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ABBA: The Defence.

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Abba were the first band I can remember. When I was three or four, ‘Arrival’ had come out and my parents bought it for me and would sit with me patiently, listening to the whole LP over and over again. I can still remember identifying the songs by their tones and feels, not having a clue what they were on about. Which was definitely a blessing in the case of ‘Dum Dum Diddle’.

The cover was (and is) gorgeous and became synonymous with the music for me. Four goodlooking people in white boiler suits standing around a still helicopter, in a mysterious dusk. Sure! Why not? The beautiful title track, all yearning chorale and folkish melody entranced and soothed me, after the terrifying screaming finale to the preceding ‘I Am The Tiger’.

The following year I was gifted ‘Abba The Album’, by a friendly nurse who worked at my dad’s surgery. It had to be explained that this was Abba – I still remember that, weirdly clearly, I initially didn’t understand that this was the same group of people as those standing around the helicopter. But again, here was a mysterious cover with lots to look at, colourful now, with moody, mysterious portraits of the band each in their own colour and surrounded by all manner of random things, a man with a case, running, a taxi and birds in the sky. Even now, if you just pick up the record and look at the sleeve without knowing of the associated film and related storyline, it would be extremely confusing.

But then you hear ‘Eagle’, ‘The Name Of The Game’ ‘Move On’ ‘I’m A Marionette’ and the rest and its a revelation. ‘Eagle’ in particular, is evocative and agreeably aerial. I revisited it recently. It’s still amazing, in a soft rock late 70s LA kind of way (of course, that was the effect they were after)

OK, so I could go on through my childhood and link each Abba release , with a stage in my life. Each new Abba album was brought home by my dad, making it all the more sweet in my memory (apart from Voulez Vous, for some reason, my dad didn’t bother with that one, though I did get the single of Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! the day we also bought a Pink Panther comic from a Blue Peter Bring’n’Buy sale for Cambodia).

It ended with The Visitors in 1983, suddenly being plunged into a Bergman film, had I known who and what Bergman was, of course. Watching them excitedly on Noel Edmonds Late Late Breakfast Show at that time, I wish I could sagely recall the grimly apparent state of affairs at Chez Abba but of course I couldn’t, I was nine. I was a member of the Abba fan club (in Swindon, a name I still can’t see without thinking of poring over the cover of Abba LPs). I even ordered the folksy ‘Lycka’ album from 1970 or so, by Benny and Bjorn, which my dad and I would listen to in the mornings before going to school, despite the fact it was all in Swedish. They were my band until around 1983, when I discovered Paul McCartney and all that followed, I was obsessed. Still love ’em dearly.

I think some of the posters who dismissed them in the DomCum thread might be interested in checking out a few tunes beyond the over familiar ones (altho they are of course, gold too). So, if you are interested in some old time Abba fun, in no particular order, here’s my top 10 Abba bangers. What are yours?

Eagle
The Day Before You Came
Hey Hey Helen
Arrival
The Visitors
SOS
My Love, My Life
The Name Of The Game
Lay All Your Love On Me
The Winner Takes It All

and this

3

Comments

  3. I return from my self imposed 3 day exile and am standing outside applauding your post.

    There is no greater 70s pop music.

    Key moment for me was when I was around 14, had probably dismissed them previously as not being rock enough. Was going to school in a neighbour’s parent’s car and Take a Chance On Me was played on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, I thought “fuckin hell, this is brilliant”, great tune, amazing singing and fantastic production. Was still not a massive fan, despite loving other releases and probably forgot about them in the 80s as I entered adulthood.

    However I later bought ABBA Gold on the day it came out and played it to death, as a singles album it can be compared to The Beatles, Kinks, Jam, Madness etc. Some can say it’s not as good as the very very best, but it is damn close. Later bought all their albums in a box set and it’s pleasures are still revealing themselves to this day. Wonderful wonderful stuff, like The Beatles it is a sort of happy accident that they came together, and we should cherish them forever.

    Take off thy raincoats and groove to this wondrous music.

    • As long as we’re having a good natured natter rather than a pointless insultfest I would venture this..
      With the Abs, it’s not that they’re not rock enough so much as – to these ears – their music is very white. Their songs landing up in a musical seemed the most natural thing to me, as I see them having more in common with that thread of song craft rather than the one I’m more interested in, all of which means I can admire what they did from afar while seeing them fit only occasionally and tangentially into my music world.
      This is an important distinction from stuff which I’m happy to say is a load of old rubbish, such as pretty much everything by Led Zeppelin and Oasis..

