Staying Alive , livre ebook

Jawbone Press - Simon Spence

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69 pages

English

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‘We didn’t know what the film was about. We didn’t know there was a conflict of image that could perhaps hurt us later on. It sort of grew, blew out of proportion.’ BARRY GIBB

In the late 70s, The Bee Gees spectacularly revived their career and, with their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, became the biggest disco group in the world. But when the disco boom crashed, they went from icons to punch lines overnight. The band was inescapably frozen in time, all long, flowing manes, big teeth, falsettos, medallions, hairy chests, and skin-tight satin trousers, one finger forever pointing in the air.

The Bee Gees would spend the next forty years trying to convince people there was more to them, growing ever more resentful of their gigantic disco success. ‘We’d like to dress “Stayin’ Alive” up in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire,’ they said.

Staying Alive finally lifts that millstone from around their necks by joyfully reappraising and celebrating their iconic disco era. Taking the reader deep into the excesses of the most hedonistic of music scenes, it tells of how three brothers from Manchester transformed themselves into the funkiest white group ever and made the world dance. No longer a guilty pleasure but a national treasure.

Sujets

Musique

Histoire de la musique

Music

Musician

Individual Composer

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Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911036289
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

Also by Simon Spence

The Stone Roses: War And Peace
When The Screaming Stops: The Dark History Of The Bay City Rollers
Happy Mondays: Excess All Areas
Still Breathing: True Adventures Of The Donnelly Brothers (with Anthony and Christopher Donnelly)
Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making Of Depeche Mode
Mr Big: Don Arden (interviews and research)
Immediate Records
Stoned: Andrew Loog Oldham (interviews and research)
2Stoned: Andrew Loog Oldham (interviews and research)

A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2017
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court
20–22 Union Road
London SW4 6JP
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Text copyright © Simon Spence. Volume copyright © 2017 Outline Press Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

To the Barnsley Boys Club

CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: NIK COHN
CHAPTER ONE: CHICKEN IN A BASKET
CHAPTER TWO: MIDDLE-AGED BLONDE MAN
CHAPTER THREE: HEALTHY SHADE OF BROWN
CHAPTER FOUR: SMOKE AND MIRRORS
CHAPTER FIVE: SOUNDTRACK TO THE 70S
CHAPTER SIX: THE DEATH OF DISCO
AFTERWORD: AFTERMATH
PLATE SECTION
NOTES AND SOURCES

