MUSIC
My My! ABBA Through the Ages
Giles Smith
Simon & Schuster, $34.99
We were blathering, my way cooler rock star friend and I, about one of the more clever tunes by one of the most credible pop artists of all time. All right, it was Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. At last, all technical nuances noted and superlatives bested, words sufficient to describe this record’s boundless shapeshifting genius failed.
“It’s the song that keeps on giving,” my learned friend concluded, palms raised in rapture. “It’s like an ABBA song.”
Somewhere in my head, a piano stopped. I knew what he was saying. Whatever your cheese tolerance, in terms of sheer structural invention and proliferation of hooks-per-minute, ABBA is simply the toppest of the pops. But I mean, we were down the pub. Anyone could have heard us.
Fifty years since Waterloo won Eurovision, his personal entry point to ABBAmania, English music writer Giles Smith is intent on understanding this “love that dared not speak its name”. It calls for a deft balance between giddy devotion and theoretical deconstruction, cute personal history and canny field research, and a sustained tone of laugh-out-loud whimsy.
Smith owns the non-sequinned ABBA fan’s curious blend of shame and quivering ecstasy from the outset. It’s 1975, and he can’t help buying and fixating over the enigmatic Swedish quartet’s self-titled album on cassette. But he files it spine-inwards between his 10CC and Wings tapes, “so no one would know it was there”.
It’s a lovely illustration of pubescent angst and ardour entwined, typical of our dag-scholar narrator’s self-effacing journey. But the undying glow of first love remains his north star, despite the gravity of teenage cool and even the requisite music journo cynicism that threatens to rewire the grown-up brain.
His masterstroke as a storyteller is to couch history in present-day events. First up, a 2023 ABBA expo in Waterloo, Belgium, becomes a picture window to the flimsy backstories of Bjorn Kristian Ulvaeus, Agnetha Ase Faltskog, Goran Bror Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.
Miraculously we see them arrive afresh, as if for the first time. Just don’t expect to know them. Whether smiling in taut lycra from a strange, icy distance on ’70s TV or looming like a glittering, four-headed phantom over our lives ever since, their absence is a huge part of what makes our longing endure.
Pilgrimages to the ABBA Museum in Stockholm, a nervous Novello Theatre session of Mamma Mia! The Musical, the ABBA Voyage digital avatar concert premiere in London, and other pointedly “now” celebrations of the legacy invite us to witness the thriving fan affection that keeps the ABBA industry sparkling.
Even at a sadly under-attended recent screening of ABBA: The Movie at Chiswick Cinema in west London, these encounters are invariably sweet and funny, all the more so for the author’s anxious eye on what he might discover, and who might have seen him slip inside.
Amusing as his Alan Partridge-sized metaphors and very Q Magazine turns of phrase can be, Smith is intensely serious about the music. During his travels, he makes time to analyse at least a dozen of the songs on ABBA Gold in forensic terms, obsessing over minutiae of composition, arrangement, performance and production.
“The instinct,” he writes as SOS goes under the microscope, “always seems to be to tighten the arrangement against the possibility of our impatience.” Hence that song’s proggy synth hook neatly halved before the last chorus, just as the intro piano is truncated for the outro. And whoever sees that sudden glam rock power chord apres-chorus bit coming?
Such cunning is beyond mere cliche. Any cheap tunesmith knows that when an idea feels like it’s dying, “the late key change is songwriting’s ER-room defibrillator”, Smith writes. “Stand clear! Ker-chak! And suddenly everyone’s back in the room and singing in F#.” But ABBA only pulled that stunt once, he asserts, on Money, Money, Money, and even there it’s timed to pre-empt rather than satisfy our expectations.
Dancing Queen, by most measures the most successful ABBA song of all, drives six whole chapters of Smith’s story, starting with the time the Sex Pistols used it to frame their mid-’90s reunion shows, then shimmying back to a zillion weddings and up a hundred charts and into BPM theory and behind the Iron Curtain and into a possibly overreaching defence of the word “tambourine” (oh yeah!) that runs to four pages.
If it’s the definitive story of those four handsome people from Sweden you’re after, as Smith acknowledges more than once, there may never be a better option than Carl Magnus Palm’s weighty Bright Lights, Dark Shadows. But knowing me and knowing you, ABBA is about something more profoundly personal and eternally mysterious than that, and this is the book you really need. Just don’t read it in public.
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