      • Sure thang – I’m happy to have any amount of good natured Abbanatter,. And yeah they are very white indeed. Benny and Bjorn come from a very culturally homogenous Nordic folky background, where they simply didn’t have the groove that their British and American songwriting peers had. There is a story (poss apocryphal) about the recording sessions for ‘Dancing Queen’ where the Swedish drummer Ola Brunkert just couldn’t get that hip-swinging looseness that was needed. So Benny and Bjorn piped ‘Rock Me Baby’ into his headphones, so that he could get the right feel.

        B&B definitely wanted to absorb funk and disco, and went to Miami in 1978 or 1979 where they used sessions musicians to do Summer Night City, Voulez Vous etc. I think they were very keen to assimilate new forms and styles into a very classic style of songwriting, rather like Lennon McCartney aspired to in their early days. I agree about the musicals, I find things like Chess and Mamma Mia pretty naff but they do contain some really good tunes.

        • If you are interested in the roots of Abba, you will find them in Swedish “dansband”. Professor Locust can tell you far more than me about this than me

          Benny’s original band was the Hepstars. Here they are performing one of his compositions,

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-lTtL3Ffs8

          Dansband music aims to get couples out there on the dancefloor. That is where he started and that is what he went back to.

          BAO (the Benny Andersson Orchester) tour Sweden many a summer and take dancefloor with them. He gets excellent musicians and they have a lot of fun.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2QMvpizlc4

          I would not pay to see an ABBA reunion but I would happily pay to see BAO and would have a great night out.

          I suggest that those of you who think that ABBA are a tad-overated, had better not come to Sweden

          Songs like Gimme gimme gimme are treated like the national anthem.

          I prefer the Abs a tad raunchier..

  4. In my teens they made music for young marrieds. I hated them. I mellowed a bit and I can see that they made great records. But these are not great songs. If they were everybody would be singing them. They don’t work outside the studio. And don’t give me Mamma Fucking Mia – pure shite, start to finish.

  6. One can’t deny they pretty much perfected the mass appeal pop formula.
    Add to that, the rising melody and “explosion” of the chorus of SOS is one of the finest moments.
    They were a constant soundtrack in parents car – along with The Carpenters and Barry Manilow- and were the first band I could name all the members of.

  7. ABBA are the best pop group ever and ABBA Gold is the best singles album out there, it’s that simple. Only a good Beach Boys compilation album comes close.

    I remember Clive James writing about “Be My Baby”, saying that he would listen to it when he wanted his spirits raised and smoothed at the same time. That what ABBA’s music does, and that’s one reason why they’re underrated. Another reason is – like Queen – they are popular with the sort of people who are often referred to on this site as “the great unwashed”. Civilians. Normal folk. People who know that you take “ABBA Gold” with you in the car when you’re going on holiday, as it’s the only CD that everyone in the family will want to listen to.

    • Maybe that explains why I’m Team Hooky.

      As I’m sure I have mentioned before, the act I have seen more than any other is Bjorn Again. A 100% copper-bottom cast-iron guaranteed great night out.

      And the only song I’ve ever sung in public was Thankyou For The Music. To an audience including Sinead O’Connor.

  9. I can’t remember who said it, though it has ring of one of Hepworth’s trademark theories, but I fully Agree that ABBA’s appeal is at least partly down to the fact that they were much better than they needed to be. More hooks, more choruses, more leaping key changes. It’s that relative sophistication which sets them far above standard 70s glam. Add in the compelling soap opera of their love lives and it’s little wonder that they are still talked about and argued over decades later.

    I have Gold and More Gold though I can’t say that get played a lot, maybe next week as I’m wfh for the foreseeable future, but I’ve seen a couple of ABBA tribute bands on festival bills and bopped along happily and knew every word. Those songs have staying power. Even at their less boppy on The Day Before You Came (The ABBA Song even non-ABBA fans allow themselves to like) they added the line ‘it’s funny but I have no sense of living without pain’ to the pop dictionary of quotations. For that alone they would deserve to be celebrated, but they gave so much more.

