Music Arcades: Bee Gees: The Very Best of the Bee Gees

Now let's be clear: I don't think there's anything clever about listening to both Sun Blindness Music and the best of the Bee Gees. In this day and age, patting yourself on the back for your eclectic tastes is like like being proud of eating kiwi fruit and apples. But one of the things I was getting at with my questions at the end of the post the other day is something like this: do people who, on one day, listen to one chord being played for 42 minutes, want to listen to How Deep is Your Love the next?

I do. In fact, along with Eilen Jewell's Rain Roll In, I'd happily listen to it every day for the next week. Of course, I hated all the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever songs at the time. I was just graduating from Abba to The Boomtown Rats, and I had no idea where these singing hairpieces had come from, but I knew they were far too smooth and tailored. Even then, by the time of Tragedy I had to admit to a sneaking regard. How odd that song sounds now: the rare hybrid of disco's metronomic discipline and prog rock's outrageous drama, plus the bonus of that guitar sound that's unique to an 18-month period in 1978 and '79 (Kate Bush's first album has it, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds). To be honest, it's a bit crap — not a patch on How Deep is Your Love? — but interestingly crap nevertheless.

Nowadays it would be tempting just to do some download cherrypicking: How Deep is Your Love, Stayin' Alive and a couple of others to suit individual taste. But then you'd miss the broad sweep of the Bee Gees' career that 21 tracks give you. There's a thread over here with nominations for 'new' traditional songs, and New York Mining Disaster 1941 could almost count as a contender for mention there. Then there's the whole baroque pop context from the late sixties, the history of which I know very little about, but it has all the tropes of music collector geekery: the marginal back pages of mainstream success, the unreleased solo albums, and so on.