The lyrics of one of the Bee Gees’ multiple signature songs posed, and then proceeded to answer, what may be the most famous rhetorical question in all of popular music – “What’re you doing on your back, aah? /What’re you doing on your back, aah?/You should be dancing, yeah/Dancing, yeah.”

And from the first falsetto-inflected note of their opening number to the final crashing power chords of the encore, audience members were indeed dancing – in the aisles, on the stage and even on chairs – at the weekend performances of Stayin’ Alive, the Bee Gees tribute band which brought the curtain down on the 2015 Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts.

Over the course of four decades the Bee Gees, the British-born, Australian-reared Brothers Gibb, produced a songbook which helped to shape and define two generations of popular culture.

From their earliest days, when they were promoted to a worldwide audience as Australia’s pop-rock answer to the Beatles, through their second, supremely unlikely incarnation as the elaborately coiffed, Lycra-suited champions of the disco-crossover phenomenon, the songs of Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb filled dance floors with the same sly ease as they stole into listeners’ affections.

Close, high harmonies, elaborate melodies and irresistibly silken hooks marked the Bee Gees’ most endearing and enduring work. From the ballads, romantic standards and classic love songs of the 1960s through the rapid-fire, funk-inspired dance anthems of their unparalleled Saturday Night Fever-propelled comeback in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the band’s output could provide the entire playlist of a Baby Boomer dance party.

Their timeless songs range from Massachussetts to I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You to Jive Talking to the powerhouse quartet of back-to-back Saturday Night Fever smashes Stayin’ Alive, How Deep Is Your Love, More Than A Woman and Night Fever to a slew of Gibb-composed pop classics performed by other artists (including If I Can’t Have You, another number one hit from the Fever soundtrack for RSO record label stable-mate Yvonne Elliman, the Frankie Valli-crooned theme of the movie adaptation of Grease and the Bermuda-penned bubblegum chart-toppers I Just Wanna Be Your Everything and (Love Is) Thicker Than Water written for younger brother Andy, a teen idol in his own right whose ill-starred life proved to be both tragic and tragically abbreviated).

Stayin’ Alive – the Canadian trio of Gibb doppelgangers Tony Mattina, Todd Sherman and Joseph Janisse – brought an undeniable joy and sense of reverence to their multi-media Bee Gees’ salute at The Fairmont Southampton’s Mid Ocean Amphitheatre.

Unfortunately, they forgot to pack some of their vitality when they headed to Bermuda direct from a barnstorming winter tour of Florida.

Admitting they were tired and jet-lagged at the first of their two Bermuda concerts on Saturday, the Standing Room Only audience ended up providing the missing verve.

Festival-goers encouraged the band through some early missteps, when the laboured attempts at harmonising sounded like the caterwauling which might be produced by inmates at some feline answer to Abu Ghraib.

The exuberant audience participation eventually helped the trio get at least some of their syncopated, hip-swinging, finger-snapping groove back. This was a welcome development because you literally have to hit the high notes – and then hold them – to replicate the Bee Gees’ trademark sound. And despite the best efforts of three tireless and hugely versatile backing musicians to provide cover with clever, seamless shifts from the rich, mellow arrangements of the early hits to the driving rhythms of the Fever-period songs, Stayin’ Alive’s frustratingly inconsistent vocal stylings were as distracting as they were detrimental to the overall effect they sought to create.

The energy provided by the audience camouflaged at least some of the night’s musical shortcomings,

But to carp at what was essentially a high-octane, entirely critic-proof headlong plunge down Memory Lane for nostalgia-minded Bermuda residents would be as pointless at it would be unproductive.

Frankly, the only missing element which might have capped the largely middle-aged audience’s collective flashback to the days of bad hair, gold medallions and clothes made of enough man-made fibres to light up an illuminated disco dance floor with static discharge would have been a mirror ball revolving slowly above the Mid Ocean stage.

For, with their Saturday Night Fever oeuvre, as one critic has said, the Bee Gees provided “one of those rare moments when music, fashion and culture came together in one place to create a style with gravitational pull so strong it sucked in” almost every one of us who was alive at the time.

And while Stayin’ Alive’s show incorporated every facet of the Bee Gees’ chameleon-type musical progression, from '60s Beatles wannabes to '70s blue-eyed soul trio to early '80s disco icons to behind-the-scenes hitmakers for Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Dionne Warwick, Barbra Streisand and others, the pulsating Fever soundtrack numbers were as much the audience favourites last Saturday night as they were on Saturday nights 35 years ago.

Stayin’ Alive take their name from a song which has been famously described as “the national anthem of 1970s”, one the Bee Gees actually sketched out in Bermuda when long-time manager Robert Stigwood was living at the Palm Grove estate in Devonshire in the summer of 1976.

During a visit to the Island, the Australian impresario asked the band to provide material for the musical he was adapting from an acclaimed New York magazine article on the disco sub-culture (the late Maurice Gibb said Stayin’ Alive was “really born, I think, more in Bermuda than anywhere else. We finished it off in France” where the group had already been in the process of recording its next studio album).

Despite a somewhat lacklustre Bermuda performance on Saturday, this talented if obviously bone-weary tribute act should take their namesake song’s lyric about “living to see another day” to heart.

With a crowd-pleasing act which brings the audience to its feet even on an off night, Stayin’ Alive looks set to be around for as very long as the Bee Gees music they celebrate.