Thank you for the music: how ABBA’s appeal (finally) became mainstream
Loving ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-old boys in the playground. But 50 years after Eurovision victory ABBA is finally supercool.
It’s Britain at the dawn of 1974, and things aren’t looking that great. Energy prices are through the roof. Strikes abound. Production is in decline and people are getting battered by galloping inflation and a soaring cost of living. The governing Conservative Party is badly split over trading arrangements with Europe, politicians on the far right are enjoying disproportionate levels of media attention, and the country will be asked to vote in two general elections in this single year – a level of political instability unknown in this country since 1910. Familiar? Yes, I know. Plus, extreme weather events are forecast: storms, floods and even tornadoes.
Embattled Prime Minister Edward Heath declares a fuel-saving “Three-Day Work Order” from New Year’s Day, restricting industry to three days per week – kind of “working from home”, but without the work. The Order will stay in place until March 7.
Meanwhile, on billboards and in leaflets, an “SOS” campaign is urging people to “Switch Off Something”, there are power cuts, and the national speed limit has been lowered from 70mph to 50mph in order to conserve petrol.
Amid this general slide backwards, a feeling is spreading that Britain in general, and England in particular, can’t do anything properly any more – apart, possibly, from football hooliganism, which is about to enter a particularly busy period. So is the Irish Republican Army, whose mainland bombing campaign will, in the coming months, produce explosions at Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, and pubs in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham. If the fabric of society holds, the coming summer will at least offer the diversion of a football World Cup in West Germany – but not for England, who have failed to qualify.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. On Saturday April 6, in Brighton and live on television throughout Europe, the UK will host the 19th Eurovision Song Contest. I am spending this particular Saturday night – like pretty much every other night, actually – watching TV in the company, more or less, of my parents.
I say “more or less” because it’s fairly obvious that the only one who’ll be fully concentrated on the screen throughout tonight’s protracted spectacular (subsequent programs may overrun, cautions our Cliff-Richard-fronted copy of the Radio Times) is going to be me. My mother, typically, with an anglepoise lamp ablaze beside her armchair, will be devoting her energies to creating one of the patchwork quilts that she seems to be producing in industrial quantities in this period. My father, equally typically, will be dividing his attention between the screen, a newspaper, and the backs of his eyelids.
I alone in this room will be achieving the state of trancelike engrossment which Eurovision no doubt merits – though not, I should admit, because I am helplessly in thrall to the contest’s allure, but because I learned a long time ago in this sitting room that any discernible lapse in concentration on my part will automatically invite an instruction to go to bed. And at this point in my life, the avoidance of bed is essentially the mission every evening. (The contest, incidentally, is starting enticingly late for the semi-professional bed-avoider: 9.30pm.) Anyway, whether I make it to the end or not, Eurovision is on, which means that I am about to have my first meeting with Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida.
“And we move now across into Sweden,” says David Vine, the BBC’s voice; he usually commentates on skiing and snooker, but he’s on secondment to the Brighton Dome tonight.
Here they come then – the ABBA group. There’s a couple of bars of galloping guitar, bundled together with a brightly chiming piano, and as it plays, Agnetha and Frida come barrelling down the catwalk from the back of the stage and into our lives, microphone cables paying out behind them.
“My my!” they sing, and it’s as if the show has suddenly shifted a gear and somebody somewhere has stepped on the accelerator.
These days we are entirely comfortable with ABBA’s ubiquity, their presence in the air we breathe. I pluck this randomly from my own experience: in the summer of 2023, wandering around a market in France, I heard a stallholder break briefly into song while looking for change for a customer. “Money, money, money!” he sang. Then I went along the road and had coffee in a cafe where Knowing Me, Knowing You came on. Driving back to where we were staying, I stopped in at a supermarket and dropped food into a trolley to a backdrop of Take a Chance on Me.
Three casual encounters with the music of ABBA in the space of about 90 minutes, then. Just occasionally, as you move around Europe at this point in history, you can be forgiven for concluding that it’s ABBA’s world and we only live in it. What gets harder to remember is that it hasn’t always been this way. It would surprise many of the people happily thronging the ABBA Voyage show in London, unselfconsciously browsing the ABBA sweatshirts and ABBA key fobs and ABBA tea trays in the arena’s store, to hear that a love for ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-olds in a school playground. This author – with his carefully concealed copy of the 1975 album ABBA on cassette – can personally attest to that.
