Super Trouper
Inside the new ‘immersive’ Abba exhibition
Saturday morning, 1am, and hundreds of sweaty twentysomethings are bellowing out the lyrics to Thank You For the
Music. It’s the last song of the night, and the attendees of the ABBA After Midnight clubnight know every single word.
A genuine appreciation of the sateen-clad Swedes is no longer an embarrassing thing to admit. For the past 15 years, ABBA fans have been crawling out of the woodwork, while musicians including Brian Eno, Noel Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker, who narrates ABBA: Super Troupers – a new
Southbank Centre exhibition dedicated to the band – have declared their admiration for Anni-frid Lyngstad, Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog.
ABBA: Super Troupers is an immersive exhibition in which the group’s rise to fame is retold in a series of spaces that recreate rooms where ABBA history was made: the Brighton hotel room in which they celebrated their 1974 Eurovision victory, and the Polar music studio, where Andersson and Ulvaeus, along with engineer Michael Tretow, perfected the songs.
The first space, a Seventies living room, is there to place ABBA in the cultural context in which they blossomed. A television relays details of the political situation of 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 has curated the show.
In 1974, ABBA beamed on to
500million 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 the UK and nine other countries to shift nearly six million copies.
The song also contained their pop fingerprint: cantering, 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 wrought from melancholy: “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 told The Guardian in 2002. In 1976, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau warned: “Pervasive airplay might transform what is now a nagging annoyance into an aural totem.” Three years later, he was no more convinced: “We have met the enemy and they are them.”
Musicians, however, thought differently. “[They] always knew how good the songs were,” explains Joe Bennett, a professor in pop music studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
“In the Seventies, no one would admit that they liked Abba,” Brian 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 1979 hit Oliver’s Army; Blondie’s Chris Stein referenced it for their 1979 single Dreaming. By the early Eighties, the two marriages at the heart of the band – Ulvaeus to Fältskog and Andersson to Lyndstad – 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 has never ended. The band licensed their back catalogue to a motley crew of 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,” explains Bennett. “There was no way, legally, to buy a collection of ABBA singles. And there’s always a market for nostalgia.”
The late Eighties and early Nineties 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 topped the UK charts instantly.
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 feelgood films with ABBA at their heart. “[The mid-nineties] was the moment it was OK to like ABBA again,” Bennett explains, “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.” That’s not to say that ABBA had become cool. In fact, when playwright Catherine Johnson was approached in the late-nineties to write a musical centred on ABBA hits, she thought the idea was “extraordinarily funny”. 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 £450million 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.
ABBA’S legacy also lives on in Sweden’s production industry. Max Martin, the elusive Swedish superproducer responsible for the hits of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Adele, produced some of his early work in Ulvaeus’s and Andersson’s studio. And Swedish songwriters continue to triumph in Eurovision – in the past six years they have crafted 10 final-worthy songs for rival countries.
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. Pop has started to be taken seriously in a way that the music industry of the Seventies would never allow. We’re no longer ashamed to thank them for the music – and it feels good.
ABBA: Super Troupers is at the Southbank Centre from Thursday until April 29 2018
Andersson and Ulvaeus were determined to make every song sound different from the last