Why is an ABBA disco song from 1979 filling dance floors in 2020?
ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! was a hit in 1979, so why is it suddenly flooding dancefloors and radio airwaves again?
Entertainment
Don't miss out on the headlines from Entertainment. Followed categories will be added to My News.
How did ABBA’s 1979 hit Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) become the biggest song on dancefloors in 2020?
The disco anthem had its first second wind when Madonna sampled it in 2005 for her No. 1 Hung Up (the original only made No. 8 in Australia).
It was only the second time ABBA had cleared one of their songs being sampled (after the Fugees’ being sanctioned to use The Name of the Game in Rumble in the Jungle).
Last year Cher covered Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! for her album of ABBA remakes (Dancing Queen) while pop star Ava Max’s Torn doesn’t sample the song, but is heavily inspired by it (and fans have made their own mash-ups of both songs).
ABBA’s original started being used on Tik Tok videos over the last year, soundtracking all manner of activities, from fights to dance routines.
And in Europe, in the past 18 months remixes of the ABBA song started circulating online and being embraced by DJs.
Last year French DJ and house producer Folamour went viral with footage of him dropping Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! in a tent scoring a million hits on You Tube.
As soon as the ‘There’s not a soul out there’ lyric kicks in the young crowd start fist pumping until the chorus drops.
It turns out Folamour was playing UK DJ Mighty Mouse’s edit of Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!, titled Midnight Mouse, first released back in 2010.
It’s a reworking that does away with most of the vocals and instead dials up the funk and groove from the original, keeping the sweeping strings and building up to a huge drop by using only one vocal – the pre chorus and chorus – but no verses.
The Folamour-led success of version led to a string of other edits – including a more techno influenced one by Eckk titled Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Gram After Midnight.
In Melbourne, legendary DJ Sgt Slick had a friend come back from Europe last summer raving about how Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! was being played across the Greek Islands. “It planted a seed in my mind,” Slick said.
He grabbed the ABBA track – his favourite by the band – and loaded it into digital software program Ableton.
“I threw some extra drums in to bring it up to date a little bit, threw in some filtering to make it sound a little more modern and have a bit more punch,” Slick says.
Pleased with his work, he took his reworking to the Village Belle hotel in St Kilda that night.
“It wasn’t a packed night, but when I played it there was a stampede of girls running towards the dance floor with next level singing along.”This was three months ago. Slick started playing his edit everywhere and got the same reaction.
“I handed it around to a few friends who were playing it, within a week my Facebook inbox was blowing up, a few friends were hitting me up asking me for it. So that was when I thought OK this might be something we need to pursue at an official level.”
Rather than try and get his remix approved by ABBA HQ, Slick decided to remake his track from scratch as a cover version. A friend in the UK tracked down two females who trade in ABBA impersonation for the vocals and got all the music from the original replayed.
“We put it all back together pretty much in the same way as I put the original edit together. It sounds quite authentic, quite close to the original.
“It’s timeless disco. I didn’t want to make it too modern, not a house record with a drum beat, I wanted to choose sounds that accentuated what was already there and just made it a little more dynamic and low end and something DJs can play next to new music but that doesn’t necessarily sound like new music. As a DJ you’re always looking for something that’s going to work in your set, if you can’t find it, a lot of us will just try and make it ourselves.”
As well as including all the verses of the original, the Sgt Slick version’s filtering is a nod to Stuart Price’s work on Madonna’s Hung Up.
“I used to play that record regularly, I did a night at Heat Nightclub with Molly Meldrum for about 10 years on a Sunday. Molly loved Hung Up, he’d always get me to play that and then Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! straight afterwards. That idea’s been swirling around in my head since then.”
Since Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! was finished it’s accelerated at a hectic pace. The song has been championed at Melbourne’s Poof Doof club – a video was shot there less than a month ago, including club regulars Polly Filla, Lachlan Ford, Fembox XYZ, Josh Xavier, Misty Pical, Krayola and Chanel (Slick appears as one of the judges alongside Lady Diamond and Susie Robinson).
For Slick, best known for the hits White Treble, Black Bass and Let It Ride, it’s been an incredible welcome home. He’s spent the last seven years based in LA, signed to Kascade’s label and working in production (sometimes under the alias L’Tric), while still frequently DJing across the US as Sgt Slick.
Moving back home to Melbourne last year with his wife to raise their newborn daughter, the success of Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! has taken him by surprise. It’s been added across the board to Fox FM and KIIS in both Sydney and Melbourne, and is No. 1 on the ARIA Club Chart and set to crossover into the mainstream ARIA chart.
“The edit scene is a really big thing right now, you can go onto sites and buy and sell edits, there’s multiple versions of tracks from the 70s and 80s. I love doing edits, they’re fun and quick and relatively simple to do. The reaction to this one has been huge. It’s more immediate compared to what I’ve been doing my whole career which is producing music from scratch and working with songwriters and musicians and taking the long route of releasing officially through record labels. It’s a different way of working, I’m really enjoying.”
Most places where I play Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! you can literally hear people shouting the lyrics over the sound system. I haven’t come across that many times in my DJ career. These are people in their early 20s were not born when it was released but now they’re all about ABBA.”
READ MORE:
PUSSYCAT DOLLS HIT BACK AT SUNRISE ‘STRIP SHOW’ OUTRAGE