‘Fever’ pitch for Bee Gees

This week the Bee Gees and Warner Music Group will make it clear that, with the looming 30th anniversary of “Saturday Night Fever,” they expect the group’s classic disco hits will be staying very alive in the pop consciousness. Warner’s Rhino Entertainment plans to announce that it has a new worldwide deal in place to revisit the original master recordings and unreleased material from the music library of the Bee Gees, who were the Brothers Gibb: Barry, Robin and the late Maurice. The Bee Gees’ original studio recordings spanned from 1965 through 2001, but really, the Bee Gees are defined (be it good or bad) by their mad success in the second half of the 1970s, when they gave a falsetto voice and an irresistible beat to the disco phenomenon.

Hits such as “Stayin’ Alive,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “Night Fever,” “Tragedy” and “Jive Talkin’ ” either made you dance or wince, but they were inescapable. In the U.S., the Australian-bred group was so closely identified with that moment in music that they found it virtually impossible to connect with new hits after the 1970s. The polyester-era hits have been repackaged again and again, but Rhino Entertainment’s Scott Pascucci says this time around the approach will be a deeper examination of the group’s history and its 1960s work, overlooked in the glare of the disco ball.

“When you have a truly great group, which the Bee Gees are,” Pascucci said, “you want to give a full context from the beginning of their career to the present, and I don’t think that has been done with the Bee Gees.”

Barry Gibb last year released a duets album with Barbra Streisand, and Robin Gibb has toured as a solo act, but the pair had said after their brother’s death that they would not go on as the Bee Gees. Barry, though, has hinted on websites that a tribute album to his late sibling may be coming.

Pascucci said there was a meeting scheduled that would begin shaping the Bee Gees’ legacy revival. And what about that anniversary of “Saturday Night Fever,” the 1977 soundtrack that was nothing short of cultural juggernaut? “Yes, we will be talking about that.”

-- Geoff Boucher