Listening to Blancmange recently I was reminded of this phenomenal ABBA song. The Blancmange version is dark and with such a sadness in Neil Arthur’s voice that it got me thinking about who “you” was. What had happened to prompt this retrospective of the day before he or she came? I’ll admit there is a huge amount of this kind of reflection on this song available online and I doubt I’ll add much you cant find on Wikipedia.
As much as I love the Blancmange version, if I’m honest I think I prefer it. Switching to Barbara Cartland is a stroke of genius. I have to focus on the original. It was one of the last songs released by ABBA and at 6 minutes one of the longest. Sung by Agneta with backing from Frida over a pretty basic backing track. It was the lowest charting ABBA song and all members of the band admit to the sadness they were all feeling at the time. They were planning their futures after Abba and that included solo careers for Agneta and Frida and musical theatre for Benny and Bjorn which you can hear in the song. I love this quote from Benny Anderson
“I really like that song. It becomes extremely sad when you hear it like this. The recording is sad too, but the lyric itself is not sad, which is the genius of Bjorn (Ulvaeus). To me, when you read that lyric and take the music away it’s just someone saying what they did that day — ‘I read a book’, ‘I watched TV’, ‘I took the tube’, whatever; it doesn’t say what it really is. But when you put that lyric onto that music you realise something not good has happened. It’s a very intelligent lyric.”
— Benny Andersson, Interview with News.com
Despite there being some discrepancy in the lyric such as the hour long train journey in the morning becoming just over 3 hours on the way home even allowing for the stop of at the Chinese. Where did she go? For me though the most fascinating part is between the end of this fairly mundane day in someone’s life and the time at which they decided they needed to reflect on it and we must assume direct it at whoever “you” was. The video hints at something then drifts away. So this is where I start my musings into the missing story which could make a novel or film or TV series. I’m surprised they haven’t, a slightly darker “Mama Mia” perhaps….
Option one could be that the singer is just sitting in that same house 6 months later talking to a lover with whom she’s become bored. They met on the train the next day and had an exciting affair. Maybe he was married and she was thrilled by being the other woman but that spark went out. Nothing in common but sex. Life was mundane before you, it’s worse now, we’re over. Time to move on. I guess that’s the most obvious. Certainly it fits the ABBA narrative of their break ups. A standard romantic drama girl meets boy, they fall in love, they break up, they try again but no. It’s done. A 3 part ITV drama “The Day Before You Came”
In another version I can picture her two years later standing over his body, lifeless in a hospital or at a graveside. Tears pouring down her face as she remembers the time they had together before cancer or brain tumour or road traffic accident took him away. A new member of the “usual bunch” perhaps who appeared the next day who became her soulmate, her life partner cruelly taken away. A French language film “La Veille de Ton Arrivee”
Maybe she’s sitting opposite him in a prison visiting room. He was her stalker, following her home that day after seeing her at the Chinese restaurant. The had spoken briefly but he misinterpreted her politeness and began a reign of terror. Slowly making her life a misery from the next day as friends and police told her she was imagining things. After possibly years of torment she can finally now look him in the eye and reflect on her life before the terror started and yearn for a return. A proper Swedish Noir Drama. Dark and frightening to be watched behind the sofa. “Dagen Innan du Kom”
If course it could be as mundane as the lyric itself, a lost pet or a life just being lived as we all do and this is how it makes her feel. Maybe if it was sung a different way it could be a celebration of how great her life is now compared to the day before he came but the song is so downbeat that surely something bad has happened.
I’ve probably over thought this haven’t I? I wish I had the talent to expand on the Swedish Noir idea I’d pitch it to Channel 4 if I could… Anyway, what can’t be in doubt is just how great the song is. Simple yet clever, full of intrigue yet a little dull, drawing you in if you let it or washing over you without leaving a mark. Leaving the listener to analyse if they want or just wallow in the mood. I know ABBA are very much a Marmite act but this song is just sublime.
