Jul 292020
 

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

bee gees covers

Despite the fact that Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb have sold upwards of 120 million records, they can sometimes seem oddly underrated. They aren’t regarded with the reverence afforded to other artists that emerged during roughly the same era, like The Rolling Stones or The Who. They haven’t generated the same level of dramatic intrigue as Elton John or Queen. And discovering their music was never part of some traditional teenage rite of passage like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. But while they don’t seem to receive near the same level of acclaim as the aforementioned artists, their music has remained as utterly ubiquitous as just about all of them. There are few other artists as essential to documenting the sound of an era as The Bee Gees were to the late ’70s.

Throw the Here At Last…Bee Gees… Live album from 1977 on the turntable or queue up the stream. You will be confronted with a veritable assembly line of perfectly constructed, exquisitely performed pop songs. Take a step back and really listen. The outlandish songwriting gift on display is nothing short of mind-blowing, You might think, how is it even possible to have written this many incredible songs? And those are just 20 or so selected tracks Barry, Robin, and Maurice had done up to that point – before Saturday Night Fever! There were dozens more to come.

We were overwhelmed by the number of incredible covers of both Bee Gees classics and deep cuts and their glorious diversity. But we really shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite the band itself not always getting its due, the Bee Gees’ songs remain for everyone and forever.

Hope Silverman

The list begins on Page 2.

Jul 262012
 

In the late 70s the Bee Gees were an integral part of the rise of disco. The brothers Gibb helped create the soundtrack and the title to the 1978 hit film starring John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever. The film was originally going to be called Saturday Night  but Robin Gibb suggested the title from a track they recorded for the film, “Night Fever”. Eventually the producer settled on merging the two and history was made. Two months ago Robin Gibb died after a long-fought battle with cancer, leaving brother Barry as the last surviving Gibb brother. Continue reading »

Mar 152012
 

Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” is an up-tempo, energetic hit full of emotion and ’80s pop fervor. Released in 1983 off of her album Live from Earth, it’s easily one of her most popular and well-known tracks. But just wait until you hear what Havana Lake – also known as the Australian Steven Heath of I Dream in Transit fame – has done with it. Continue reading »

Sep 022011
 

This Week on Bandcamp rounds up our favorite covers to hit the site in the past seven days.

Bad news first: We didn’t find any good covers for this post. We did, however, discover five great covers (and a bunch of mediocre-to-terrible ones). No middle ground this week. So while the average quality of everything we heard was lower than usual, our cherry-picked set may be one of our all-time favorites. Funny how it works like that sometimes. Continue reading »