The Bee Gees captured some serious urgency on "Tragedy," with a falsetto lead vocal by Barry Gibb that sounds like a siren racing to the scene of an emotional breakdown. The song captures that feeling when the love of your life has left you, and you feel you can't go on. The group didn't have to be experiencing heartbreak to write about it: They were expert composers who could capture an emotion and deliver it in convincing manner.
The Gibb brothers wrote both "Tragedy" and "Too Much Heaven" (another American #1), in an afternoon off from making the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie in which they were starring. Then in the evening they wrote another American #1 single, "Shadow Dancing" for their brother Andy Gibb.
Stuck for a convincing thunderclap sound, Barry Gibb cupped his hands over a microphone and made an exploding noise with his mouth. Several of these sounds were then mixed together, creating the large boom heard on this song.
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