Songfacts®:

• "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" was the second of three #1 hits for not-quite-Bee-Gee Andy Gibb in his solo career. It followed "I Just Want To Be Your Everything" and preceded "Shadow Dancing." But that's just #1 hits by Andy Gibb; in the general scheme of things, this song bumped the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" from #1 and was itself bumped by the Bee Gee's "Night Fever."
  
  Is that not enough Gibbs for you in the #1 spot? "Night Fever" was seceded by "If I Can't Have You" - which also happened to be written and produced by the Gibb brothers. Basically anybody who remembers 1977 will tell you that the whole year was one big blur of Gibb, and then at the end there there was Star Wars and somebody lit up Debby Boone's life.
• Barry Gibb had a hand in writing this song for Andy, which makes Barry Gibb the only person in music history so far to have written four consecutive #1 Billboard hits in a row. Eat your heart out, Elvis!
• Collectors take note: Andy's solo albums tend not to be released on their own as much as get included in Bee Gees' boxed sets; such is the case for most of the tracks from Flowing Rivers, available in the Bee Gees' 4-disc set Mythology.
• And now, if you're tired of all this Bee Gee worship, here is a specter at the banquet in Ken Emerson's essay Britain: The Second Wave as printed in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll: "The Bee Gees' ornate orchestrations and tremulous romanticism scarcely concealed a solipsistic nightmare... in which the obsessed singer (most often Robin Gibb with his choked, inconsolable quaver) floated or flew in frightening isolation as everything dissolved into tears or rain. The violins and silken harp sugarcoated a bitter pill, and the Bee Gees laced their confections with musical dissonances." Hey, just so you know, it wasn't just rainbows and unicorns back there.