Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarizing reaction? Australian writer Clinton Walker attempts to answer that question and finds that, among other things, a certain seemingly unlikely Australianness is part of the reason. Fever was a supernova for disco, for the Bee Gees, for the domineering Robert Stigwood, producer of the film and is its true auteur, and for the entire record business. This book traces all the interdependent convolutions that fed into the film and its music - not least the Australian roots that Stigwood and Gibb brothers shared, which gave them an Otherness and almost gormless, shape-shifting self-determination - and it finds that sometimes great art can be made by a committee ... that sometimes, five songs are enough to change the world.>

List of contents

Introduction: Brisbane, Me and the Bee Gees - and Robert Stigwood
1. Disco Opera
2. The Gumnut Mafia, Rocker Operas & the New Film Musical
3. Miami Nice
4. Hollywood Now
5. Supernova
6. Death to Disco, Death to Record Business, Kill the Bee Gees
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the author

Clinton Walker is a Sydney-based Australian writer who since the early 1980s has published eleven books including Deadly Woman Blues(2018), Suburban Songbook(2021), and Highway to Hell(2023).

Product details

• Authors: Clinton Walker
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.09.2024
• EAN: 9798765109694
• ISBN: 9798765109694
• No. of pages: 152
• Dimensions: 126 mm x 206 mm x 14 mm
• Series: 33 1/3 Oceania
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Miscellaneous; Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, Australia, Musicals, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, MUSIC / Printed Music / Musicals, Film & TV, Films, cinema, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Music of film and stage