The fact is, for a long time it seemed that where ABBA had come from – both in the sense of Sweden and of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, where they first came to prominence – had placed a tight restriction on what the band and their music could ever be or mean to people. Almost three years after they sang Waterloo in Brighton, a review in the Guardian of a rare ABBA live performance in London described them wanly as “four Euro-persons” who made “elegant Eurorock pop”, and remarked by way of conclusion that it was “nice to be able to put four faces to a pleasant sound”. There is, of course, no term in the critical lexicon more damning than “pleasant”. As for the term “Euro“, it comes up again and again in writing about ABBA in this period and is rarely meant positively either.
Two years after that, in 1979, the American rock critic Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice, didn’t even try to gild it: “We have met the enemy,” he wrote, after experiencing ABBA in concert, “and they are them.”
As ABBA tried to make their way in the world, it rapidly emerged that the Eurovision Song Contest was a unique kind of springboard that could also function as a trap. Blasted high off that Brighton stage, ABBA would look around for months and years afterwards and discover that somehow all the scenery had tiresomely come with them and was threatening to drag them down again. So: a Swedish act, a Eurovision act … ABBA and their defenders would be a long time struggling to answer the band’s repeated arraignment on these twin charges, both of which, of course, had the disadvantage from the defence’s point of view of being completely undeniable.
“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Here at least was evidence of a thaw. But it was also evidence that even defenders of ABBA for a while had to tie themselves in knots of equivocation. So great … and yet so cheesy. Even their most fervent admirers would find themselves acknowledging sometimes that there was something confounding about ABBA, something that was just beyond the grasp.
ABBA are the band you know best that you barely know. Of course, there are ABBA fans and superfans whose commitment to the study of Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida in all their manifestations is both clarifying and humbling. But in the slightly less specialised and more ad hoc place where ABBA intersect with the general listener, it’s clear that a certain amount of cloudiness about the band frequently persists.
Somewhat distant even at the blazing height of their fame, the band were only fully and openly embraced by the world some years after they had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Consequently, today, familiarity with ABBA’s music outstrips familiarity with anything else about them. The band’s members are, by any definition of the term, superstars, yet in 2024, even in circles where ABBA are adored, a confident and unerring ability to know your Benny from your Björn – or even, in some cases, your Agnetha from your Frida – betokens ABBA-knowledge at practically PhD levels. We know, perhaps, that they were two couples whose marriages came apart yet who somehow kept the band on the road even after that, channelling the pain of separation in timeless songs such as The Winner Takes It All and Knowing Me, Knowing You. But Björn wrote the lyric for the second of those songs two years before he separated from Agnetha and when they were together, seemingly happy and enjoying the arrival of their second child. And Benny and Frida didn’t get married until after Björn and Agnetha had decided to split up.
The truth is, we don’t know much, and most of what we think we know is wrong or improvised or conjecture or (most frequently of all) projection. Glory in its fullest form came to ABBA posthumously, when they had stepped down from the stage and out of the studio; and so, with a purity which is rare in the history of pop – and practically impossible in the social media age – Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida burn most brightly in our minds as a set of bombproof songs which a very large number of us appear tirelessly happy to hear. The songs, we do know. But how do we know them?
To all intents and purposes, ABBA finished being a band in 1982. They had eight years together as recording and performing artists – about the same as The Beatles. Then, albeit without ever making an official announcement that they were done, they withdrew, apparently exhausted or wrung out to some extent, and tired of each other’s company, and moved on to other things – solo albums in the case of Agnetha and Frida, the composition of musicals in the case of Björn and Benny. At that point, ABBA were widely felt to have outlived their purpose and, more than that, were regarded in many quarters as irredeemably naff.
There is no image of the members of the band on the cover of ABBA Gold – the 19-song compilation album put together by the Polydor label in 1992, 11 years after the band’s last set of studio recordings – because the album was carefully market-researched in advance of its release and the feedback from the focus groups was that although people were potentially interested in buying a record of ABBA’s hits, and more than happy and able to nominate the songs they wouldn’t mind hearing on it – Take a Chance on Me, The Name of the Game, Super Trouper – they didn’t especially want to own something with the band’s faces prominently displayed on it. So the label went with simple gold lettering on a black background. Such were the feelings around ABBA in 1992.
Yet it was ABBA Gold which began to change the climate around the band, ushering in what we can now regard as ABBA’s renaissance period, helped along, somewhat randomly, by the Australian films Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding, both released in 1994 – and in due course by the 1999 jukebox musical Mamma Mia! and, in 2008, the first of the two films that arose from it.
