In 1978, the Bee Gees owned the music world. This song spent eight weeks at #1, on the strength of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album that was, essentially, a Bee Gees album. That soundtrack is the best selling soundtrack of all time, and one of the ten biggest selling albums of ANY kind.
It ended up being the second biggest hit song of 1978, behind their brother Andy Gibb's "Shadow Dancing", which, well, they wrote. In fact, five of the top ten songs of 1978 were either by the Bee Gees or Andy Gibb and written by the Brothers Gibb. 8
To put that in perspective, Debby Boone's cover of "You Light Up My Life", one of the biggest singles of all time, was the #3 song of 1978. In the moment, "Night Fever" was the bigger hit.
By the way, the movie was originally called Saturday Night, but the band, who hated that as a song title, convinced the director to rename the movie to match THEIR song. It was the right choice. The song began life as something of a disco-based rerecording of Perth Faith's "Theme From A Summer Place", which, now that you know that, you cannot unhear.
The song is pure disco perfection.
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