Barry Gibb & Friends - Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1 review: Starry cast take on Bee Gee hits

Two decades since the last Bee Gees album, and following the deaths of twin brothers Maurice and Robin Gibb in 2003 and 2012 respectively, oldest brother Barry is finally ensuring that his group’s legacy has the respect it has always deserved.

The most prominent victims of a vicious disco backlash following their dominance of the mega-selling Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977, it was too easy to laugh at the jumpsuits, falsettos and all those teeth, as Clive Anderson did 20 years later in one of TV’s most notorious interview walkouts.

Where once they were covered by Nina Simone, Janis Joplin and Al Green, spending the late Nineties watching their songs being sung by Take That, Boyzone and Steps seemed like a significant step down.

The tide had turned by 2016, when Coldplay brought Barry on stage during their Glastonbury headline set, and the next summer, when he returned for the Sunday teatime legends slot. Now a new HBO documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, gives the brothers the serious treatment, and this album sees 12 songs given a classy country-soul makeover in the hallowed RCA Studio A in Nashville.

Producer Dave Cobb, who runs the historic building, recorded Gibb duetting with a succession of giants of the genre for this project, whose “Vol. 1” suggests there is more to come.

Although Dolly Parton, Keith Urban and Sheryl Crow provide genuine star power, this isn’t a case of Gibb showing off his famous friends.

Everyone’s here in service of the songs, so the real highlights are less obvious: not so well-known Jason Isbell sharing the smoky vibes of the rarity Words of a Fool, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings providing blissful harmonies on a 1970 deep cut, Butterfly. Alison Krauss’s turn on Too Much Heaven is a gorgeous reminder that Sixties Bee Gees had as much to offer as in their Seventies pomp.

Nor is the style country in a clichéd way. They’ve done far more than stick a stetson on John Travolta.

Jive Talkin’ gets a soulful Muscle Shoals transformation, with Jay Buchanan of Rival Sons and Miranda Lambert transporting the song from the dancefloor to a swampy wilderness. The songs all stand up in these new outfits, as you’d expect of true classics.