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British writer Giles Smith was 12 and sitting in front of the television when ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Fifty years later, the Swedish band’s music is arguably as popular as it has ever been: the Mamma Mia! musical continues to rack up record-breaking runs internationally, the pioneering ABBA Voyage virtual concert simulation is entering its third sellout year in London, and the band’s songs are familiar globally to young and old alike.
Yet, for 42 of those years the band hasn’t formally existed: they quietly ceased to function in 1982. In My My! ABBA Through the Ages, Smith sets out to retrace the ABBA story, to listen anew to the songs and to try to crack some of the secrets of their astounding success and longevity. Here, in Book takes, Smith shares three things he hopes readers will learn from his book.
ABBA were the masters of reinvention:
ABBA had a “glam rock” period but it lasted less than three and a half minutes, which is to say the length of Waterloo. Nothing they released subsequently sounded anything like that record. Indeed, nothing ABBA released sounded much like anything else they released.
What, exactly, is the thread that links, for example, Fernando, a Mexican-inflected campfire ballad on the theme of freedom in the form of a conversation between weary war veterans, with Money Money Money, a piece of vampy musical theatre with shades of You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two from Lionel Bart’s Oliver!? And what links either of them with Dancing Queen, a dancefloor-filler with oddly magnetic properties in its opening bars and a haunting tale of delusion in its lyric?
ABBA seemed to be starting over every time they put out a single – which rather explodes the common dismissal of them, back in the day, as un-riskily commercial. Who, in the disco-dominated mid-1970s, would have considered releasing Fernando, a song which features a fife and drum, to be the obvious commercial move? Yet it sold at least 10 million copies around the world and was number one in Australia for 14 weeks.
For the eight years that ABBA were properly with us, they were constantly shape-shifting, the only consistency being their melodic invention and the stickiness of those melodies. Consequently, you can pastiche the clothes – the loosely cinched judo outfits, the baby blue onesies, the minidresses with cartoon cats on them. You can pastiche the videos. You can even produce satirical mock-ups of individual songs, as Rowan Atkinson’s Not the Nine O’Clock News team did in 1981 by converting Super Trouper into Supa Dupa. But producing a pastiche generic ABBA song would be next to impossible. Where would you begin?
ABBA is a heavy band:
Hefty power chords thundering from an electric guitar are possibly not the first thing you think of when ABBA come up, but they are definitely part of the mix. Listen to the coda to the chorus of SOS, which has a surprisingly hefty guitar underpinning. Which would explain why Glen Matlock has always claimed that SOS was his inspiration for the riff that starts the Sex Pistols’ punk anthem Pretty Vacant. Unlikely, but true. There is a considerable, and perhaps under-estimated, power across the ABBA catalogue in Agnetha and Frida’s vocals, too. Björn once said, of the way those two voices blend together, “There’s a metal in the sound and you can hear it from far away.”
ABBA, we can agree, have three vocalists – Agnetha, Frida and the sound made by Agnetha and Frida combined. Listen to Chiquitita and hear how much power and defiance there is in those twinned voices when they hit the chorus. With ABBA, even the songs you might be tempted to file away as light and frothy frequently turn out to be full of strength and firmness of purpose in their delivery and production. Perhaps the longevity of those songs is less surprising in this context. They were built to last.
ABBA discovered the secret of eternal life:
Few predicted exactly how well ABBA Voyage, the pioneering concert spectacle, would do. Certainly, nobody with any experience of previous duff “hologram” shows (Nat King Cole, Whitney Houston, Tupak Shakur even) was expecting ABBA’s virtual experience – in fact a glorified three-dimensional film show – to be quite so convincing and involving.
It’s now booking its third year in London and will no doubt perform as strongly again in Australia or Las Vegas, often touted as potential future locations. Meanwhile, in what seems to appeal to them in their mid-to-late-70s, the four actual members of ABBA get to sit at home. They can be there, right in front of us, every night, without being there at all. It’s very ABBA in that sense. And it can run for as long as people have the appetite for it, which appetite shows no sign of flagging.
ABBA were pioneers of the music video; they were very early to the jukebox musical and have certainly outperformed everyone else in that area; now they seem to be first in the art of surviving forever.
One thing I learned while researching this book:
ABBA superfans love their karaoke. I mean really love it. I attended the International ABBA Fan Club’s special ABBA Weekend in Stockholm last year, and as the dedicated ABBA-only karaoke session carried deep into its second hour, and the fifth or possibly sixth version of The Winner Takes It All rang out, I realised I was not only badly under-dressed but also significantly out-karaoke’d. Why wouldn’t they sing, though? Theirs is a story with the happiest of endings. These fans loyally weathered the thin years of the 1980s, when ABBA’s stock was at its lowest, and now time and history have brought the world around to their point of view.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages by Giles Smith (Simon & Schuster, $39.99) is out now.
