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When you're creating a phenomenon, the historical legacy can really only be viewed in the future. Everything has to be right at the right time, everything has to line up -- and that music was just right with that film, all the ducks were in a row. I just think how easily it could have been different music. But you can't know in advance that it's going to have some kind of profound impact.

"By the way, what did you think of Justin's imitation of you in that sketch?"

Well, imitation is the greatest form of flattery -- or of being flattened! No, I take it with good humor, certainly take it as a compliment.

This "Bee Gees Greatest" album doesn't include any of your earlier hits, such as "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" or "To Love Somebody." Do you think that "Fever" is actually the group's best work?

Well, it corresponds to this anniversary, to 30 years of "Fever," and that's what it's celebrating: the event and the phenomenon. Your own favorites aren't always the things people most want to hear. It is what it is, and people love this music. There will always be things that are my favorites -- and "To Love Somebody" definitely is one of them.

If you ask about the best music by the Eagles, most people will say "Hotel California," but if you ask one of the band [members], they'll probably say something different. Or Michael Jackson -- he might like the album before "Thriller" better. But there was a decision from all of us that this collection would concentrate on this decade and not the songs from the '60s.

The press material that went out with the album seems to go to great lengths to avoid using the world "disco." Was that intentional? What are your thoughts about the whole concept of disco?

When we wrote these songs, we never knew the word existed. To us, in Europe since the mid-'60s, "disco" was just short for discotheque, the places that you went to dance. Even the film doesn't talk about disco. But radio started using the word after "Fever," and the people that started to jump on the bandwagon all used it later. And then, it really was attributed to the culture, not the music.

We were writing blue-eyed soul, R&B- influenced grooves. You just happened to be able to dance to it.

The album includes new mixes of some of the hits. Do you keep up with new dance music, and do you hear a Bee Gees influence out there today?

I think the young black groups are very influenced by our harmonies and by the grooves we did on "Fever." Babyface just said that recently. Not a lot of the white groups do the harmonies, but you hear it on black radio.

The kind of grooves that people dance to really doesn't change a lot. I've been to clubs all over the world, and I still hear songs from "Fever." And when they come on, everybody gets up and dances.

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Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.

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