KEY POINTS:
I like Abba. There, I said it. Always have, always will. And it's not in some postmodern ironic way either.
I liked them as a boy. I once owned the sheet music of Fernando. It's harder to play than it sounds. Harder to sing, too, especially after
your voice breaks.
Also, many years later, in a former job editing a local music mag, I once borrowed a helicopter to recreate the cover of Abba's Arrival album for the front of the rag. It was all to do with Flying Nun releasing an Abba tribute album of their acts covering the hits, mostly in a postmodern ironic way.
I finally found the right model chopper after much ringing around and pleading and got four Nun stars to dress up in white jumpsuits - Chris Knox made a particularly scowly Bjorn from memory - and there we had it: an Abba cover, cover version.
And just last week I was drafted into a quiz team as a music "expert". The only question I got right had the answer "Super Trouper". Then again, the typical question was what is the name of the bloke in the Corrs? Quite.
These days, I still wonder at the meticulousness of Abba tunes - is there anything in Dancing Queen that isn't a hook? It's a like a barbed-wire fence of a song, one barb after another. Hook here, hook there, hook, hook, hook. There, stuck in your brain for the next 30 years, by fiendish pop scientists and their glamorous singing lab assistants. I liked the blonde one best. I think everybody did.
So clever were those BB guys in Abba, they even put the chorus at the beginning of the song. Just in case you thought the beginning of the first verse - "Friday nights and the lights are low" - was a bit low for those pre-pubescent, school disco singalongs.
All of which is one of the reasons why when I got to see Mamma Mia! last week - which opens today, yes this column has a point - I thought I had better not review it.
One of the other reasons is that it - and the hit stage musical it was based on - is not designed for me, being a bloke.
Also, I'm not one of the 30 million people who has seen its original stage concoction, which at least makes me one of the very few people who will ever see the movie not knowing how the story ends.
Doubt this happened in the stage version but the film ends with a couple of murders - of some of the songs by some of Mamma Mia!'s big-name stars. One seems to think the licence to kill in his previous employment applies here as he creeps up on and garrottes one of Abba's best-loved tunes without mercy.
There are other victims along the way, too. Lots of them.
There's also a whole 20-minute patch in the middle of the film where it's one B-side after another. Like, haven't these people heard of medleys? Or deleted scenes for the DVD?
It's set on a Greek island, of course, which is only fitting for a musical of English-language Swedish pop with an Italian name. For Abba pretty much conquered the rest of Europe in their heyday, whether it was Waterloo (France, Britain er, Prussia), Voulez Vous (France again), Chiquitita (Spain) before the songs stretched out towards Mexico (Fernando) and Australia (the best forgotten Bang-a-Boomerang). It also means every song gets an actual Greek chorus.
Not that the local peasants get to say much or break many plates. ("Quick Zorba, the 007 guy is about to sing again. Take him out with the crockery. No one will notice.")
Mamma Mia! will be huge.
Here's hoping it will be the Abba revival to end them all.