    • I felt I was forced to endure ABBA in the seventies. They were everywhere from 1974 to the beginning of the eighties, saccharine sweet, singing about a romantic ideal in which the woman’s life is transformed by the arrival of her true love. They wore the clothes of Glam, well and truly over by then, and the cheesy smiles of Eurovision. Their songs had more than a touch of musical theatre but were pounded to dust by the tyranny of block chords and an obligatory key change into an uplifting chorus. It was no surprise when Benny and Björn teamed up with Tim Rice for Chess.

      My favourite record of theirs, as you correctly surmise, is their last and not in a thank-goodness-it’s-all-over kind of way. The Day Before You Came subverts their usual romantic ideal. Benny plays a bank of synthesised instruments, Björn an acoustic guitar. The music is melancholy, the rhythm a funeral march. The lyrics appear to about Agnetha’s life, or someone like her, before she married Björn. She speaks/sings the lyric in a flat monotone, her Swedish accent more obvious than normal, as though making a witness statement after the event. She seems to have difficulty remembering the exact details of that day because every day was pretty much the same and it seems to have been a while ago. She does, however, remember the rain at night. Little details point to depression: prolongued sleep, anhedonia, poor motivation. Frida, singing backing, providing the only element of colour in a grey production, is especially impressive in the prolonged lament of a coda. The mystery concerns what happened next. Looking back from her vantage point in the future, Agnetha does not sound happy. Events clearly didn’t turn out well. The joyful transformation that occurs in an ABBA song when girl meets boy is entirely absent. There is no uplifting chorus. Perhaps, it all ended in divorce, as it did for Agnetha and Björn two years earlier. The narrator’s bedtime reading is Marilyn French, a feminist writer who is incorrectly attributed as saying all men are rapists. Perhaps, there was worse, violence, abuse, death but French’s latest book at the time was about a couple who find they have nothing in common, maybe like Agnetha and Björn. Reportedly, Agnetha sang the vocal with the studio lights off. When she finished, she slipped out without anyone noticing.The song lasts six minutes and isn’t especially radio friendly. It wasn’t a hit.

      In Mamma Mia (I’ve seen both the movie and the stage show!), Meryl Streep sings about reading Margaret Atwood instead.

      • That’s a lovely piece of prose. I’ve the appealing, if unevidenced, theory that it’s from the point of view of a murder victim addressing her killer.

        • I just think it’s about the day before she met the person who would become her new lover or the love of her life. A very literal interpretation, I see nothing in the lyrics or the video to suggest murder. Her life was meaningless until that day. I like it, but it is somewhat mundane compared to most of their output.

          • I agree, which is why I say the theory is unevidenced. The simplest interpretation is almost certainly correct.

            Then again I remember a long discussion here, or maybe in a predecessor site, about whether Running Up That is about sex. It is, of course, and very obviously so, but a few people were strangely insistent on other, less clear and more convoluted interpretations.

            • I think Kate may have said that, but of course it could apply to relationships in general. Perfectly ok to apply a doomed interpretation to The Day Before …, but I doubt Bjorn and Benny had that in mind.

              • Maybe not ‘doomed’ but definitely unfulfilled. In an ABBA song, once the couple meet joy and sweetness and light inevitably follow. Not in this case.

                Agnetha is quite a character. Superficially, she’s a dumb blonde fronting a band singing songs, written by a couple of boys, in which girls’ lives are incomplete without a man. She appears to have been chosen for her looks rather than her singing talent. However, she was disdainful of her sex symbol status and ignored all attempts to explore her motivations. As time went by ABBA became more serious, less fun, more moody. I have no doubt she actually did read Marilyn French books. She is responsible for the lead vocal on the two ABBA songs expressing the most heartache, the other being Winner Takes It All. Not without talent after all.

  10. I think they are very much like Queen. I think their songs (well, some of them) are brilliant, but I love them and hate them at the same time, and I don’t like talking about them in public because of their kitsch appeal. Maybe I’m just a snob.

    I do think there is something fluffy and insubstantial to them, however. It doesn’t take much close listening for their songs to blow apart like paper. I’ve never felt any real emotional kick listening to any Abba songs, although the craftsmanship is undeniable. I’m well aware people have made the same argument against the Beatles, however, who I hold in significantly higher esteeem.

      • What can I say! That song leaves me totally cold. Compared to, say, The Long and Winding Road, Wild Horses, The Man With The Child In His Eyes, Tinseltown In The Rain, Wichita Lineman….. I would rate all those and a hundred others above it.

