Bee Gees – ALTERNATIVE SPIRITS CD

Spirits Having Flown was the fifteenth album by the Bee Gees, released on 5 February 1979, by RSO Records. It was the group’s first album after their collaboration on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The album’s first three tracks were released as singles and all reached No. 1 in the US, giving the Bee Gees an unbroken run of six US chart-toppers in a one-year period and equalling a feat shared by Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. The album’s title track was also released as a single in the UK and other European countries. It was the first Bee Gees album to make the UK top 40 in ten years (not counting Saturday Night Fever), as well as being their first and only UK No. 1 album. Spirits Having Flown marked the end of the band’s most successful era, prior to a severe downturn in the early 1980s when they were subject to a near-total radio blackout (particularly in America).The Gibb brothers began recording Spirits… in March 1978, co-producer Albhy Galuten recalls the album as being created primarily by Barry Gibb, Karl Richardson (producer and engineer) and himself, putting in long days and nights at Criteria Studios. In the recording phase, Robin and Maurice now mainly played the role of backing and harmony vocalists, and even in that capacity Barry did many of the vocal dubs himself as he went over and over the recorded work. The Bee Gees had been effectively typecast as a disco group after Saturday Night Fever, and in a 1978 interview Barry remarked “People think we’re just about disco now. Of course that’s not true. If you look at the SNF soundtrack, there’s some dance music, but we also have ballads like ‘More Than a Woman’.”