Living on the music so fast, borne on the wind, thinking it’s mine.” That’s it, the instant of delivery, the head rush, the euphoria, captured in a few words.į or one week in April 1964, the Top 5 singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 were all by the Beatles. “I can’t hide!”īarry clearly understood this dynamic and used classic Gibb linguistics to push the feeling on: as the song unexpectedly takes its dramatic turn, he sings “Here I am, waiting for this moment to last. “Here I am,” sang Barry at key moments, when the music swooped downwards, away from the light and air of the verse, and suddenly it was all self-awareness. This feeling is both exhilarating and borderline terrifying. You are more alive than you’ve ever been. You share the feeling with every other boy and girl in the place. It’s worth sweating through a 40-hour nine-to-five just for those fleeting, stolen hours when the music is everything. Night Fever is all love and abandon and desperation. Night Fever is a great example of their almost outsider take on lyric writing. They really weren’t doing themselves justice. The Gibbs would always be first in line to say their lyrics were “meaningless”. The emotion, as ever with the Bee Gees, is conveyed by the sound of the words, the feel of that sound. The lyric to Night Fever isn’t far behind the Kingsmen’s Louie Louise or the Skids’ Into the Valley in its murk and mystery – the odd line jumps out as a waymark, the rest lure you in to the Gibbs’ world there is a reason they never printed lyric sheets with their albums. The song, taken from the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, also transmitted a feeling of nervousness there was sweetness and there was fear. This was not the sound of too much air freshener.
The Bee Gees’ Night Fever was not that dense, liquid perfume that made you feel slightly sick. This version of Black Is Black was a fug, like the ground floor of a department store, a dozen different perfumes hitting you at the same time, far too busy, forced fun, nauseating.
Musicians who longed to be in James Last’s orchestra played with funkless fingers behind girls who cooed unconvincing come-ons. La Belle Epoque’s 1977 version added every imaginable bauble, it went “whooooo!!” on the beat. It had been perfect – pop as monolithic simplicity. This 1966 version had been a thing of slab density, a three-note organ riff with a Charlie Watts clone’s monotone drumming keeping it simple as can be, and an unreal human voice, half-crow, telling the world “black is black, I want my baby back.” It sounded like the Stones fed through a telex precursor of Google Translate. Originally it had been a hit for another act with a tempting European name, Los Bravos. On the chart in 1977 was La Belle Epoque’s version of the German/Spanish 60s hit Black Is Black. There were reasons people hated it, and they weren’t all homophobic or racist. D isco could be a heavy, unctuous perfume.
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