    • Funny you should mention real emotional kick, Arthur, because I was just mulling over just that. As I said over there ——–> I really only listen to ABBA Gold in one or other of its various manifestations, but when I do I find that there’s such joy and inventiveness in the music that I fall in love all over again. Yes, it’s white music, but I’m nothing if not white (with quite a lot of Northern European in my makeup according to Ancestry.com 😉 ), so I don’t really care, despite my enduring love for (some) black music. I hope nobody takes offence at this, but I don’t turn to Lou Reed if I want cheering up.

      I was way too cool to embrace them at the time, though a chance to embrace Agnetha would have been a fine thing, but that ceases to matter after a while, eh?

    • Queen are OK. I liked them better after watching the documentary about them on BBC4. Like Abba they were similarly quite prepared to look daft, and enjoy themselves, not really caring or knowing about being cool. I find that commendable. They had an audience who felt similarly unbothered. Abba hits are in another league however.

  11. Steven Wilson says when he was a kid his Dad had Dark Side of the Moon and his mum had Abba’s greatest hits and they totally shaped his music tastes from there.

  16. Not sure I can add anything new to the discussion other than the first time I heard Waterloo it awakened something in me, the excitement of music, the power of taking you somewhere, the power it had to affect you. I still love a lot of their stuff and continue to be amazed they wrote those songs, those fantastically well written songs, in another language than their own. And Rigid’s description of SOS is spot on.

    • Hat’s off to writing lyrics in a second language. I always enjoyed it when they clearly struggled to fit English words with the right number of syllables whilst still clinging on to at least a semblance of meaning.

      • I think there is only one real language syntax mistake in the big hits.
        The line in Fermando when they sing
        “Since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand”

        A minor mistake, but still better than my Swedish

      • Their lyrics are pretty darn amazing considering English is not their first language :

        The history book on the shelf
        Is always repeating itself

        I’m pretty sure my life was well within its usual frame
        The day before you came

        • I don’t think the first lyric was theirs; iirc they weren’t confident enough to write in English at the time. The latter is as good as pop lyrics get, especially if you include the ‘oh yes’ at the start and the descending notes of the tune.

        • It was their strength. They kept the words simple and direct. Any peculiarities of syntax or pronunciation added to the girls’ lovability.

          For example, I like “There wasn’t I think a single episode of Dallas I didn’t see.” There’s a double negative and the I Think is oddly placed but it makes sense.

          Certainly, there are plenty English speakers guilty of worse crimes. I’m just saying it adds to a sense of otherness about the band.

  17. The weird thing looking back, but which didn’t seem strange at the time was how at their imperial all conquering peak they regularly turned up on programmes like Crackerjack and Seaside Special.

  18. Don’t own any of their albums and have only ever listened to one or two of them. But even when they weren’t cool and I wanted it be cooler than thou, I loved the singles – they just sounded irresistibly in a different league from any other chart pop around at the time. They still do.

  19. Let me know when it’s safe to come out. I’ve read all this with interest and no small respect, the respect I have when folk can unfailingly muster their love for lost causes. St Jude has been one busy man this night. Maybe it’s an age thing: they sprawled across my horizon during my TOTP years, religiously watching for a bit of rockier fare, punk and new wave, they perpetually popping up to remind me why I preferred Whistle Test. Plus, I have twice, twice, I tell you, seen that awful film of the hapless Aussie Hank Marvin lookee likee trying to get an interview with them, partly as that was all that was on and that the majority of the people I was on holiday with were willing to see. And then an erstwhile wife had best friends whose idea of joy was having singalong Mamma Mia parties. I fecking hate them. But you knew that.
    Just felt the post needed balance. I’d hate a new lurker to think too ill of the site.

    • God, Whistle Test, now that is something that was generally really awful throughout much of the 70s. Those godawful black and white cartoons, a studio with no atmosphere at all, soporific presenters etc.

  20. Does your mother know? Lead vocal by Benny – the story of a young groupie trying to cop off with him. But, unlike many “of the time” songs, he is declaring that she is far too young and she should stick to people of her own age.

  21. Knowing Me Knowing You is a bit of a masterpiece. A tremendous tune, unforgettable guitar riff and drama.

    The chorus has a simultaneous male voice in the background which calls to mind the incoherence of a deeply emotional argument/break up conversation.

