Gateway To Geekery: Abba

Geek Obsession – Abba: The four-person travelling Swedish divorce case were, and remain, pretty much the last word in 70s European pop music. All four members had musical careers before the band took off and some measure of success in their home country Sweden before coming together for their first album, Ring Ring, in 1973. After that they went on to become one of the most successful bands of the 70's after winning Eurovision in 1974 with “Waterloo” and their last album, 1981’s The Visitors, caps a hugely successful, world-spanning career. Yet despite massive sales figures (at one point, second only to The Beatles), it’s only comparatively recently that they have been critically re-evaluated, spending most of the 80's as a punchline and only beginning to emerge from their credibility exile after queer culture reclaimed “Dancing Queen”. The straight-up pop music of their early career still sparks with energy and enthusiasm that’s incredibly infectious, and the later melancholic, yet never self-indulgent, works are testament to a band at the absolute height of their powers. That they could combine such pop sensibilities with such depth speaks greatly to the quality of the material they produced.


Why it’s Daunting: It’s not daunting as such, or at least not in terms of their actual output – eight albums in ten years isn't exactly like trying to plough your way through every obscure Miles Davis album or every Grateful Dead live bootleg, but there is a lot of baggage to get over. Most obviously there’s the whole camp element, which can be terribly off-putting to non-fans, and anyone who’s even glanced at a picture of the band has to get past the unassailable 70’s-ness of it all – sequins and quality are not an easy match. And of course it’s virtually impossible to listen to “Knowing Me, Knowing You” without thinking of Alan Partridge (a shame really – it’s a phenomenal song in its own right). Also, the fact that their best-known material isn't often their best work (stand up, “Dancing Queen”, this is your moment) and the fact that some what is their best work (the aforementioned “Knowing Me, Knowing You”) is sneered at doesn't help matters either. But get past all that and there’s a grown-up, perfectly crafted pop band whose reputation, especially in the U.S., belies the quality of their writing, the sheer craft and musicianship of all four members, and the maturity of what the band became. Appreciating Abba is like appreciating similarly under-rated but now critically reclaimed The Bee-Gees – you just have to get over some things.


Potential Gateway: Super Trouper (1980)



Abba were never much of an albums band for the first half of their career. They released them, obviously, but they started out as a bunch of unconnected songs (hits and filler, essentially, and on the first couple of albums it’s not immediately clear which is which) and only later in their career did they begin to develop actual albums. Super Trouper finds them able to produce an album of thematic and musical consistency which built on the work done over the course of the previous three albums, but yet to deliver their swansong and absolute masterpiece, The Visitors, a year later. There’s a handful of well-known songs (the title track was a massive smash), yet one of its best-known tracks is also one of the most bleak songs the band ever released (and there’s some competition there). “The Winner Takes It All” is the sound of defeat put to music, and everything about it, from the production to the vocals to the lyric, is brutally effective. It’s a cold, chilling song, icily produced and delivered in the midst of personal pain that just makes the performances all the more real and raw. Elsewhere, there’s more musical experimentation than might be expected – the towering chords of “Me And I” suggest someone in the band picked up a copy of Trans-Europe Express at some point (see also: “The Day Before You Came”, their all-but-final and best single), folk, reflective ballads, faux-rock, and whatever the hell “The Piper” is. The only slightly off note is the closer, “The Way Old Friends Do (live)” which benefits neither from being live, nor being stuck at the end of an album that seems to have little use for it, although it does feature some impressive vocals. It’s not a bad song, exactly, just fractionally out of step with the rest of the material.


Next Steps: 

Generally speaking, the later in the bands catalogue you dip into the better the results will be, and with the exception of odd miss-step Voulez-Vous, every album is better than the one that precedes it.  And while musically and lyrically things just get better and better, the production on their work should never be under-estimated either – it’s immaculate (except for weird outlier “Dancing Queen”, which put up against something as well produced as “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie (A Man After Midnight)”,”The Name Of The Game” or, yes, “Knowing Me Knowing You” just sounds hollow and a touch amateurish).

Their final album, The Visitors, is by an absolute mile their best, and deserves a much stronger reputation than it has as one of the best albums of the early 80's (or any point in the 80's or any other decade really). From the bizarre opening title track about a Soviet dissident waiting to be taken away by the secret police, the accepted finality of “When All Is Said And Done”, and the near unbearable yet very different kinds of loss captured in “One Of Us” and “Slipping Through My Fingers”, there’s not a single note out of place. Even the “boys get to sing” comedy song of “Two For The Price Of One”, with its “And now! The punchline!” ending, which could sound jaunty in isolation takes on notes of strained desperation when surrounded by much more weighty material. And the brooding cover, all dark reds and four people unable to look at either each other or the camera, is incredibly evocative. Had the final track, “Like An Angel Passing Through My Room”, also been the final track of their career it would have been a perfect ending, a clock coming to rest after everything else has wound down.

From thereon out, just ramble through the remaining albums, though don’t forget almost-final single “The Day Before You Came”. It was released post-The Visitors and effectively acts as the end of their career (though one more single would be released after it).  It's as good as anything they ever recorded, and though it’s included in re-releases of The Visitors as a bonus track it deserves much more, a haunting, ghostly presence that stalks the night of their final album. It’s a spectral, brooding piece, almost impressionistic in places, filled with a sense of foreboding.  It's also gifted with probably the finest and most accomplished lyric of the bands career, and two vocal performances that are devastatingly effective (the haunting, almost operatic backing vocals, wound through the instrumental breaks, make the track worth listening to alone, and the fragile vulnerability of the lead vocal sells every single word of the unreliable narrator's tale). If you listen to nothing else following this, listen to “The Day Before You Came”. It’s not all brooding Swedish melancholia though, and there are just as many wonderful moments of pure pop joy, from the rightly-celebrated Europop of “Waterloo”, through the Spanish-influenced “Chiquitita”, the vocal gymnastics of “Hole In Your Soul”, or the widescreen cinematic feel of “Eagle”, there’s plenty to be enjoyed and cherished. For the rest, it won’t take you that long and every album has something to enjoy. Even if you need to dig a little on the early ones to find it.




Where Not To Start:

There are more Greatest Hits albums than there are actual studio albums, and you probably know everything on them anyway. Some, like Abba Gold, give a reasonable but not especially well-rounded skip through their career, but they mostly cover the singles and while Abba are a great singles band there’s much more interesting stuff to unearth. Their debut album, Ring Ring, with its half-hearted vanishing-point cover and truly odd mix of European folk, ballads and… other stuff that defies easy categorisation doesn't make for a good starting point either. It isn't entirely without its charms but the most impressive thing about it isn't what it is so much as what it begat. Oh, and avoid anything live. Abba weren't a bad live band by any stretch, and Benny and Bjorn are genuinely gifted musicians, but nothing they do on stage really adds much to the material. They only released one live album proper, the inventively-named Abba Live, and it’s the very definition of inessential – released four years after the band had given up the ghost, with none of the members involved at any stage, badly edited and smeared in post-production horrible 80's synth drums, there’s absolutely no reason to check it out.



Potential Gateway Playlist:

Hole In Your Soul

Tiger

So Long

On And On And On

Head Over Heels

Summer Night City

The Day Before You Came

Money, Money, Money

The Piper

I’m A Marionette

Super Trouper

The Visitors

The Winner Takes It All

Arrival

Voulez-Vous

Waterloo

S.O.S.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Like An Angel Passing Through My Room