The drummer flew home, so a loop of tape played on "Stayin' Alive"

01A castle in France

The place chosen for recording was the Château d'Hérouville, a studio in a French castle where Elton John had made Honky Château. When they got there, the Bee Gees found somewhere far less glamorous than the address suggested. Karl Richardson, the engineer on the sessions, remembers having to ground the electrics, and noticing something odd: someone had painted the knobs of the mixing desk with nail polish.

Stigwood, the Bee Gees' manager, wanted songs for a film he was producing. Bill Oakes, who ran Stigwood's record label, says he gave the band the script in France, and he doubts the Gibb brothers ever read it. "Two or three weeks later this magical cassette arrived which had these five killer songs on it," Oakes told Have a Go News in 2020.

02Drums borrowed from "Night Fever"

During the sessions, the drummer, Dennis Bryon, had to fly home because of a family emergency. Without him, the band needed a way to keep working.

First they tried the rhythm box built into the studio's Hammond organ. They did not like it.

Producer Albhy Galuten and Richardson had another idea: use drums that were already recorded. They chose the drums of "Night Fever". They listened to the recording and picked out a short stretch, a bar or two, with the feel they wanted. They copied that piece onto a separate piece of tape and joined the two ends, making a loop. That way the same stretch kept running through the tape machine, repeating the beat.

There was one problem: the tape was more than six metres (about 20 feet) long and would not fit inside the machine. It had to be stretched around the studio, held up on microphone stands. Richardson told Mix magazine in 2000 that the setup was "total Rube Goldberg", in other words a homemade contraption.

03The stopgap that stayed

The loop was only meant to last until Bryon came back. But the band kept recording the other instruments and the vocals on top of that beat, and the stopgap became an essential part of "Stayin' Alive".

Galuten told Berklee Today in 2002 that the feel was "very insistent but not machinelike. It had a human feel." The beat came from drums played by a real drummer, after all.

When Bryon came back, the other parts were already recorded. "By the time we had overdubbed all the parts to the songs and Dennis came back, there was no way we could get rid of the loop," Galuten said. The loop stayed, and Bryon added fills, cymbals and hi-hat on top of it.

04In the same castle, "How Deep Is Your Love" and thoughts of Chopin

In the 2020 documentary The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the keyboard player Blue Weaver said that the idea of Chopin having stayed at the castle fired his imagination. Whenever he looked at the piano there, he pictured Chopin playing it.

And it was at the castle that "How Deep Is Your Love" was born. The band made a simple demo in France. Later, in Miami, the team kept going back to that version as a guide, right up to the final mix. In 1978 the song won the Bee Gees the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group.