    This time we’re though
    (This time we’re through, we really…)
    Breaking up is never easy I know but I have ( I have, I have) to go
    (it’s time I go…)

    I interpret this as the woman being the stronger of the two and the man jumping in quickly, knowing the writing is on wall and saving face.

    • Amazing song, that guitar phasing in the verses just adds something special and then the ringing acoustics too. They really came up with the goods when it came to these break up songs, hardly surprising given their own dynamics. I always find it astonishing that Agnetha sang ‘The Winner Takes It All’, penned by Bjorn after their divorce, after a bottle of scotch.

    • Yes it is, in my top 6 I think (at least today), along with The Winner Takes It All, Supertrouper, Take a Chance on Me, SOS and this one, astonishingly mature lyrics for a pop song (The Name of the Game).

  24. Re: the original Cummings story.
    I think it would have been more accurate and wittier for the naysayers (including me) to say:
    “Thank the Lord, he wasn’t playing Jimi/Dusty/Beatles, I’d never be able to listen them ever again!”

    Abba … hmm … I hated the music press with a passion in the late 1970s and dire 1980s, because of their total dismissal of The Beatles at just the time I wanted to know about them.
    As such, it was impossible to be more “out there” in about 1983 if you ardently listened to The Beatles … FACT.
    In comparison, Bowie was as mainstream as “Blankety Blank.”

    I find it a bit rich all these years later that the same people lump on Abba, an act at the time who I never loved or hated, and I don’t know anyone who loved or hated them either.
    Oh, and all of a sudden these same people all love, and “always did” (oh, yeah?), The Beatles!

    Far more vitriol gets heaped towards Cliff Richard, than Abba, and that STILL exists, and yet he is vital to the link between Buddy Holly and The Beatles, and, like Abba, had loads of hits.
    Don’t see too many of the *NME crowd (we all know the names; tossers, all of them) leaping to his defence.

    *I’ll cut Danny Baker some slack.

  25. My own trajectory into music, like yours Mr Badger, was helped significantly by ABBA’s Arrival. There was a Radio 1 interview to launch the album, possibly with Richard Skinner, during which a number of tracks were played. One of them was When I Kissed The Teacher, still my favourite ABBA song. I also remember hearing SOS over the radio for the first time, and having a spine-tingling moment. It was, and remains, a cracking song.

    Too many important childhood memories are bound up in ABBA’s music for me to be overly objective about them. In my maturity I can see their flaws, although if we are using Dum Dum Diddle as the benchmark of awfulness then I’m on the side of the angels. The lyrics may be trite, and yet, and yet…… They are indeed very white, and have that distinctive plinky plonky Eurovision piano sound, but the song craft transcends all of that. I still make a point of listening to them occasionally, and it’s more than just a nostalgia fest. We all have our own musical journeys and ABBA were a big part of mine, I’m not too proud to say.