At that juncture, a decade into the 21st century, ABBA, once presumed dead and buried, were arguably more alive than they had ever been. ABBA Gold has now sold more than 32 million copies worldwide and is behind only Queen’s Greatest Hits as the UK’s best-selling record of all time.
And then, as 2021 ended, almost out of nowhere, the band re-emerged among us – not just with one final, completely unexpected and time-defying burst of new music, but in the form of the magnetically engaging and mysteriously moving Voyage stage show, which was nothing less than a complete re-imagining of the live concert experience and which revealed the band as a set of idealised, computer-generated versions of themselves which were somehow at once entirely them and not them at all.
At this point, approaching 42 years since their last formally ticketed concert and with the band members now well into their seventies and apparently entirely indifferent to the idea of performing together in the flesh, ABBA had probably never been more prominent – and had arguably never been more ABBA.
“I’ve been reading you all my life,” a gushing fan once told the author Samuel Beckett.
“You must be very tired,” Beckett replied.
Well, here I am, a full half-century after Waterloo, and in a position to say much the same to the members of ABBA, were I ever to meet them. “I’ve been hearing you all my life,” I could say, “or for nearly all of it that I can remember. And no, actually, before you ask, I’m not tired. Or not of ABBA, anyway.”
Because what would it even mean, in 2024, to say you were tired of ABBA, except by way of admitting that you had run out of patience with pop music altogether, or that pop music had run out of patience with you?
What’s certainly true is that, over the 50 years since Waterloo, ABBA have been liked by pretty much every kind of person and in pretty much every way that it’s possible to like a pop group. They have been consumed in a hurry as sugary pop stars and appreciated soberly as abiding musical craftspeople of exceptional talent. They have been enjoyed ironically and enjoyed entirely sincerely. They have been a guilty pleasure and an utterly unashamed one. Their records have managed to define whole periods and to slip free of history altogether, with the result that, in 2024, their songs are warmly familiar both to 1970s nostalgistes, hungry to revisit their childhoods, and people who weren’t even born when the 20th century ended. They have been feted alike as exuberant gay icons and as the reliable providers of pan-generational dance music for heterosexual wedding receptions. Their music knows the unequivocal love of the very best among us, and yet has also been used to soundtrack lockdown-busting piss-ups in Downing St (the notorious “ABBA party” of November 2020, about which Benny Andersson said, with an understandable instinct for dissociation, “You can’t call it an ABBA party. It’s a [Boris] Johnson party”).
In this wildly elastic range, they outperform even The Beatles. Certainly, it is given to vanishingly few groups to have been so many things to so many people at so many different times. It is given to even fewer to have been so many things to so many people while the group’s members simply sat in their various houses for four decades doing nothing (or, at least, nothing ABBA-related).
And that, surely, is the most delicious detail in the deeply satisfying narrative of ABBA’s eventual widespread vindication. All of the things for which they were routinely teased and dismissed along the way eventually turned into things for which they could be uncomplicatedly celebrated and loved.
All Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida had to do in order to be fully and resoundingly appreciated was … nothing. They just had to stand by until the rest of us came around.
Here I am, 44 years later, at ABBA Voyage, for the second time, watching not even ABBA but a simulation of ABBA sing this song about heartache, scars, grieving and the longed-for release from grieving. I’m also watching a very artfully realised total eclipse of the Sun, which is the backdrop for this number, the room glowing orange and then slowly falling dark as the song plays, which is quite something.
And, you see, the thing is, everyone at ABBA Voyage sings along to the chorus of Chiquitita. That’s the point of it – they all just pile in. They pile in on it like you wouldn’t believe, raising their arms and swaying.
Chiquitita – the power of the singing, the defiance of grief in it, the iron nature of its consolation, there is stuff in that song that I wouldn’t and couldn’t have got to with any amount of effort in 1979.
And it is just so extraordinary how this manifestly artificial show ends up evoking so much in the way of feelings. In an interview, co-producer Ludvig Andersson attributed that ostensibly unlikely outcome to the blurring of “the borderline between real and fantasy worlds”, and how the show’s peculiar position between those borders “triggers feelings about youth and ageing, mortality and immortality”.
And there seems to me to be a lot of truth in that, and especially at this exact point in the show, when the Sun is disappearing before our eyes and the audience has got hold of that chorus, and I mean, really got hold of it, and the whole place is a sea of arms in this gradually darkening room, and two of my brothers are dead and, oh, for god’s sake, now I’m crying in the middle of ABBA’s bloody Chiquitita.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages (Simon & Schuster, $34.99)by Giles Smith is out now. Available for purchase here.
