"Too Much Heaven" is a song by the Bee Gees, which was the
band's contribution to the "Music for UNICEF" fund. They
performed it at the Music for UNICEF Concert on January 9,
1979. The song later found its way to the group's thirteenth
original album,
Spirits Having Flown. In the United States and Canada,
it became the latest in a long line of chart-toppers, and rose
to the top three in the United Kingdom, as well.
Imbued with their falsetto style, it is also notable for
being one of two songs on the album featuring the Chicago horn
section (James Pankow, Walt Parazaider and Lee Loughnane)--the
other track with the Chicago members being "Search, Find".
The recording process was the longest of all the tracks on
Spirits Having Flownas there are nine layers of
three-part harmony creating 27 voices, though the high falsetto
voices are the most pronounced in the final mix:
The horn section from the band Chicago play on the song, in
return for the brothers’ appearance on the Chicago song "Little
Miss Lovin".
In the summer of 1978, the Gibb brothers announced their
latest project at a news conference at the United Nations in
New York City. All of the publishing royalties on their next
single would go into UNICEF, to celebrate the International
Year of the Child, which was designated to be 1979. The song
earned over $7 million dollars in publishing royalties.
Then-United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim heralded
the move as "an outstanding and generous initiative."
The Bee Gees were later invited to the White House, where
President Jimmy Carter thanked the group for their donation. At
the ceremony, the brothers presented Carter with one of their
black satin tour jackets. Carter remarked that he was "not a
disco fan" but knew enough about their music because his
daughter Amy was a big fan.
"Too Much Heaven" was released nine months after "Night
Fever". At the time, this had been the longest gap in The Bee
Gees' distribution of singles since 1975.
The single "Too Much Heaven" was released in the late autumn
of 1978 (it had originally been intended for use in the John
Travolta movie
Moment By Moment, but was pulled before the film's
release reportedly because Barry Gibb thought the movie was
awful when he was shown a rough cut.), and started a slow
ascent up the music charts. In the first week of 1979,
preceding the Music for UNICEF Concert, the single first topped
the charts in both the United States and Canada. In the United
Kingdom, the single peaked at number three late in 1978. A slow
ballad that was unlike the previous two singles off the
Saturday Night Feversoundtrack, Barry Gibb noted that
the group wanted to "move in an R&B direction, still
maintaining our lyric power, and our melody power as well."