Not only is the Bee Gees' 'Staying Alive' still a banger of a song almost 40 years after it was first released, but it's even helping people to... well, stay alive.

A subway worker in New York was electrocuted after tripping and falling onto the line of the No. 1 train in Manhattan recently, while performing maintenance work.

Monique Braithwaite's colleague David Martinez - a man with good taste in disco music, apparently - rushed to her aid, and even as smoke emanated from her body, began CPR. He told The Daily News that he "followed the advice he read in a news story to use the Bee Gees' 103-beats-per-minute rhythm as a guide."

The song, taken from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, has been used in medical training and has been endorsed by the Resuscitation Council (UK), and has even been used in a campaign video by the American Heart Foundation as recently as 2011.

The story had a happy ending, although the electrocuted woman did suffer severe burns to her arms and shock wounds to her legs.

"I thanked him," she said of her saviour. "I told him, 'Thank you. You are my hero.'"