ABBA was the confidence boosting answer to a young boy’s S.O.S.

ABBA’s arrival in mid-70s Australia was greeted with great excitement by the youngest of the Meagher boys.

ABBA in 1974, the year before Molly Meldrum featured them on Countdown.

DAVID MEAGHER

3 min read

12:00AMJanuary 05, 2023.

Updated 9:52AMJanuary 05, 2023

Sunday night dinners were a casual affair in the house I grew up in. We had our main meal at lunchtime, after attending church in the morning. Dinner was toasted sandwiches or lunch leftovers in front of the television. There was always a squabble over what channel to settle the TV on, except on Sunday nights when the consensus was Countdown on ABC TV. One night in 1975, when I was nine years old, Molly Meldrum introduced a song and said something I’ve never forgotten: “These guys are going to be huge, and I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more from them.” My ears suddenly stood to attention.

The song was S.O.S. by ABBA and from the first few notes of the piano introduction, I was hooked. I stared at the screen with my mouth wide open like I had finally received the Holy Spirit. I’d never heard anything like it. Where had these people been all my life? Up until that point, music was noise or church hymns as far as I was concerned, I just didn’t engage with it. My four older brothers dominated the stereo and their choices – Skyhooks, Dragon, the Ted Mulry Gang – all sounded the same to me, which is to say boring. My parents, on the other hand, listened to Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Shirley Bassey and I related to them even less.

I watched the S.O.S. film clip on Countdown with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I knew my brothers would hate it for all the reasons I loved it and potentially change the channel and rob me of the ecstasy I was experiencing.

Two women were front and centre, singing and the sound was nothing like the overtly masculine rock music my brothers liked. It had a chorus you could sing along to, even if, at that age, I didn’t really know what the song was about. The female vocalists had just the right pitch for a pre-pubescent boy to emulate.

All I knew after that Countdown experience was, I needed more.

When the song ended I ran into the kitchen and told my mother what I wanted for my birthday, which was coming up. She failed me. The Best of ABBA was sold out everywhere and the sales assistant told her that if her son loved them so much he’d “also be into this” and handed her the Village People’s Macho Man album. I ripped off the wrapping paper and was deeply let down. What was I supposed to do with this? It would be a few years before I fully realised what the Village People were all about and the awakening they stirred in me, but that’s a whole other story.

Molly Meldrum on Countdown

I knew that I was different to my brothers and when I found music that wasn’t what they liked it was confirmation for me that being different was not just okay, it could actually bring you great joy. I didn’t have to like what they liked or what adults told me I should like because I was a boy. It’s hard to be different when you’re one of five boys all expected to be interested in the same thing.

I knew ABBA wasn’t cool. When your grandmother compliments you on your music choices you can kiss goodbye to being at the cutting edge of style. I tried to be interested in what the other boys at school and at home liked: football, cricket, girls, and their music choices.

And the more I tried the harder it was to feign interest, and other boys could tell. They bullied me and were annoyed that girls preferred my company to theirs. That was mostly because we spent lunchtimes chatting about ABBA and re-enacting their music videos in the school playground.

When people ask me what age I was when I realised I was gay I don’t have an answer because I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t. I can only think of a period that was pre-ABBA, and it wasn’t a very happy one. Discovering ABBA wasn’t exactly a coming out. That would happen in earnest a few years later and involve Barbra Streisand’s Guilty album, but again, that’s a whole other story. Falling in love with ABBA was the realisation of me as an individual instead of as just one of the Meagher boys.

I still listen to ABBA and lately I’ve been revisiting complete albums rather than a greatest hits compilation. I didn’t love Voulez-Vous when it was released in 1979 and could sense my beloved ABBA was on the decline. Now I think it’s a masterpiece.

Ditto Super Trouper, which was released a year later. It’s possibly ABBA’s best album. As for their 2021 album Voyage, well I won’t hear a bad word about it.

Straw poll of ABBA favourites

At a dinner party of all middle-aged gay men recently, one of the guests went around the room and asked everyone to name their favourite ABBA song. But there was a caveat: Fernando and Dancing Queen were excluded.

Here are some of the answers:

● Chiquitita

● S.O.S.

● Knowing Me, Knowing You*

● The Name of the Game

● The Winner Takes It All

● Our Last Summer

● If It Wasn’t For The Nights

● Me and I

● Take a Chance on Me

● Honey, Honey

*my choice

David Meagher is the editor of Wish.

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ABBA was the confidence boosting answer to a young boy’s S.O.S.

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Straw poll of ABBA favourites

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