OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Alice Vincent explains how after all these years, it finally became cool to admit you are a fan of ABBA.
For the past 15 years, ABBA fans have been crawling out of the woodwork, while musicians including Brian Eno, Noel Gallagher and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who narrates ABBA: Super Troupers — a London exhibition dedicated to the band — have declared their admiration for Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog.
ABBA: Super Troupers is an immersive exhibition in which the group’s rise to fame is retold in a series of spaces that re-create rooms where ABBA history was made: the Brighton, England, hotel room where they celebrated their 1974 Eurovision victory, and the Polar Studios in Stockholm, where Andersson, Ulvaeus and engineer Michael Tretow, perfected the songs.
The first space, a 1970s living room, is there to place ABBA in the cultural context in which they blossomed. A television relays details of the political situation in England at the time: the three-day week, a hung parliament and an unstable economy. “We noticed a lot of parallels between today and what it was like at that time,” says Nick Dent, who curated the show.
In 1974, ABBA beamed on to 500 million television screens across Europe.
The band had released Ring Ring the previous year but Waterloo, the title track from their second album, proved to be their breakthrough, topping the charts in 10 countries and selling nearly six million copies.
The song also contained ABBA’s pop fingerprint: rhythmic melodies, with cleverly layered vocals that sound more than the sum of their parts. Hidden beneath the stomping spectacle of it all lay Ulvaeus’s lyrics, which sounded euphoric but, upon closer inspection, were melancholic: “My, my, I tried to hold you back but you were stronger / Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight.”
Waterloo was a huge hit. But, inspired by The Beatles, Andersson and Ulvaeus were determined to make every new song sound different from the last. A year later, the band released SOS, considered by Ulvaeus to be ABBA’s “first really exceptional song.” A slew of perfect pop standards followed: Mamma Mia; Fernando; Dancing Queen; Money, Money, Money; Knowing Me, Knowing You.
While ABBA’s chart success was undeniable, their appeal remained a mystery to music critics.
“For the main part of the group’s lifespan, the critics despised us,” Ulvaeus said in 2002.
Musicians, however, thought differently. “(They) always knew how good the songs were,” says Joe Bennett, a professor of pop music studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
“In the ’70s, no one would admit that they liked Abba,” Eno said in 2010. “The snobbery of the time wouldn’t allow it. I really fell for them.”
The 1976 hit Dancing Queen, in particular, has been a source of envy and inspiration for artists ever since. Elvis Costello called it “manna from heaven” and leaned on it heavily for his 1979 hit Oliver’s Army. Blondie’s Chris Stein referenced it for the 1979 single Dreaming.
By the early ’80s, the two marriages at the heart of the band — Ulvaeus to Faltskog and Andersson to Lyngstad — were in tatters. The fallouts were documented viscerally in ABBA’s final studio albums: Super Trouper in 1980 and The Visitors the year after. The heartbreak seemed to make for some of the band’s best songs, such as The Winner Takes It All. Ulvaeus wrote the lyrics — “But tell me does she kiss / Like I used to kiss you?” — while drunk, and then made his ex-wife sing them alone. In 1982, they went on a break that never ended. The band licensed their back catalogue to various record labels and, for that decade, ABBA’s music was available in a plethora of compilations. That stopped in 1989, when PolyGram bought the rights.
“PolyGram took the decision to starve the market of ABBA compilations,” says Bennett. “There was no way, legally, to buy a collection of ABBA singles. And there’s always a market for nostalgia.”
The late ’80s and early ’90s had seen the charts bombarded with genres borne from technology — the likes of techno, hip hop and acid house.
ABBA offered something different and timeless. In 1992, Gold: Greatest Hits scratched that global itch for top-notch, old-fashioned pop. It has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. From there, ABBA became a cultural touchstone once again. In 1994, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding were released: two Australian feel-good films with ABBA at their heart.
“(The mid-’90s) was the moment it was OK to like ABBA again,” Bennett says, “because enough time had gone past for us to feel that combination of irony and nostalgia for one generation to pick up on the previous generation’s music.”
Over the course of the next decade, Mamma Mia! became one of the longest-running musicals around the globe, spawning a film adaptation that grossed US$609.8 million worldwide. A sequel is due next year. Meanwhile, the 21st century has seen dozens of musicians reclaim ABBA, notably Madonna, who sampled Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! in her 2004 dance-floor hit Hung Up.
Ultimately, though, the reappraisal of ABBA says more about us as music buyers than about them as a band.
Thanks in part to the rise of streaming, where we can listen to any genre we want at the touch of a button, traditional musical tribalism has broken down — and, with that, music snobbery. We’re no longer ashamed to thank them for the music — and it feels good.