The Bee Gees

One Night Only

How do they keep doing it!?!

Review Score:

(10/10)
I have a copy of an album, bought in about 1973, entitled The Bee Gees' Greatest Hits. The album is full of truly great songs like Massachusetts and New York Mining Disaster 1941. I have a later compilation from about 1980 which is also entitled The Bee Gees' Greatest Hits, which includes 'the disco stuff' (although in fairness that description does not do it justice) and most of the earlier compilation. So what do they do in the late 1990s, when you would probably need a double or even triple album to fit in all the classic tracks? Simple., they release a live album. This has so many advantages. Firstly they can record shortened versions of well-known hits, even putting some together in medleys so fans don't feel short-changed. They can also do their own versions of hits they wrote and produced for others, such as Islands In The Stream for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, and Heartbreaker for Dionne Warwick. The other songs are all pretty faithful to the original recordings, no mean feat when you are covering a thirty year career with one night's musicians. So although there is the live feel, with announcements and applause, this album is a worthy retrospective of this dazzling career, perhaps more original than yet another hits collection, but who is to say it won't need revising in another ten years when the Bee Gees have clocked up their sixth U.K. Number one?

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