Spirits Having Flown is the Bee Gees' fifteenth original album (thirteenth internationally), released on 5 February 1979. It was the group's first album after their collaboration on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The album's first three tracks were released as singles which all went to no.1 in the US giving them an unbroken run of six US chart-toppers tying with The Beatles. It was also the first Bee Gees album to make the UK top 40 in ten years (not counting the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever), as well as being their first and only UK no.1 album. It has sold 20 million copies worldwide.
The title track (which, unlike the album title, includes parentheses) was also released as a single in the UK and a few other countries in December 1979. It reached No. 16 in the UK chart in January 1980, but its relatively low chart position and its somewhat limited release means that, although it is a well known track, it is often absent from Bee Gees Greatest Hits compilations. The exception is Bee Gees Greatest released in 1979 (for which the single was issued to promote).
Read more about Spirits Having Flown: Recording Sessions, Release and Reception, Track Listing, Singles, Rejected Material, Awards, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words spirits and/or flown:
“Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world ... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)