Spirits Having Flown by Bee Gees

Spirits Having Flown, the Bee Gees' fifteenth album, arrived on RSO in February 1979, the first thing Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb put out after Saturday Night Fever turned them into the kings of the disco boom. Following that should have been impossible. Instead they doubled down: Barry's falsetto soaring over everything, the brothers' tight three-part harmonies stacked sky-high, with Alan Kendall on guitar, Dennis Bryon on drums and Blue Weaver on keyboards keeping the grooves silky.

The first three tracks all went out as singles and all went to number one in the US, stretching their run to six American chart-toppers in a single year, a feat that put them alongside Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. It became their first and only UK number-one album, topped the charts in the US, Canada, Australia and beyond, and sold more than 20 million copies. It was also the last hurrah: the early '80s brought a near-total radio blackout.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.