We’d like to dress ‘Stayin’ Alive’ up in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire. Barry Gibb
There’s never been a more perfect marriage of movie and music. Robert Stigwood
PROLOGUE
NIK COHN
From the start I just felt that disco was the most exciting development in 70s pop music. Nik Cohn
It’s all your bloody fault, isn’t it? Barry Gibb to Nik Cohn
He did not want to talk about it ‘just now’. And he did not want his famous June 1976 magazine article reproduced here, as a prologue to this book. The ‘project’, Nik Cohn said, was not for him. He recalled our former meetings and said he had enjoyed them, but felt ‘the subject’ had long since been ‘flogged to death—certainly for myself’.
The New York Times dubbed Cohn’s celebrated article ‘the monster’, and all 8,500 words of it can be read on a number of free-to-access websites, not least the electronic version of New York magazine, where it was originally published as a cover feature under the title ‘Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night’. Look hard enough on the internet and you can find a facsimile of the actual magazine, reproduced page by page. The sophisticated layout and the vivid James McMullan paintings that accompany Cohn’s text are a reminder of the American magazine’s then pre-eminent position among its rivals with a reputation as a high-class, cutting-edge cultural beacon. McMullan’s paintings of disco club action take up five pages of the fourteen given over to the story, including the entire cover, and look much like a primitive storyboard for the movie that developed out of the article. Cohn’s story, sold as a reportage piece ostensibly about disco culture but tightly focused on the lives of a gang of unknown teenage characters and one particular nightclub in a run-down Italian American neighbourhood of New York, Brooklyn, was, of course, the spark for the film Saturday Night Fever , the movie that sent The Bee Gees, John Travolta, impresario Robert Stigwood, and, indeed, Cohn himself into the stratosphere.
Cohn told me he still owned the rights to the article. He had written it when he was just thirty.
Forty years on, despite him having several best-selling books to his name, it remains his most famous work. ‘In America I have always, and will always be, the guy that did Saturday Night Fever ,’ he said in 2013. ‘I’ll always be known for that.’ The rest of his work, Cohn added, was not even ‘a wart on the fanny of Saturday Night Fever ’.
Although the movie was celebrated for its authentic representation of the period and the working-class youth culture on which it was based, for Cohn, an Irish man who had spent the best part of the past decade around Soho in London, the night-time rituals of backwater Brooklyn were something of a mystery. He had, in fact, only been resident in New York a few months when he wrote the article. In that time he’d rarely left Manhattan, the trendy centre of the city where New York magazine was based. ‘Brooklyn was a foreign country to most New York magazine editors,’ Cohn said.
Cohn had arrived in America with a reputation as one of the UK’s best, most precocious and perceptive writers on pop culture. And anyone who had followed his work closely would have recognised in ‘Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night’ some of his familiar tropes: the overheated style of the narrative, the almost fantastical character traits of its key characters, and, above all, his breakneck commitment to the subject. They would also have wondered—considering he was by then author of a handful of hyperbolic novels that revelled in exaggerating aspects of pop culture, such as I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo and Arfur Teenage Pinball Queen —how much in the article was real and how much Cohn had imagined to complete his beautifully sculpted mini opera of blue-collar disco life.
Cohn, however, was not widely known for his fiction, even less so in America. His cultural cache was attached to his journalism, his role in creating the idea for Tommy and ‘Pinball Wizard’ for The Who, and two celebrated music books. The first, about 50s and 60s pop and rock’n’roll icons, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom , was published in 1969. It had been ahead of its time in appraising and venerating the culture of pop and rock music and its associated acts, and it had done so in a blur of attitude with prose as fast-paced and overblown, raw and alive, as the records it described. Even now, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom is still considered one of the greatest music books ever written, regularly featuring in Top 10 lists, often at #1.
It was this book, above all, that had established Cohn as the Elvis Presley of British music journalism, a real pioneer and a heavyweight, seminal, almost mythical figure. Awopbopaloobop was infamously written in a Kerouac-style stream of thought, fuelled by drink and drugs, loud music and demons, in just a few weeks. Throughout much of the 60s Cohn had been untouchable in his field, his journalism never far from controversy. In 1968, for instance, he’d famously savaged The Beatles’ White Album in the New York Times , calling it ‘boring almost beyond belief’.
All along, his chief concern was with weaving his own self into pop mythology. He was obsessive about it, and he created for himself a brilliant image. ‘For a while, back in the 60s, he was “the kid of the moment”, to use a Lillian Hellman Phrase,’ writes the author Gordon Burn. Cohn was a rebel, snotty and cocksure, an upstart in the literary world and a youthful irritant in the world of newspapers and magazines. He was part of the new pop aristocracy, one of the in-crowd in London’s swinging set, among those profiled, alongside figures such as Mary Quant, Twiggy, and David Bailey, in Jonathan Aitken’s notorious 1967 Young Meteors book. The Observer , for which Cohn wrote regularly, described him as a ‘wise guy, whizz-kid, hustler’.
Looking back, for a 2011 newspaper profile, Cohn was wonderfully self-coruscating, describing his younger self as more of an ‘insufferable, arrogant little twit’. Under close scrutiny, the image fell apart. His background was bourgeois, privileged, and he’d been privately educated. His father was the historian Norman Cohn, author of cult classic The Pursuit Of The Millennium , and his mother was a Russian writer who had been part of the Dadaist art scene.
‘I have always been fascinated by the self-inventors,’ he told me when I interviewed him in the late 90s for Stoned and 2Stoned , Andrew Loog Oldham’s two volumes of autobiography. It was easy to see why. Cohn had a tremendous admiration for the outrageous teenage Rolling Stones manager Loog Oldham, but of all the 60s bands he was most closely associated with The Who, particularly their managers, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert. ‘I never hung out that much with the bands,’ he told me. ‘I found the managers to be more interesting because they were more articulate.’
Inexplicably, during the 60s, Cohn, also developed a deep-seated, long-lasting admiration for self-aggrandising American solo singer P.J. Proby, best recalled for his trouser-splitting outrages onstage. It was Proby that provided the inspiration for I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo , Cohn’s second novel, published in 1967 when he was just twenty-one. In it, in a sign of things to come, the line between fact and fiction is outrageously smeared. The book, which details the rise and fall of a mythic rock star transmogrified into a cult type religious leader, is best recalled for part-stimulating David Bowie to create his Ziggy Stardust character.
Cohn’s long-forgotten first novel, Market , a collection of vignettes about street-market characters, published in 1965, had led to him being compared to the French literary giant Emile Zola, famed for his naturalist portraits of working-class life. By the 70s, he was more often being compared to Tom Wolfe, the acclaimed author and leader of America’s popular New Journalism movement, which mixed literary techniques with first-hand reporting. Until Cohn, Wolfe’s journalism, articles such as ‘Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s’ had been the most famous work published by New York magazine. Cohn, however, said he hated Wolfe.
The comparisons flattered Cohn. By the time he got to New York, in 1975, his halcyon days were behind him. His 1971 follow-up to Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom , a book about men’s fashion movements in London entitled Today There Are No Gentlemen , only intermittently hit the mark and was not widely read. He had said all he could on pop, and he was feeling for a way out of music writing. For a peri