The Bee Gees had first come to prominence in 1967 when manager Robert Stigwood, who’d had success overseeing Eric Clapton’s career, positioned the siblings as the next Beatles. “What happened to them was unprecedented in popular music.” “Nobody wanted to touch them,” said Simon Spence, whose new book “ Staying Alive: The Disco Inferno of the Bee Gees” (Jawbone Press) chronicles the group’s meteoric rise and spectacular fall. They hadn’t been shot, but they were as good as dead. The disco craze that had ruled the late ’70s had come to a screeching halt, and the Bee Gees, lords of the airwaves for two years, found themselves banned from the country’s most influential radio stations. Six months later, as the tour was winding down, nobody was laughing. And now the band was playing 60,000-seat arenas across America.ĭisco was king, and the Bee Gees - brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, clad in white suits and flashing gold chains - were its ambassadors.Īt the start of the tour, Maurice got hold of a T-shirt that made everyone backstage laugh.
The year before, it spent 24 weeks at No. Months before, their “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, featuring songs written and/or performed by the Australian trio, had won a Grammy for album of the year. In June 1979, the Bee Gees were on top of the world.
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