Great piece, Dave.
I’ve said this before, but the idea of Neil Arthur tucking himself up in bed with a Barbara Cartland novel has always amused me, and I think that’s intentional. I think that song – that image perhaps – invented the Pet Shop Boys.
It’s the ABBA song which has grown most in stature since they broke up, and the one which even those fools who can’t admit to enjoying their upbeat poppy songs can say they like. I’ve just read the lyric for the first time because I had never noticed the time discrepancy before. You’re right of course. She leaves home at 8 and gets to her desk at about 9:15, but leaves work at 5 but doesn’t get home until 8. There is no mention of stopping off anywhere, and certainly not for dinner because she gets a take out, so where did the missing time go?
The other thing that I noticed reading the lyric is the line ‘it’s funny but I have no sense of living without aim’, which suits her completely routine day perfectly, but I had always heard it as ‘it’s funny but I had no sense of living without pain’, which could be read as tragic in a couple of ways. Was she constantly conscious of pain before? Or did the pain only occur after ‘you’ came? It could be either, but of course it’s neither because the it’s my mondegreen. I rather like my version though.
She read the paper between 5 and 8, maybe at the station? Or maybe there was engineering work or someone “under a train” on the Stockholm Metro?
Morning commute took one and a quarter hours but return journey took three hours?
Easy: she takes Southern Rail trains.
She had a sun bed booked and forgot to tell her partner.
Me simple bloke applying simple thought.
Woman living life on her own, it’s all a bit routine and samey.
Then she meets a bloke, they move in togrther, and now she wants out.
She actually likes the sort of day where you can set your watch by your actions, and this bloke is just hanging around affecting her OCD tendencies.
Can totally see Moose’s Pet Shop Boys reference – Left To My Own Devices is probably the sequel to the ABBA track
(or maybe Being Boring?)
Definitely Behaviour / Very era. It also reminds me of Erasure – who were spoken of in the same breath as the PSBs, Mode and even New Order in the late 80s but seem to have fallen off the edge of time since.
What’s interesting about the original record is that though Abba were already frozen in the recent history of the 70s in the public mind, where they’ve been ever since, it shows them firmly in the 80s.
Naturally it is a masterpiece, like 90% of their work.
And nice original piece @Dave-Amitri
I think it is simply a love song written about the day before that person came into the narrator’s life. The narrator being probably a depressed person living an incredibly mundane, sad and lonely existence. My assumption is that when she met the new person it would change her life very much for the better, the loneliness and mundanity would be over and life would now have an “aim”. Life not worth living alone
So I think it is “aim” not “pain”
I find this early Wilco track to have some (lyrical) similarities.
“You been dealing with all of these feelings
Like they got you believing
They have no meaning
But they do
Your life’s been stinking
Your heart’s been sinking
And you’re too busy thinking to stop
You blink and you’re blue
Should’ve been in love
Should’ve been in love
Should’ve been in love …”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0AdFzIxNgo
Very absorbing piece of writing – thanks for posting. Although it’s interesting to wonder what happened on ‘the day you came’* and the days after that, for me what the song is about is the state of mind of the singer, and I think you capture that well with the last word of your text – sublime.
Listening to it again, she sounds neither happy not sad, but on the cusp between the two – absorbed in a trance or a fugue state between contrasting moods – not tied to one or the other, but able to explore the whole range of bittersweet feelings,
Whatever it was that happened on the day after the day before you came, there was a sudden schism between normality and a completely different experience of the world – what came next is yet too intense to contemplate, so the day before you came is a safe space to rest before diving into the turmoil of the following day.
It’s a perfect song for the AW, with its strong Stockholm constituency – a Swedish mood piece sung in English catching the rare poetry of our every day lives and drawing us back to an earlier time of Dallas and Marilyn French – the hangover years from the seventies.
* Relax. Don’t do it.
This is why I come here.