  31. I was 10 when Abba won Eurovision with Waterloo. From about 7 years old I’d immersed myself in pop music, transistor radio under the bedclothes beaming in scratchy messages from other planets, far better places than the one I lived in. I heard the songs before I saw what the performers looked like, and the images in my mind didn’t always match up with the reality that Top Of The Pops subsequently provided. David Bowie did, of course, which made sense as he’d contacted me directly with Starman (‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you’).
    The year before the Abba victory, I was listening to a radio 2 saturday early evening show, which played hits from other European countries. I think Katie Boyle might’ve been the presenter. The song that really stood out for me was Ring Ring, but I couldn’t make out the name of the band. I tuned in each week hoping to hear it again, but it never happened, and it didn’t seem to crop up on daytime radio 1, though apparently it reached number 32 in the UK charts.
    1972 was the first Eurovision I saw, albeit not in its entirety, and I was a bit disappointed that the New Seekers didn’t win with Beg Steal or Borrow, though the evening dresses sported by the ladies were a bit too teacherly for 8 year old moi. ’73 was ruined by Cliff’s ‘Make an O shape with the legs’ dance during Power To All Our Friends.
    And then, 1974, on come Abba, with outfits and guitars that are two years out of date, but with a twinkle in their eyes and a conductor dressed as Napoleon. And two things happened before a word was sung. The women ran forward, and someone – probably Benny – could be heard shouting ‘Yeah!’ They hit the ground running, and so it began. Olivia Newton John’s UK entry, something about the Sally Army Band, was forgotten. This morning I showed my 18 year old daughter the BBC clip of Waterloo in ’74, and despite all the resistance that goes with that age, she couldn’t help but say ‘Fuck. Wow!’ when commentator David Vine concludes ‘It’s certainly gone down well here inside The Dome in Brighton’. We live in Brighton btw. The Dome’s down the road.
    It wasn’t until maybe a year later that I twigged that Ring Ring had been by these same people. Waterloo’s follow up was the rather dull, barely top 40 grazing I Do, I Do, I Do etc, but then along came SOS, and the imperial period began.
    I, too, became a member of the Abba fan club. Sheep Street in Swindon was the base (not that there were any other buildings involved in the operation, I suspect). In the autumn of 1977, in a school assembly, as I larked about at the back with my fellow fledgling punk rocker pals, possibly writing ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’ on the front of my chemistry book, the head teacher boomed ‘Who is in the Abba fan club?’ He held up the membership card, luckily with no name on it.
    As Boneshaker says, none of this associative stuff can be fully disentangled when we speak about that which has touched us so much at such developmentally important times. We can’t really listen ‘without memory or desire’ as the psychoanalyst Bion puts it. I do know, though, that I’ve experienced more joy listening to Abba than any other musical act, and that continues to be the case. That may well be in part because it connects me with that child who craved something other, somewhere else. With their not-quite-idiomatic English, Abba were perfect, suggesting and hinting rather than stating.
    I’ve never been to an Abba tribute gig, though, and I’ve no interest in any kind of reformation. And my favourite songs, other than SOS which is obv their best, are When I Kissed The Teacher, from Arrival, The Winner Takes It All, The Day Before You Came, and, increasingly as the years go by, Eagle, which I wasn’t at all keen on at the time. Which goes to show something.

    • Super post thank you – you articulated much of what I was trying to reach for, especially true is “suggesting and hinting, rather than stating”.

      I just remembered, being really disappointed by the immersive Abba exhibition at the South Bank a few years ago, which led you through a series of rooms from “typical” British 1970s living room with Eurovision playing on the telly to a recreation of the room they filmed the ‘One Of Us’ video in. Clearly a lot of money and time had been spent in recreating this room, a sort of outdoor glade with caravan (to represent the folkfest pre Abba days) and their Brighton 1974 hotel room. But none of it seemed to make much sense. There was a mock up of Polar studios, and we were invited to stand behind a mic and sing Dancing Queen (No one did) but they had got stacks of equipment from the original studios, and mixing desk. I alienated the rest of the group by ponderously explaining the session musicians, at which the chirpy young woman leading the tour started looking slightly glazed. It was really aimed at fans of comically ghastly satin glam wear and glitter, judging by the scrum at the gift shop (lots of “ironic” souvenirs, comedy masks etc) while the audio tour smugly narrated by Jarvis Cocker (and scripted by Jude Rogers), was an awful nudge-nudge “ooh, can you believe these outfits!” tacky “nostalgia” fest.

  32. I do… is a curious choice of follow up for a band who made their breakthrough with a stomper like Waterloo. It does surprise me though, looking back, that when the charts were EVERYTHING, so many acts had their biggest hits with the third or fourth choice single from an album – quite a contrast with, say, Prince and Madonna in the eighties, who always seemed to “play their joker” (to reference a 50 year old non-musical tv show) with their album’s first release..

  33. ABBA were the first band I ever loved and still do.

    Arrival and ABBA the Album are my favourites and I bought them a few years ago on the CD/DVD reissues and still play them today. Eagle is my favourite song.

    ABBA Gold is the perfect pop ‘best of’ along with Queen, The Eagles, 10cc and ELO.

  34. Here’s a mix I made for those who have heard ‘Dancing Queen’ too many times. Some fine songs here, although if you don’t like ABBA, these won’t change your mind.

  36. “When I kissed the teacher”; it was the 70s, as many a Yewtree defendant noted. I guess you had to be there.

    OK, you’ve had your fun. Now all go back to discussing The Fall B-sides. I’ll keep with Todd Rundgren if I want pure pop (plus everything else lauded here), thank you very much.

  37. Lots of love for ABBA chez Hairnet. Steve Hackett too. Plenty of room for all sorts. Some great, insightful contributions on this thread.

