The author’s photograph in Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung says it all. The late rock critic is fixing the camera with a baleful, distressed glare and pulling open his jacket to reveal a promotional T-shirt. ”Abba,” it reads. ”The largest-selling group in the history of recorded music.”
Bangs may have spent the 1970s championing music every other critic believed unworthy, but clearly even he drew the line somewhere. Thirty years ago, the idea that Abba might be worthy not just of serious consideration, but of a nine-CD, two-DVD box set collecting their every studio recording and video, would have been both bizarre and hilarious.
Even now, Abba: The Complete Studio Recordings seems slightly incongruous. Today, only the priggish would dispute Dancing Queen‘s place among the great singles. Yet, Abba have never been entirely rehabilitated. A faint odour of naffness still clings.
Initially, The Complete Studio Recordings sounds pretty catastrophic. Their 1972 debut Ring Ring is unspeakable. In Lukas Moodysson’s film Together, Abba’s music symbolises a glamorous life that exists somewhere beyond the grim walls of a 1970s Stockholm commune, but He Is Your Brother and People Need Love sound more like something its inhabitants might enjoy: limp, hippy sentiments over oompah pop, as grey and lumpy as oatmeal. The latter song features yodelling.
Waterloo (1974) has a loveable brashness and, crucially, no yodelling, which counts as an improvement. But the Abba of 1975 cemented songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’ signature style: glossy harmonies, subtle orchestration, glam power chords — a melodic sense they claim was derived from Swedish folk music — a certain fearlessness regarding hooks lesser writers might have considered too obvious, and a predilection for tick-tock rhythms as clipped as Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s accented vocals.
A year later, Andersson and Ulvaeus were on a remarkable roll, writing songs almost dreamlike in their perfection. Not just the singles — Dancing Queen, Money Money Money, Knowing Me Knowing You, The Name of the Game and Take a Chance on Me — but album tracks too: the glorious, expansive Eagle, the gripping Tiger.
And, yet, Arrival and its follow-up, The Album, still seem less like a product of the 1970s than the early 1960s, when LPs were afterthoughts, rushed out under pressure and padded with filler. One difference: a 1960s album’s filler was forgettable, not an adjective applicable to Arrival’s Dum Dum Diddle.
Abba had written some weird lyrics before (see What About Livingstone? and Sitting in a Palm Tree), but Dum Dum Diddle is something else. It is about a woman who feels sexually threatened by her partner’s violin. That was the thing about Abba. They either made you feel like you had temporarily ascended to heaven or they made you feel like sawing your own head off with embarrassment. The one thing they couldn’t do was mediocre.
Ironically, as Abba began to fall apart, they got really good at making consistent albums. Penultimate effort Super Trouper is a remarkable musical sleight-of-hand. Beneath the irrepressible melodies lurks one of the dourest records ever to be palmed off as pop music. The the mind boggles at how many suburban parties on December 31 1980 must have been blithely soundtracked by Happy New Year, its blissful singalong chorus deafening listeners to lyrics that slump on the stairs, drunk and sobbing inconsolably.
Finally came The Visitors, gloomier and more sophisticated still, the last vestiges of schmaltz eradicated in favour of chilly synthesisers. The title track is far removed from the usual perception of Abba: platform-booted, lightweight and ripe for reinterpretation. That image may be too deeply embedded to ever be shifted but, along with Abba’s various flaws, The Complete Studio Recordings reveals some startling hidden depths. — Â