Not bubblegum pop: Abba’s story is Nordic noir with sequins

Mamma Mia! proves Abba is one of the most important cultural influences of all time, and the unsung geniuses of Nordic noir.

Abba’ Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus attend the Mamma Mia 2 premiere at the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith on July 16. Picture: Getty Images

Mamma Mia! Here we go again. Again. After the sale of more than 380 million records, a stage opera, countless tribute bands, a film that grossed $828 million, and now a sequel, it is time to acknowledge Abba as one of the most important cultural influences of all time, the most powerful force to come out of Scandinavia since the Vikings, and the unsung geniuses of Nordic noir.

Because beneath the spangled jumpsuits and jaunty tunes, the Swedish band follows a tradition of Scandinavian melancholia that can be traced back to Swedish and Russian folk music, the works of Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg, all the way through to the novels of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, and the dark television of The Killing and The Bridge.

Abba’s cultural soulmates are not Bucks Fizz and Showaddywaddy, but August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman and Greta Garbo. Abba are not just serious, but seriously sad. For far too long Abba have been dismissed as cheerful bubblegum pop, but almost every one of their great songs contains elements of both musical and psychological complexity, strains of despondency, nostalgia, confession, sorrow and pain peculiar to cultural and artistic life above the 59th latitude. These songs come from a place where the sun all but vanishes for several months of the year. Sunny, they are not.

Abba's lyrics are worthy of the best of Nordic noir.

As Benny Andersson observed recently: “A lot of these songs I’ve written … are not very happy songs. They may sound like they are, but there’s a lot of melancholy in them.”

The Winner Takes It All explores the agony of separation and wreckage of romance (But tell me does she kiss/ Like I used to kiss you?); Money, Money, Money is the furious lament of the frustrated gold-digger (“And if he happened to be free/ I bet he wouldn’t fancy me”); the stomping anthem Super Trouper reflects on the solitude of fame (“Facing twenty thousand of your friends/ How can anyone be so lonely?”). Knowing Me, Knowing You contains some of the saddest lyrics in pop. (“Walking through an empty house, tears in my eyes/ Here is where the story ends, this is goodbye.”) Even the “uh-huuuhhhh” at the end of the refrain carries the jolt of erotic yearning for lost love.

Abba were never afraid to ­tackle the big issues. Fernando finds two battle-scarred veterans reminiscing about the Mexican Revolution of 1910. There is female sexual self-assertion (“Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight”), but also the sense of cruel vulnerability when love fails (“How can I even try to go on?”). Take Waterloo, Abba’s breakthrough Eurovision winner of 1974. “The history book on the shelf/ Is always repeating itself” plainly echoes George Santay­ana’s dictum that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

This simple love song explores the idea that surrendering to love can feel like a defeat. It also encapsulates the French attitude to war: “I feel like I win when I lose.”

Star of Mamma Mia 2 Lily James with Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus. Picture: AP

Even today, the band remains intensely earnest. Here is Bjorn Ulvaeus on Brexit: “It would really make me sad if Britain would leave and what that would mean. It’s like someone you love leaving you. It’s emotional.” With its sad simplicity and slightly mangled grammar, this is a perfect Abba sentiment.

There was melancholy sewn through the band. Anni-Frid Lyngstad was the product of a wartime liaison between her Norwegian mother and a German soldier during the Nazi occupation, and suffered the social ostracism that went with it. Agnetha Faltskog, like Greta Garbo, always wanted to be alone, and took refuge for 17 years on the island of Ekero. After the two couples that formed the group broke up under the strain of celebrity, the song ­lyrics grew steadily darker, musically more intricate and ever farther from the inane gibberish with which they started (anyone remember King Kong Song and Bang-a-Boomerang?)

As a soprano and mezzo-­soprano, the women offered a wide vocal range. The later songs, frequently written in mournful minor keys, have considerable harmonic complexity, and much heavier rhythms. Money, Money, Money alternates the chords of the augmented sixth and dominant 13th to remarkable effect.

With skilled artifice, the band managed to make something very difficult seem brash and catchy. It was not nearly as easy as it sounded. As Dolly Parton, another great philosopher of pop, once put it: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Even Abba’s outfits had a serious point: under Swedish tax law, stage clothes were tax deductible only if it could be demonstrated they would never be worn for private purposes: hence the sequins, satin flares and ridiculously stacked boots.

Just as Scandi noir crime fiction explores murder and misogyny beneath the bland social surface of Nordic countries, so the sombre lyrical content of Abba’s songs was overlaid by camp exuberance; beneath an extrovert surface lurked painful introspection. That may partly explain why Abba was adopted by the LGBTI community at the height of the AIDS epidemic — songs to party on to, despite the pain and loss.

So I say … thank you for the music, for continuing a great Scandinavian tradition, and for some of the most upliftingly gloomy songs ever written.

The Times