    Looking back, ABBA is an interesting band from many different angles. They didn’t really play the 70s rock ‘n’ roll game. Outrageous behaviour played no part in their self-image. If they were hellraisers, they kept it to themselves. They presented themselves as straightforward songwriters/performers (with complicated love lives) and just got on with the business of churning out great hits. Too much success irked the purists and rock snobs.

    Singing in a second language did create a uniquely remote atmosphere to many of their songs. And it drew attention to what they were saying. Lyrics routinely dismissed as trite are still being quoted on this thread. Oddly, hits is an anagram of shit.

    As a nipper, my perception was that the women were most definitely the stars. Obviously, the blokes were somehow part of the show, but they were always lurking in the background, and it wasn’t really clear what they did. Although you could hardly accuse the band of being political – I can’t think of a single song of theirs that references current events or political causes – this reversal of the traditional roles in pop music is an interesting one from a feminist perspective, and I wonder if it has underscored some of the antipathy towards the band.

      • Otherwise, all their songs are about how women are incomplete without a man in their life. Even Waterloo. Except for that 17 year old enjoying herself in Dancing Queen. I’ll give you her.

        • All? Fernando, Chiquitita, Thank You for the Music etc? If you are going to write off songs that are about women (or men) being either fulfilled by forming relationships or breaking up from them, then we lose about 90% of pop music including most of The Beatles early output too.

          • That rifle in Fernando’s hand doesn’t Fire bullets. In Chiquitita, she’s consoling her friend devastated by losing her man. In Thank You For The Music, Agnetha is addressing her ex husband, without whose music she’d be incomplete.

              • Are you telling me Frida doesn’t have the hots for Fernando and vice versa? Chiquitita’s lyric is very one dimensional. I don’t think I’m the only one who sees Thank You For The Music as the girls thanking the boys.

                • I do think you are overthinking this a bit. It’s just (glorious) pop music. Lyrics are always secondary in pop, but I find Abba’s can be relatively profound and sometimes offering perfectly mature female commentary e.g. The Name of the Game (again). Of course they are written by men for women to sing which can’t ever be perfect. But even Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush are often singing about finding someone to love, f*ck or give them orgasms.

                  • In The Name Of The Game, she is a hopeless case, bashful with no friends and no life. Within a week, date three, she’s growing and feeling and becoming whole.

                    Sex and relationships are at the core of most songwriting but the ABBA set up hardly varies: in 99% of the songs, the woman is a lost cause until she meets a man. Almost every other band/artist at least tries some other topic some of the time.

                    • And you make me talk
                      And you make me feel
                      And you make me show
                      What I’m trying to conceal
                      If I trust in you
                      Would you let me down?
                      Would you laugh at me
                      If I said I care for you?
                      Could you feel the same way too, I wanna know
                      The name of the game

                      I would say that these are quite universal, explaining (quite beautifully) what a woman or indeed a sensitive man might want in a loving relationship. It can be read your way or my way. They are both just opinions and don’t really matter too much. Let’s agree to differ.

                    • You missed out the beginning:

                      “I’ve seen you twice, in a short time
                      Only a week since we started
                      It seems to me, for every time
                      I’m getting more open-hearted

                      I was an impossible case
                      No-one ever could reach me
                      But I think I can see in your face
                      There’s a lot you can teach me”

                      Without this man she’s worthless.

                    • @Barry-Blue That’s a well-written, provocative piece that’s pretty assertive in its conclusions. I have never studied ABBA lyrics in any detail, so a comment such as

                      “Among ABBA’s greatest hits, there is a message coded: Women without men are nothing. Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were crucial to the band’s success, and some of ABBA’s reductive treatment of women may be chalked up to the period in which they were making music, but it probably wouldn’t be too far of a reach to say that Andersson and Ulvaeus straight-up hated women.”

                      took me by surprise. That’s certainly never been my perception, but perhaps I haven’t been paying enough attention. The writer argues that Mamma Mia the movie reclaims some of the agency for the female protagonists in the songs, but I found the movie glib and sentimental, and that the emotional impact of many of the songs was diminished.

