CD1: 1) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 2) To Love Somebody; 3) Holiday; 4) Massachusetts; 5) World; 6) Words; 7) I Gotta Get a Message to You; 8) I Started a Joke; 9) First of May; 10) Saved by the Bell; 11) Don't Forget to Remember; 12) Lonely Days; 13) How Can You Mend a Broken Heart; 14) Run to Me; 15) Jive Talkin'; 16) Nights on Broadway; 17) Fanny (Be Tender With My Love); 18) Love So Right; 19) If I Can't Have You; 20) Love Me; 21) You Should Be Dancing
CD2: 1) Stayin' Alive; 2) How Deep Is Your Love; 3) Night Fever; 4) More than a Woman; 5) Emotion; 6) Too Much Heaven; 7) Tragedy; 8) Love You Inside Out; 9) Guilty; 10) Heartbreaker; 11) Islands in the Stream; 12) You Win Again; 13) One; 14) Secret Love; 15) For Whom the Bell Tolls; 16) Alone; 17) Immortality; 18) This Is Where I Came In; 19) Spicks and Specks
Two discs is a little excessive here but it's hard to argue against the most iconic songs here, even if it gets quite cheesy quite often
Key tracks: "Massachusetts", "Stayin' Alive", "Tragedy"
Are Bee Gees the least cool vintage pop band? During a time when ABBA and Fleetwood Mac are enjoying critical re-appreciation, 80s yacht rock is an endlessly inspiring aesthetic and the power duo of nostalgia and poptimism have given a rise in appreciation for so many easy listening radio hits from decades long gone, Bee Gees are practically forgotten and rarely receive any kind of critical love. Even their "cool" period, the folky and harmonising 60s, has resulted in a relatively few songs people ever bring up, while the 70s - the decade that inarguably defines them - brought about the still-divisive disco and falsettos. After that it's been an album after album of easy-listening radio cuts that sound like they were tailormade for feel-good nostalgia radio stations from the get-go. Stacking the hits and other miscellanea one after another in a compilation like this really just demonstrates how utterly trapped Bee Gees are in time, decade after decade, and it gives the impression that's exactly what they were going for. They were perhaps trend-chasing to a fault, utilising every single fashionable production trick to ensure they were always relevant to radio. A lot of the nostalgia-pop people have come to appreciate have an evergreen quality in the songwriting itself despite their datedness: with Bee Gees, sounding contemporary always seems to have come first.
Confession 1: I find that a schmaltzy MOR pop sound can be almost comforting, the music equivalent of a tub of ice cream you know you shouldn't be enjoying in your pyjamas but there you are, gulping it down. It's music for happily lazy Sunday mornings and summer days where everything is completely fine for once and you just enjoy that positive still in life, and it's where my appreciation for some of pop music's most dated trends stems from. So I can take the cheese and enjoy it, but it's not an automatic cruise control for success. You ultimately need a great melody to make the song and a great hook to lift it up and give it that comforting earworm quality. Whether it's disco, 80s reverb-stadium pop, 90s easy listening or even 00s smooth radio grooves, Brothers Gibb absolutely knew how to write a good hook, and that's what we are here for.
Confession 2: I find Bee Gees in the 60s to be a largely forgettable affair. It's an endless slog of faux-earnest, sappy, overly sentimental ballads, cheered up by the rare highlight that have a melodic strength akin to the later, greater material ("To Love Somebody", "I Started a Joke", "New York Mining Disaster 1941", and above all "Massachusetts"). They're still very on-trend with all the other string-laden 60s folk-pop singer/songwriters, but to a fault, sounding indistinguishable from anyone else peddling the same style at the time. The first disc of Their Greatest Hits: The Record has figurative dust all over it: there's just not enough of any real interesting material to warrant coming back to it. But then, towards the end of the disc the sudden disco reinvention rears its head, and that's when Bee Gees come alive.
"Staying Alive". "Tragedy". "How Deep Is Your Love". "More than a Woman". "Night Fever". "You Should Be Dancing". Immortal songs. Certified bangers and irreplaceable slow jams, as they say. A good number of the decade's finest hits, all in one go, in the scope of a couple of albums and showcased one after another in an immaculate tracklist string. For a long time the first third of disc 2 was the sole reason why I kept hold of this compilation. The disco period has ended up as the Bee Gees' signature sound and while still tuned onto trends, unlike the decades surrounding it in the 70s Bee Gees sounded like they're part of what defined those trends. The songwriting is sharp and dynamic, and you get a sense of a real group on an inspired, creative high rather than individuals gathering together in a studio every once in a while.
Once the disco period ends, the universally famous songs vanish and you get a quick cut-through of the next couple of decades, including a number of newly recorded versions of songs the Bee Gees originally wrote for other people, sounding fresh off the 2001 production line. Calling the selection of songs from the Bee Gees' least remembered years revelatory would be a stretch, but Gibbs still wrote consistently cracking melodies. "One", "You Win Again" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in particular are exactly what you'd want from comfort food schlock, and "One" in particular feels like a lost soft rock staple. I also, perhaps perversely, enjoy the new rendition of "Islands in the Stream": it's all so very early-00s in a charming way, is a genuinely powerful piece of pop schlock and the nod to "Ghetto Supastar" (which famously interpolated the original song) towards the end is actually quite a fun touch with some personality to it. Inexplicably the second disc ends with a previously unreleased sixties cut "Spicks and Specks", but not only does it work in a way as the closure of a full circle for the chronological hit trip, but it's actually better than most of the songs on the first disc.
I'm not going to state that they're gems people ignorantly look over. The only period of Bee Gees genuinely worth giving the classic moniker for is concentrated around the Saturday night fever rush, and the rest is almost supplementary. That's likely where part of Bee Gees' relative uncoolness lies: when your golden period is disco and even then you lack any further story than the ludicrous sales figures that the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack holds, you don't generate the kind of mythos around the music that gets people looking for a deeper appreciation - and I don't think there's necessarily anything deeper to look for here either, or that there's any need to. Some things you can just take at face value, and the place and purpose of Their Greatest Hits in my collection is clear: to contain some hits I love and offer a selection of inexplicably feel-good retro sounds and melodies to back them with, for those occasions when they feel like the right thing to play. While I appreciate its broadness, purely as a compilation Their Greatest Hits arguably overshoots its scope and gives a more uneven impression of the band than a tighter single-disc collection would. It inadvertently answers why Bee Gees might have become stuck in the critical limbo they find themselves in; and yet, many of their peers would be envious of the caliber of the biggest hits here.
Rating: 7/10
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