Story of the song: Night Fever by the Bee Gees

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on the Gibb brothers’ disco classic

The trio defined the sound of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ (Getty)

As the title theme to one of the highest-grossing movies of the Seventies, “Night Fever” was the song that brought disco to the silver screen. It began life as a magazine article, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”, penned by the British author Nik Cohn.

In 1976, Cohn was assigned by New York magazine to cover the disco boom, then taking over the clubs. His reportage focused on Vincent, a working-class Italian stallion who lived for the weekends, when he could strut his stuff on the city’s dancefloors and fight Puerto Ricans off it. The cover feature was read by the producer Robert Stigwood, who asked if he could fictionalise it for a film, with the working title “Saturday Night”. Cohn agreed, but 20 years later admitted the whole thing had been fiction from the start. He’d driven past a local disco, and simply made the rest up. “I knew the rules of magazine reporting,” he said. “And I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated.”

Stigwood managed the Bee Gees, who had signed to his RSO label in 1975. They had been given a disco makeover by the R&B producer Arif Mardin, bringing a powerful and distinctive falsetto style to the genre. The Gibb brothers – Barry, Robin and Maurice – already had a song they thought would fit Stigwood’s project.