                      Clearly people find different things to like and loathe in music. Someone higher up the thread mentioned Queen, and they are a good comparison. Like ABBA, they are a band that revelled in the dynamic and theatrical potential of music, and who also fell foul of rock’s credibility police. My late father was a huge fan of Mozart operas, and would often claim in his snobbish way that they were the pinnacle of human achievement in music. Nothing else came close. But have you read the libretti of some of those operas? Utter bobbins. Operas are full of simplistic fantasies and lyrical conceits. Do they diminish the enjoyment of great art? Like ABBA, for me it’s all about the theatrics, and the broad brush emotional vistas.

            • Tigg, I know it is down to interpretation, but I’ve always thought Thank You for the Music was addressing a higher being (Apollo?) rather than Bjorn. It was written as part of the “mini-musical” The Girl with the Golden Hair which was one side of The Album.

              Fernando was originally a Frida solo single, Tango, then had three different sets of lyrics, written by three different people, for the Swedish, English and Spanish versions. I’m not sure they are all direct translations.

                • You might, just might, have a case with Thank You, but you are struggling, aren’t you? The vast majority of their songs, time after time, have the same theme: a woman’s life is meaningless without a man. It’s more than just the fact they were writing in English. They could easily have come with a boy-meets-girl song that didn’t have the same set up. I was struck by it at the time. It seemed odd that those liberated Swedish women went along with it. And, from what Barry Blue posted, I’m not the only one. Even Thank You depicts the woman as having a worthless existence until the music came along.

                    • Damn right! But not in ABBA’s case.

                      They had these fantastic role models in the front but time after time after time, it was ‘I need a man’.

          • The Beatles cleverly made the men the needy ones. Teenage girls, who bought most pop singles in those days, loved it. It wasn’t long before they were subverting the boy meets girl scenario.

          • Worth remembering that the songs may have been sung by women but they were written by men.
            Could be interpreted without a gender bias as people needing other people to fulfill them, which is still not 100% true.

        • Take a Chance on Me is a song of low self-esteem. We have covered this previously – others are Jolene, Substitute (I am thinking mainly of Clout but also The Who, in a way). I read yesterday that the soft rock power ballad “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx was offered to Barbra Streisand who loved song but wanted the lyric changed, saying “I won’t be ‘right here waiting’ for anybody!” Go Babs!

  38. I saw ABBA win the Eurovision and would never have dreamt they would become the phenomenon they are. I regard the love for them with the same bewilderment as I do those who swear Ringo is a great drummer. To my ears it’s patently a bizzare view given the evidence but each to their own. Some people don’t like country with a boogie beat. As @robc would say, _/\_

  40. Lyrics in rock? Hmm. Let me see. And pop for that matter. If the sometimes dodgy lyric accusation is meant to be part of building a case against (it’s a bit unclear if that is that is the intention) then one would have to come down hard on huge swathes of the music we profess to love and admire.

    • Exactly. Pop and rock musicians aren’t classical composers or poets, and they’re not trying to be. Why a certain type of fan is always trying to get it to compete, or to judge Dancing Queen as if it were bloody Tennyson, is quite beyond me. Just enjoy it or don’t, FGS.

      I think half the problem is we all grew up reading tone-deaf reviewers who don’t have a any more of a scooby about how music works than the average punter, and so reviews end up being about

      – lyrics (usually decent-sounding (or not) bollocks written by some drunken overgrown teenager that happens to rhyme) or

      – a potted bio of the band and analysis of their guessed-at lives and personalities or

      – some kind of pretentious thematic bobbins that treats the whole thing like it was Oedipus Rex rather than a collection of three minute four chord songs about a girl with nice tits who the writer spotted on a bus

      Reviewers almost never tell you what the bloody music sounds like – or if they do, they can’t manage it without using all that sonic cathedrals crap, or words like “angular”.

  42. I do a Gig Guide show on local radio, and virtually every week (in normal times) there is an ABBA tribute and a Queen tribute somewhere. Along with many Beatles and ELOs and Elvis’, ….oh, and the 4 Seasons, ….these are the mainstays it seems. These are acts that people seem to be able to see time after time, and the great general civilian public couldn’t give a flying one about musical integrity – they go to have a good time and a singalong to music that makes them feel good and to escape from everyday life for a couple of hours. The common factor is great songs, and actual hits…loads of them. People love them.

    I was just thinking about all of those acts above. For all of them besides the 4 Seasons and the fabs , I have CDs of Greatest Hits and nothing much more. Probably says a lot about me!

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