Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarising reaction?

Australian writer Clinton Walker attempts to answer that question and finds that, among other things, a certain seemingly unlikely Australianness is part of the reason.

Fever was a supernova for disco, for the Bee Gees, for the domineering Robert Stigwood, producer of the film and its true auteur, and for the entire record business. This book traces all the interdependent convolutions that fed into the film and its music—not least the Australian roots that Stigwood and Gibb brothers shared, which gave them an Otherness and almost gormless, shape-shifting self-determination.

It finds that sometimes great art can be made by a committee... that sometimes, five songs are enough to change the world.