Divine Madness: Bette Midler Calls Her 1979 Disco Album ‘Odious’
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bette Midler was asked by Andrew Goldman:
What was the worst creative note you ever got?
“Sing disco.” And unfortunately, I did sing disco and it was practically the end of my creative life.
Interesting. You did one disco album [1979’s Thighs and Whispers]. Did it not do well?
It laid an egg, as they used to say, and I actually never really recovered from it. It was so far removed from what I believed in and loved, and I felt like such a sellout trying to chase the charts. In those days, the label A&R man was kind of in charge, and I didn’t have the guts to stand up to the label. I actually love dancing and dance music, but I [performed] these strange, odd numbers that were pandering, and I thought, that’s not for me. I don’t want to pander to anybody. And it was just an odd time in my life. I really did lose track of where I was. And that’s not a good thing when you’re a performing artist. My recording career was very checkered. Some albums were really good and some albums would just lay there. But this one was particularly odious, the disco.
I decided to listen to Midler’s fifth album Thighs and Whispers (a pun referring to the 1972 Ingmar Bergman film Cries & Whispers) to try to…
