Alan releases delivers his own take on great Abba classic
Brighton singer-songwriter Alan Bonner releases his version of the Abba classic The Winner Takes It All, ahead of his Brighton Fringe show. The release sees Alan hoping for better times as he eyes up a couple of Fringe dates – restrictions permitting – in June. In the meantime, setting the scene, he’s releasing the single – a track he had hoped to put out on his Abba-inspired album The Way Old Friends Do last year, but he didn’t get the permission to use it in time. The album, Alan’s fifth, has passed 18.5k streams on Spotify since its release in 2020 and has had a great response. The idea is that it is the soundtrack to the live show Alan was hoping to do at the Brighton Fringe last year. Instead, if restrictions are released, the show will get its premiere this year at The
Brunswick, Hove on June 11 and 12. “It is all a bit touch and go, but as things stand, it will go ahead if we are actually able to get the band together to rehearse. I am hopeful that if things get eased in March, then we can get together to rehearse in April and May and the first half of June. “The single was supposed to be included on the album that we put out last year, but for some reason we couldn’t get the rights to release the song. “When you do a cover, your label asks for the licence from the publisher to release the cover version, and they granted permission for all the other songs but not for The Winner Takes It All so we had to take it off the album. “But this year we resubmitted the request and it was granted. “I don’t know whether it was a mistake last year, but it does mean that we can legally release it this year. “The song is one of my favourites. It’s a really nice pop song, but it is actually more like an opera. It has got quite a range to it. The vocal range is very big, and it is a very theatrical song. And you don’t often get pop songs that are quite so emotionally on the nose as this one. “It’s a genuine piece of pop. Abba are a pop band, but it is more than that as well. “I love the original version, and I just wanted to put a different take on it. “But it is actually an incredibly difficult song to sing. At the time of recording it I was having some issues with laryngitis. “But also it is quite technically hard to sing. You have got to be in good voice to carry it with that big range.” It’s very much Alan’s take on the song: “I don’t see the point in covering a song if you are going to do it the way it was done before. “But obviously I am a male voice and have quite a husky male voice so it is bound to be different. “But I have stayed faithful to the structure and the emotional palate of the original. “My version feels a bit more like a theatre song, but obviously isn’t.
“It has a bit of piano and strings, a stripped-back element and a lot less production than the original had.” For the show, if all goes ahead, Alan will be backed by a five-piece acoustic band as they celebrate and re-imagine the Abba songbook in their own style. “I was five years old when I first heard them, sitting cross-legged in front of the record player at my grandma’s house in my shorts, with an ice pop melting down my chubby little legs. “Those voices, that sound. It was the first pop music I ever heard and I was hooked.” Alan describes the show as a nostalgic journey through the music that helped him survive a turbulent childhood and awkward adolescence, growing up “different” in a small rural market town in an “evening of homage, cabaret, reflection and celebration set to some of the best pop songs ever written.”
And that’s what we will be getting at the Brighton Fringe in June this year if the restrictions lift in time...