As far as I’m aware, this was actually *the* very last thing they recorded together, so it gives it an added twist.
I’ve always loved it, and it is nicely ambiguous. The line that always makes me wonder is almost the last, “And rattling on the roof, I must have heard the sound of rain.”
It’s very late ABBA: melancholy, with a hint of menace and foreboding.
I take it at face value, like Dai, and as such I can totally relate. It’s a moving, yearning, swelling masterpiece of a song.
There is something about Nordic pop. They do the happy sad thing so wonderfully. Lots of songs by Robyn or Tove Lö tread the same turf.
Superb song. My favourite ABBA and the only record of theirs I bought, helping to push it into the top forty just about.
These are her answers during her interrogation by the police because her lover went missing between 5 & 8pm. She seems vague about the details. ‘I must have’ or ‘I’m pretty sure’ or ‘the usual crowd.’ The funereal coda at the end spells out that someone is dead.
Either that, or she’s a ghost.
This is quite a popular theory online…that’s she’s reflecting on the ordinary things in her life that were mundane but now hold a greater resonance because ‘you came’ and murdered her. The ethereal synths and Frida’s spectral background vocals suggest that the Agnetha character now exists in limbo in the netherworld.
I prefer the theory that Agnetha is a murderer. Otherwise, it’s just the same as every other ABBA song, all of which have the message: a woman is worthless without a man.
😉
Oh @tiggerlion don’t be a spoilsport, this is a good thread!
Sorry.
There is a nod to feminism, to be fair. The book she reads is by Marilyn French. Otherwise….
Neil plays it safe with Barbara.
….perhaps I’d better rephrase that
Or the narrator could be starting a relationship with a (gasp) woman? This could apply to many Abba songs ….
Must….repress…mental… images…
…until later at least
It’s always wise to separate artist from art, but there is a line is ABBA’s output which is compelling autobiographical. It involves Bjorn writing songs for his stunning wife to sing in which the narrator, hard to separate from the singer in this case, is plain and ordinary, and often only steps out of that role when transformed by a man.
One could make a guess that she lacked self esteem in her real life. As indicated by her having a bizarre sexual relationship with an unstable stalker.
As I remember he looked like a Steve Pemberton character from League of Gentlemen.
There is hope for us all 😉
I always thought it was her statement after the secret police from ‘The Visitors’ had locked her up and were interrogating her. As in: ‘I live a very boring life and did pretty much the same thing every day, before you broke down the door and dragged me away. What can you possibly want with me?’
That could work for most of the lyric, but ‘never even noticed I was blue’ is easier to interpret in the more obvious sense of having been transformed, whether by love or death, by the mysterious ‘you’. Why would the secret police care about here Blue mood, and why would it occur to her to tell them?
I can see a similarity to a police statement in the bland list of anonymous activities, but if it’s intention it is more atmospheric than literal.
Wasn’t originally on The Visitors album though.
Indeed, but the same period and (checks Wikipedia) the follow-up single. It’s not a watertight theory, but I’ll still sail it round the duck pond.
It was intended for the album after The Visitors, tentatively titled Opus 10, which was never completed.
You know the inner workings of a lesser-known Abba song (a huge hit for the no-hits clash, of course, no. 32? Strewth! Pass Comrade Joe the oxygen mask!!!) from the dire… but you hadn’t ever heard a Bowie album either before, during – that’s during – or after the dire?
‘spose that could happen.
I adore the 60s… but I do want to get on record that I have … that’s “have”… heard a Bob Dylan L.P.
Crazy though it might seem – what was I thinking!
To paraphrase Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, “Did David Bowie wrong you in another life, Deramdaze? Where does this intolerable hatred for him come from?” You don’t like him…we get it. Every. Single. Time.
That’s not quite true. He likes everything he released on Deram in the sixties.
I think we understand why you do this but I would suggest that beating your particular dead horses deader could be saved for another time and a place than a discussion about a perfect song that means a lot to many people.Just a thought.
