of ideas. At that point, Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven came along to revitalise things. It’s a real highlight, a far cry from the falsetto wails which opened it. The middle of the album is its best section, containing the aforementioned, more energetic and outgoing version of More Than A Woman, another fiery re-interpretation of a classical piece: Night On Disco Mountain, and the wonderfully silly Open Sesame.

A couple of tracks are somewhat overlong, especially for a genre in which the tracks don’t tend to change much across their runtime. Calypso Breakdown is 7:49 of absolutely relentless cowbells and agogos, which starts to drag long before it fades into silence. But it turned out I didn’t know when I was well off, as the full-length version of Disco Inferno is nearly eleven minutes long. There are some people who decry modern pop music as being too repetitive; I challenge them to listen to all eleven interminable minutes of Disco Inferno without wanting to switch it off by the end. In fairness, the mundanity was leavened slightly around halfway through when the strained rasp of Jimmy Ellis reassured me that the song was about a metaphorical inferno and The Trammps were not, in fact, encouraging arson. It didn’t help that Disco Inferno is another one of those tracks that shows up all the time on TV shows and adverts, so it felt as though I’d heard it approximately five hundred thousand times before. Nor did it help that it was the final track of the album so I’d already been listening to over an hour of disco and was about ready for something else.

The last few tracks aside, Saturday Night Fever was largely a good time. It gets major points for being the first album to feature at least one track that will probably earn a place in my regular Spotify playlists. Despite my relentless roasting of Disco Inferno, I’m trying not to let the fact that it was the last song spoil my memories of that excellent middle section. And it really is some good stuff, even though I haven’t written much about it; it’s just a bit more fun to be scathing in something like this. The reworkings of classical pieces fizz with energy, and Kool & The Gang give Open Sesame enough of a wink and a smile to stop it from being too ridiculous. I think, regardless of what I expected going in, this is my favourite album on the list so far.

Shame about the ending though.

Favourite Tracks: Night On Disco Mountain and Open Sesame

Next Time: Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue