What do the late Queen, Sex Pistols fans and the West End have in common?
Their love for Abba — who, as a new book argues, have never given the world a chance to grow tired of them
MY MY! ABBA THROUGH THE AGES by Giles Smith (Gallery Books €21.75, 336 pp)
ON A WARM Sunday evening in June 1996, a crowd of 30,000 gathered in Finsbury Park, London, for a reunion gig by punk icons the Sex Pistols, now 20 years older and several pounds heavier.
Just before the Pistols come on, the PA puts out some hits from the 1970s. Ah, thinks the writer for the Pistols’ website as he watches, it’s a reminder of the awful, flimsy lightweight music from the time when the Pistols arrived to blast us to the outer stratosphere.
He hears what sounds like a murmur of discontent. But no, it’s not that; the huge crowd of punk rockers is in fact singing along to Dancing Queen.
It seems that now and at all points in between, this is Abba’s world and we are just passing through.
This week, several broadcasters have featured programmes by or about Abba to mark 50 years since their Eurovision victory. Who can honestly say they don’t like them?
The songs are familiar to everyone, from the older fans who remember Waterloo and Eurovision in 1974 to Gen Z groovers born this century.
Who nowadays hasn’t got a favourite Abba song (though it probably changes constantly as you hear the next one)... is it SOS? Is it Mamma Mia? Fernando? The Name Of The Game? Perhaps The Winner Takes It All? And so on.
They’ve been played at a No 10 lockdown-busting booze-up (‘the Abba party’). They are the only Eurovision winners to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Even the late Queen apparently told someone she especially liked Dancing Queen as ‘I am the Queen and I like to dance’.
THERE can’t be many pop groups who mean so much to so many people, certainly without appearing on stage for decades.
This lovely book — as bright, shiny and uplifting as an Abba hit — is an attempt to explain why the foursome, Anni-Frid (the dark one), Agnetha (the blonde one), Benny and Bjorn (can you tell the difference?), has such an abiding hold on the world.
Giles Smith, an author and music fan, was first hit by Abba when they burst on to the scene with Waterloo. For the young Giles, growing up in the 1970s in suburban Essex with its 7in singles, Vesta chow mein meals, three TV channels, radiograms and mini-cassettes, Abba, in all their gaudy, life-enhancing exuberance, were a revelation.
This book also tries to grapple with the mystery of the universal pop song: how it works and how it inserts itself into our heads and hearts.
Ultimately of course, no matter how much we know about descending piano figures, well-placed glissandos, unfolding hooks (and Abba songs don’t just have one hook, they shimmer with them, all as catchy as hell), surges of power chords, key changes and so on it doesn’t much help us — otherwise we would all be writing millionselling hits. Which we’re not . . .
Dancing Queen is Abba’s most successful song, and their first track to reach a billion streams on Spotify. The band started work on it in August 1975, and were still working on it several months later: these things don’t come easy.
The song is guaranteed to get anyone on to a dance floor, even if, like me, you would rather eat your feet than try to dance.
Former British prime minister Theresa May, one of many to pick the song for their Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, also made the ill-advised decision to come on to the stage for her speech at the 2018 Conservative Party conference actually dancing to Dancing Queen.
It was partly an ironic riposte to the flak she got for jigging awkwardly to some schoolchildren in one of those ghastly ‘meet-the-people’ moments on a South African tour. But generally politicians should be told not to try to show their ‘lighter side’.
Smith puts in the yards, but
whether they are ‘hard yards’ is questionable.
He visits southern Belgium and Waterloo, where the visitor centre is celebrating 50 years since Eurovision with an exhibition of photos and even a karaoke room.
Of course, Abba are not the only people to have put the town on the map: Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington did their bit, too.
Later, Smith heads to the theatre and Mamma Mia!, now the sixth-longest running show in the history of the West End, and the ninthlongest on Broadway, ever.
It’s been seen by more than 65 million people and brought in more than €3.5 billion. The song itself is three and a half minutes of pop perfection, filling our minds with memories of Retsina-blurred holidays in the Greek sunshine. What’s not to like?
He takes us to East London and the purpose-built arena for the ‘virtual’ show, Abba Voyage. It’s May 2022, the first night, and Smith finds himself standing just a few feet from the real Abba, now all in their 70s.
He has to resist the urge to scream. Why is the allure still so overwhelming? Partly because they have never given the world the chance to get sick of them. Their final public performance was in 1982 and they have made just a handful of private appearances since.
What they never did, Smith points out, is take up a Las Vegas ‘residency’; they have never gathered round studio mics with other stars for a post-disaster charity single; nor have they turned up to perform a couple of numbers sandwiched between Bryn Terfel and Brian May at a pre-Coronation bash at Buckingham Palace.
They have done none of the things that ageing pop acts do to keep themselves in our memories.
They never grew old. They simply got out and stayed out, living in Europe and growing ever more popular.
WHENEVER I visited the strictly nonbudget Swiss resort of Zermatt for hiking and skiing, winter or summer, I was always sustained by the faint hope that Anni-Frid, who lives there, would run into me on the slopes and decide I was the one she wanted to spend her life with.
Sadly, this never happened. Her loss though I guess: she will just have to live with it.
En route, Smith has a huge number of very enjoyable sidebars, too. He is always happy to take a pop at critics who got it wrong: Clive James, for example, who once branded them as ‘incurably negligible’, though he later recanted, writing a few years ago that ‘you could dance to them for ever’.
The Guardian, too, gets it in the neck: the paper offered up the view that they were four ‘Euro-persons’ manufacturing ‘disposable pop songs’. Though as Smith points out, it’s an odd kind of disposable that lasts for half a century and has a museum devoted to them in their home city, Stockholm.
In the interests of full disclosure, do feel free to disregard any of this, as I should say I have been a long-time colleague and admirer of Smith. But I hope you don’t: you will be missing a treat. His book is as sharp and shiny and beautifully constructed as the very best of Abba. It’s also very funny.