Is he drunk? His post is pretty incoherent.
I think anybody asking “Why is dd saying the same thing that he always says?” must be pretty hammered. Dude’s the Fast Show of Th’Afterword – suits you, brilliant, ain’t seen me roight, does my bum look big in this, ethethethetheth Chris Waddle…. nice!
Even better than that…
Saying the same thing on the afterword every single day forever?* Aaaardest game in the world…
(*yes I can bloody talk)
Scorchio!
The Fast Show was funny.
Anoher theory, and the one I also like to believe is the true one, is that the person who was “murdered” was just her old lonely depressed self.
This far and no one has mentioned my favourite line.
It isn’t a phrase I have ever heard anyone else use, and it may have been coined for the rhyme, but it is immediately comprehensible, as well as perfectly suiting the melancholy descending notes. It’s a remarkable thing to achieve in a second language.
@gatz yes it is. I don’t think they ever got the credit for writing so many great songs in their second language.
May have been an inaccurate translation that ended up producing accidental profundity. Our Swedish speaking friends can help possibly.
What I consider to be their best song “The Winner Takes it All”, has a truly superb lyric.
Re: “May have been an inaccurate translation that ended up producing accidental profundity.”
Yes, you’re absolutely correct here, dai.
Swedes are obsessed with the phrase “inom ramen för” – “within the frame of” and use it incessantly. Everything tends to be within the frame of something else. One gets used to it, I suppose. It seems quite normal to me that Agnetha’s life should be within its usual frame!
That’s useful information and makes a lot of sense!
The words leading up to final use of ‘the day before you came’ are ‘And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain’. To a native English speaker the word suggests window frame more than anything else, so the understanding is that if she is sure it is raining because her life is so full of rain that she can assume she heard it on the roof then her usual ‘frame’, both literal as well as metaphorical, will have been filled with rain too.
The carefully placed images, the sense of a police interview (perhaps leading up to the unspoken confession of what she was doing in the missing time between 5 and 8), the variety of interpretation of what happened during or just after what are deliberately described as an utterly mundane series of daily events, all captured (or framed) within what is at first a rather melancholy love song working with the standard ABBA theme of an ordinary woman transformed by a man. The case is building for this lyric to be a masterpiece. Why do people write so many books about Bob Dylan when there are such rich pickings to be found here?
Can I just say I like the song?
Can I just say that Agnetha is wearing my old coat in that video. I always wondered what happened to it.
Either that or she shops in the same charity shop as me.
Dear god – have you all gone stark raving bonkers round the bend off your trolley what day is it who is the prime minister why did I take the brown acid mad? If it’s not “Let’s All Wind Up Lodestone Day” then….
And another one …
Fish in a barrel
You’re not obliged to read every thread, you know…
What? Now you tell me!
Nice enough song. Unusually. Second language. Bless.
Strikes me that if this blorum ever fractures into a million pieces it’ll be over ABBA. Or possibly Jaffa Cakes. Me, I love ABBA, can’t be doing with Jaffa Cakes.
Can someone do a Venn Diagram of Jaffa Cakes and ABBA? I’m in the middle.
So you’re the orangey bit?
No he is an Ipswich Town fan so he is the bitter lemon bit!
Away kit only .
I hadn’t considered that statement-to-police theory before. .. BUT…why would she be describing in detail to the police (or anyone else) the day BEFORE he came into her life? That’s of no interest to anyone.
I prefer Blancmange’s version because I dont like the widdly noise at the end of each line in the original and also I now believe it invented the Pet Shop Boys.
No, the ‘you’ would be the police and her whole narrative is her response to , ‘What were you doing yesterday at 8am?’ And so on. If you buy that theory of course, which I don’t except as a neat poetic device.
Great song, I’ve always loved it (both versions).
I reckon ABBA must have seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Its got some similarities to the song, and one interpretation of the song. Although by saying only that I’ve probably spoiled the film for anyone here who was thinking of watching it!
