Here I lie in a lost and lonely part of town

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

20/05/79 : Spirits Having Flown - Bee Gees

Our third visit with the Bee Gees, they've got to be surfing the post SNF wave here, haven't they?

Yup, we start up with "Tragedy" (which features an awful lot more repetition than I remembered) and "Too Much Heaven", which were the only ones I recognised but the album doesn't venture too far from disco territory, although it does try some disco ballads at times. I don't love disco but can appreciate it when it's done well, which it certainly is here - but a whole album is just too much I'm afraid. But a whole album of bad disco would have been considerably worse, so I have to give them that. And you've got to love that hair, dontcha - but what's going on with that red blur?

We're at #10 in the charts this week on their fifteenth week of an impressive 33 week run, with it having spent its fifth and sixth weeks at #1 - people really were keen on disco back in the day, weren't they? The top five this week were ABBA, Art Garfunkel (really?), the Leo Sayer best-of, James Last and Supertramp with the highest new entry being Bob Dylan (#6). 

Wikipedia tells us this is their fifteenth album and came after their contributions to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, with "Tragedy", "Too Much Heaven" and "Love You Inside Out" all getting to #1 in the US, giving them six consecutive #1 singles in the US in a year, matching Bing Crosby, Elvis and The Beatles. But it went a bit wrong for them after this, with radio (particularly in the US) pretty much blanking them for the early 80s. Critically, this was received well enough except by Smash Hits (3/10) but commercially it all went a bit mad, getting to #1 in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the US, being #2 in the US year-end list and selling 20 million copies globally. OK - very mad!

discogs.com tells it's not quite so popular these days because you can pick a copy up for £1.50 but if you want a copy autographed by Barry Gibb it will set you back £150. This album is very much of its time and it's done well - yes, it's all a bit too much for me nowadays but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate how much they ruled things back then. 

27/05/79 - Enjoyable but forgettable

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