You Should Be Dancing

I have owned the SNF album as LP, cassette, CD and mp3, and it is a treasure trove of teenage memories for me. Played it at sooooo many parties, where we used coloured paper on bulbs set off by a tubelight choke to recreate disco lights….no? it was just me and my weird friends then???    But I’m sure you went to parties where you played ‘You Should Be Dancing’ (copying Travolta’s king of the dance floor dance!), Night Fever’ (remember the line dancing Hustle?), ‘Stayin’ Alive’ (how the hell do you look cool strutting down the pavement carrying a can of paint?!!).

The Bee Gees were never meant to be a part of SNF. Yes, I know it’s crazy talk but really, really! They had no association with the movie during its scripting and filming. The movie was already in the cans when the producer, Robert Stigwood, who was also the manager of the Bee Gees, reached out to them and asked, pretty please, would they write some songs for this little indie movie he was producing based on a newspaper article called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”.  The Bee Gees were in France working on a new album and said they were too busy! So, Stigwood flew to France where they were working. And, over a single weekend, without seeing the movie or really reading the script, the Bee Gees wrote all these fantastic tunes and also offered a few songs they had released a couple of years ago – and became disco supernovas!! Doston, isko kahten hain kismet….So, if the Bee Gees weren’t even in the picture, who the hell was Travolta dancing to during the shooting – it was Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs!!!

By the time SNF came out Disco was over in the US. They costume dept. had to go to old-clothes stores to find the white suit that Travolta wore in the movie! But, this movie turned it all around and for a glorious year, all of us, along with literally the entire world, fell in love with Disco again. SNF’s soundtrack is the 2nd largest selling soundtrack, EVER. There are so many fantastic songs in addition to the ones I’ve already listed – “How Deep Is Your Love” “More Than A Woman”, “If I can’t Have You” ( by Yvonne Elliman – remember her? she sang backup vocals for Eric Clapton on ‘I Shot The Sheriff’).

 I’m going to add a bunch of videos here…enjoy!!  Tonight is Saturday Night after all !!

Stayin’ Alive

The strut on the guy – he makes it cool to walk with a can of paint! The walk and those shoes are etched in our memories. Interestingly there are two cameos in this opening sequence of the movie – the girl at the pizza parlour asking “Tony, two or three ?” is Travolta’s sister. And the old lady at the end who is waiting for her paint can, is his mother.

This is #183 on Rolling Stones’ 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Night Fever

This was the song that the Bee Gees felt captured the movie it definitely deserved to be the title track of the entire soundtrack. It was #1 all around the world – in fact At one point, this was #1 and Stayin’ Alive was #2 on the Billboard charts.

Come on, the right lyric has to be “you come to me on a submarine” and not “you come on a summer breeze”. I mean the song is called ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ – what the hell does that have to do with a “summer breeze”?

Anyway, this is # 375 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

More Than A Woman

The dancing on this is interesting…you wouldn’t catch any guy doing these steps in real life. By the way the ‘Tango Hustle’ – the dance to on this song –  isn’t really a proper dance. As it happened, that day the choreographer didn’t show up on set. So, Travolta and Karen Gorney made up some steps on the spot and the director recorded them!