Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		2.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 2, 2018

This may strike some of you hoity toity musical elitist types as somewhat funny, but I had a rather prominent music professor in college who thought the Bee Gees’ Main Course album was one of the great classics of 20th century music (pop, classical or otherwise), and who would go on at great lengths about the genius he perceived to be running through it. In fact one day in class he did a quasi-Schenkerian analysis (and you hoity toity musical elitist types should know what that is) of the entire record, charting the “topography” of each tune and how they all fit together into a seemingly organic whole. Now of course even given how “epochal” some folks felt music like the Main Course album or the boys' contributions to the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever may have been, the Bee Gees’ career spanned several decades and some actually pretty widely variant styles. That virtuosity is on display in this 1989 concert from Melbourne, Australia, one that captured the trio in the midst of their tour for their then new album One. This is another so-called “SD Blu-ray” from Eagle Vision, Universal Music Group and Capitol Records (kind of cool to see all those logos together on one cover), where the video quality is spotty at best, but where some may simply choose to enjoy the release as a (more or less) audio Blu-ray.

There’s a certain bittersweet quality watching this concert now and knowing about the impending mortality of some of the brothers, but kind of interestingly (and also in some melancholic territory) some writing in the insert booklet mentions how this era for the trio was beset with heartache of its own due to the then relatively recent death of their brother Andy. That said, the concert on display here is a pretty resolutely energetic and joyous occasion, with the band moving through a huge gamut of material that goes back to their early, almost folk like, sensibility, through their “kings of disco” phase and beyond up through the One album itself.

The Bee Gees' set list for this concert is as follows:

1. Ordinary Lives

2. Giving Up the Ghost

3. To Love Somebody

4. I've Gotta Get a Message to You

5. One

6. Tokyo Notes

7. Words

8. Juliet

9. New York Mining Disaster 1941

10. Holiday

11. Too Much Heaven

12. Heartbreaker / Islands in the Stream

13. Run to Me

14. World

15. Spicks and Specks

16. Lonely Days

17. How Deep is Your Love

18. It's My Neighborhood

19. How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

20. House of Shame

21. I Started a Joke

22. Massachusetts

23. Stayin' Alive

24. Nights on Broadway

25. Jive Talkin'

26. Band Jam

27. You Win Again

28. You Should Be Dancing

Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bee Gees One for All Tour Live in Australia 1989 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, along with Universal Music Group and Capitol Records with an AVC encoded 1080i (upconverted) transfer in 1.30:1. To their credit (as I've mentioned previously), Eagle Rock is completely upfront by branding this a so-called "SD Blu-ray", but even by those standards, this is one of the less pleasing upconverts the label has released, through no real fault of their own. The concert is quite variably lit, with long swaths bathed in darkness and dry ice effects, both of which obliterate what little detail was there to begin with. Some of the close-ups are at least reasonably detailed, as can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review, but midrange and wide shots tend to be little more than blobs of color. Adding into the less than satisfactory visual presentation is the ubiquitous use of dissolves by the director to get from one vantage point to the next, with even more lack of clarity as the two images intersect. Finally, noticeable ghosting and interlacing artifacts are regularly on display.

Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Luckily, there are no similar problems in either of the two tracks included on this Blu-ray, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround offering and an LPCM 2.0 stereo version. The surround track has considerably better amplitude and especially low end dynamics, but both tracks offer pretty sterling clarity that is extremely well mixed and prioritized. Vocals and instrumental forces are all balanced nicely, and there's extremely pleasing fidelity across the board. Occasionally the live performance versions of the brothers' famously multi-tracked backups don't quite sound the same as the original versions, but that's about the only qualm most Bee Gee fans will have sonically with this release in my estimation.

Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements on this disc.

Bee Gees: One for All Tour - Live in Australia 1989 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bee Gees One for All Tour Live in Australia 1989 features an extremely enjoyable survey of this iconic band's impressive output, and both voices and instrumental support sound excellent. Unfortunately, this "SD Blu-ray"'s visual component is pretty shoddy looking most of the time, so my recommendation is that those interested in this release simply think of it as an audio Blu-ray, and under those circumstances, this release will most likely be highly appreciated.