And great original post Dave, plenty of food for thought there. All that cold Scandinavian existentialism going on in the song.
Now, there’s a thing: an interesting thought given the Sight and Sound winner this year (decade)…was this the first AW mention of this movie? And in a curious context!
Surely @myoldman must win the white carnation for this insight!
I’ll accept the carnation thanks! (I never usually win anything!)
Condensed milk?
Oooooooooookaaaaaayyyyyyyy!
Also it probably needs a comma – The Day, Before You Came – which I think makes “the day” about the passage of time before the event rather than a whole calendar day before the actual day of the event.
Or am I being too pedantic, or grammatically wrong, or probably both!
Well at least you put the comma before before not after before.
Or, one for Moosey: The Day Before, You Came.
If I may interrupt this orgy of exegesis, can I just say that Agnetha Fältskog is an astonishingly beautiful and sexy woman? As you were.
Orgy of Exegesis – TMFT in a very real sense L
To quote Mark Radcliffe’s ‘Showbusiness’: “I always fancied the blonde one out of ABBA. Bjorn, I think his name was.”
I remember Clive James’s review of the ESC when they won, and paying tribute to her alluring lordosis, at which point thousands of Observer readers reached for the dictionary…
https://archive.clivejames.com/books/katie.htm
‘Clinically interesting lordosis’ no less.
Steven Wilson did a good cover of this song too.
I posted the same thing seconds after you. He’s a big ABBA fan. I didn’t make it to the end of the first verse of his version either. I guess that makes me one of @gatz ‘s fools.
I just gave it a listen. He’s no Agnetha.
He’d probably be the first to agree!
No no, you misunderstand – it’s fine not to like something, but I meant those people who secretly enjoy the poppy side of ABBA (which is most of it) but wouldn’t say so in public, so they have to reluctantly acknowledge that they admire a moodier song like this.
Surely one should be past not admitting stuff you secretly like by the time you leave your teenage years? Oh I see …
Some of us are just moody types* who like moody songs – that’s OK as well, isn’t it?
I mean, I like all of ABBA (even Dum Dum Diddle), but I have to be in the mood for it. I can well understand people who just don’t get frivolous and frothy, like, ever?** For them, ‘The Day Before You Came’, Like ‘Hide Your Love Away’ is probably all you need from pop acts. No need for secrets.
Probably every happy pop act has at least one ecstatically miserable song in their catalogue. Could be a thread in it…
*Goth
**teenagers
I love it when these threads take on a whole new life of their own. Off on all sorts of rambles and down nooks and crannies of people’s imagination. Some great theories. I’m not sure about the police interrogation one but the one where shes talking from beyond the grave is great and is a popular theory on t’interweb. I notice a lot of names not here who must have seen the thread and thought “ABBA! Blancmange!! Nothing for me here” and moved on to the Jaffa Cake thread. It’s a lesson we could all learn. I am expecting, no, hoping that someone does a pisstake of my post based on “Chiquitita” or “Fernando” as that would be funny and quite the right response.
Fernando trivia:
The only ABBA song (I think) that contains an English grammatical error:
Now we’re old and grey Fernando
And since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand
1 error in 100+ songs – in a second language.
Forgivable?
They also say “funny” when they mean “fun” (e.g. Money money money). “Since” is used like that in German “seit”, I presume that in Swedish it is the same, as it shares many similarities with German I believe.
“Ich arbeite hier seit 5 Jahren”, I have worked here for 5 years (“since” 5 years)
And as stated elsewhere I find lots of worth in Fernando and (especially) Chiquitita.
See also the use of “See you somewhen” by my two German pals.
We’ll see us next week.
That’ll be me away then.
One for the “hits with no choruses” round of the quiz, it does seem like it must have been on the tape the Pet Shop Boys were playing in the van when writing Behaviour.
