By Jason Shawhan
It has been a difficult week for devotees of the disco.
With the passing of Robin Gibb this week after extended complications from cancer, you could say that there’s a lot less light shining down on dancefloors everywhere. That’s not to say that Gibb, along with his brothers Barry and Maurice, were exclusively dance/disco artists. They had a strong career going as singer/songwriters before disco could introduce its octave bassline and 4/4 kick-snare pattern to one another. But when impresario Robert Stigwood urged the brothers to try some disco on for size, their popularity exploded. You could hear it in “Nights on Broadway,” made before Saturday Night Fever made the Gibbs the most famous group on the planet. It was the sound of the 70s, itching to get out of its pants and into the pleasure centers of all listeners.
And then with Saturday Night Fever, everything changed. Movie studios suddenly understood the kind of money a proper tie-in album could mean. Pop and rock artists of all stripes suddenly decided to take a disco strut and see what happened. All over the world, everyone thought ‘this feels like it could be fun… Can I do this?’ And the answer was, if disco can take one of the great underrated singer-songwriter combos in the world and make them the wispy chest hair superstars they’ve always deserved to be, then what couldn’t disco do for you…
Never beholden to any particular genre, the brothers took their success and diversified, writing songs for countless other artists and making them huge. They worked in film, television, (eventually) the stage, and every medium they could help spread their majestic sound. The disco backlash hurt the brothers’ sales in the US under their own name, but their productions and collaborations with other artists never faded.
In 1987, they released “You Win Again,” a song that rightfully kicked ass all over the rest of the world, but barely even got a release in the U.S. Time would eventually see the brothers vindicated, with their dance-rock hits One, Paying The Price of Love, and Alone all finding U.S. success many decades down the road from their original emergence into the world of music. And they never went away, remaining a dynamic force in music up until the death of Maurice Gibb in 2003.
We pay tribute to Robin Gibb with a look back at his music, as performer composer, producer, and icon.
Image Courtesy of www.RobinGibb.com