(Credits: Far Out / Exclusive Media Group)
Thu 2 October 2025 3:00, UK
The film Saturday Night Fever has tricked the modern world into thinking that two things are true. Dancing like John Travolta and singing like The Bee Gees is easy.
In the cinematic celebration of disco, the hip-thrusting actor moved across the technicoloured dancefloor with the sort of ease your average weekend club dweller could only dream of. And the astonishingly difficult three-part falsetto of The Bee Gees was the high-pitched engine behind this trendy new wave, fooling people into thinking they could sing along with relative ease.
Because let’s not forget, in 1978, upon the release of this film and the burgeoning interest of disco that it coincided with, singalong music fans were more accustomed to the gruff realms of traditional rock and roll. Sure, Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne could soar with the best of them, but the palette in which it was presented was more conventionally suited to the masculine voice. But disco changed all of that, for better or worse.
Rock fans pushed back against it, defending what they thought was their right to protect “proper music” and tried to avert people’s attention back to the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. You could say they won, giving way to a further three decades of rock supremacy, later led by the likes of Dave Grohl.
But Grohl rather ironically arranged heavy rock songs with disco inspired sensibilities, quietly highlighting the ridiculousness of music’s reverse snobbery. While he famously labelled his drum introduction to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as a rip off of The Gap Band, he later decided to pay homage to the flared trousered icons of the late 1970s, when performing on the BBC with Jo Whiley.
Grohl said, “We’ve been going down to our studio every day and filming things and recording things, and this one day we had our list of things we were supposed to do, and it said, ‘Record a cover song for Jo.’ And while we were having this conversation, somebody said, ‘Hey, have you seen that Bee Gees documentary?’ And I was like the last person on earth — the only person that hadn’t seen it! So I was, like, ‘Why don’t we just do a Bee Gees song?’ And someone was just, like, ‘Okay, how do you wanna do it?!’ And I said: ‘Well, let’s do it like the Bee Gees.’”
It was an unfiltered celebration of disco by a band that many rock fans would be keen to label one of their own. But while they might not have been pleased with the song choice, they may have found Grohl’s experience of recording the song as relatively easy, as somewhat of a consolation and proof that disco is, in fact, an inferior genre.
He continued: “We started recording the instrumental track, and then I thought, ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna go out and sing it’ and let me tell you, I have never, ever in my life sung like that, but it was the easiest song I have ever sung in my entire life! I sang the song, and it was like six minutes and I was done. I should have been singing like this for the last 25 years!”
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