As for what it’s about – clearly Bjorn and Benny, about to dip their toes in musical theatre, had begun working with Jeff Wayne of War Of The Worlds.
TDBYC is obviously meant to appear on the WOTW soundtrack just before Richard Burton’s intro and was only nixed after Jeff decided he needed to go root down and take his story back to the original period.
Just replace “the 19th Century” in Burton’s voiceover with the 20th and leave in
“It seems totally incredible to me now that everyone spent that evening as though it were just like any other”
That rain rattling on the roof is just signalling the coming storm..
Of course, if you want to hear something truly arousing, you should hear my own reworking – a pathetic litany of activities devoid of joy and meaning I engaged in before the day that changed my life –
…“I must have checked my Beatles thread to see there no replies
Beside the thumb a zero, tears were forming in my eyes
I must have cursed the Afterword “I won’t come here again!”
The Day Before Kocain”
Arf!
I’ve been binge listening “Mange Tout” today and I’ve noticed a couple of moments in TDBYC that I’d not noticed before. Neil throws in a “It’s a rich mans world ” as a backing vocal and they use some Coronation Street trumpet over the Dallas line. Then the jazz trumpet in the fade is just perfect. Their version is wonderful. As for this Top of the Pops performance. Moose could be right, they invented the Pet Shop Boys…
I always say this, but it’s worth remembering how thunderously uncool Abba were in 1984. They were from the uncool, non-punk 70s which in those days we wanted to forget. The past is different in the past.
The past is different in the future too. Brave choice then releasing it as a single. Then doing it on TOTP. Love it…
In North African clothes. The early 80s was just a big dressing up party, wasn’t it? Pop music was like a bunch of sugar-rushed schoolkids larking about backstage at the panto.
“Put those curly slippers back, you floppy-haired whippersnappers!”…. said Sir Peter Brook.
Mange Tout – very underrated album and clever play-on-words title.
As well as the Pet Shop Boys, they also invented sea shanties. This two minute a capella piece in Mange Tout must have had the label scratching their heads.
I thought the same today. “You’re going to what!!!???”and cover ABBA??” Then theres this like something off “Elton John” a real “First Episode at Hienton”
Something’s been bugging me about this. I said up there that I didn’t like the jaunty widdly bit at the end of every line in the original version – but it seems that all versions of Blancmange’s cover now also have this noise.
I feel sure that the original Blancmange version was different. My only evidence is this extended version which – when you listen to the lines – come across with more sadness because there’a less of an oompah band feel to it. None of this is remotely important but better out than in. Thank you, Afterword.
https://youtu.be/fSAADEYxTic
I did wonder when I read that comment. I only remember a widely bit in the Blancmange version. Not that it matters. It’s still darkly brilliant but glad you could share…
I want to know what happened the night before the day before you came. I suspect there was an incident with a tambourine, and the next day was one of careful and sombre monotony because of a stinking hangover.
She’d had the time of her life, and it was downhill from there.
The principal thing that makes the song interesting is the room left for speculation, about what it was that happened after the mundane day that’s described.
I think it was deliberately left unresolved so that listeners could interpret it in their own way. Great songwriting.
It’s like that Neil Diamond line about not even the chair.
Woah. Heavy.
I was introduced to this song by The Word – a version by The Real Tuesday Weld was on one of the covermount CDs. It maybe be because I heard it first, but that’s my favourite version. Worth seeking out.
Yes, that’s a good version.
Don’t mind me. I’m just throwing in a random comment in the hope that someone adds another and gets this thread the hamper it deserves before it slips off the front page, until it’s revived by Moose three years into the Hancock government’s term. This may be the most enjoyable thread of 2021 to date.
Did someone say “HAMPER”?
The Hancock government? Stone me, what a life…
It was the comment that the fast show is funny that caught the Corsair!
He caught the Corsair, and left me a mule to ride.
I know. I read about it in one of @Gary‘s tiny donkey magazines