The morning after the night before, there is surely only one thing to talk about this morning: Abba. I do this for a reason because, it seems, there are only two other topics to debate at the moment, which are the EU referendum and the thuggery in France. There is a story that greatly concerns me about Abba. Last week, they got together and sang a song for the first time in decades. I have some advice for them. Leave it at that.
Nestling alongside my AC/DC and Ryan Adams albums are various Abba compilations. To my ears, Abba made some of the finest pop music ever. Like the very best music, it sounded oh-so-simple, but it was actually oh-so-complex. I have seen pub bands trying and failing to perform Abba tunes to anything like an acceptable level.
They exploded onto the music scene in 1974 at the Eurovision Song Contest, which is not somewhere you expect to find stellar music. Waterloo, the winning song, was strikingly different from any other Eurovision winner. You knew, as soon as the ivories tinkled and the two female singers appeared on stage that this was the winning song. Since then, I have failed to predict the winner during the show – apart from the year Buck’s Fizz won – and that’s for one reason: Abba were brilliant.
My Abba albums are rammed with great tunes, with very little filler. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote tunes like no one else, a unique sound which no one could possibly replicate. And in Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad they had two strikingly beautiful brilliant singers. It was irresistible.
And then, they disappeared. The last Abba album was in 1981, The Visitors, the last stage performance some years after. And that was it. Musicals, the occasional solo album and Abba was no more. The constant public clamour for a reunion, for the band to satisfy our nostalgia, went unheeded and rightly so. But the clamour has never gone away.
I hope they never get back together. The band members are now in their late sixties and early seventies. They will not look anything like they way the looked back in the 1970s and they probably won’t be able to perform like they once did. Quite simply, they were of another time. I’d like them to stay there.
Can you imagine the media scrutiny, especially of the women? Women, you will know, are never allowed to grow old in an industry that is run by men. It is okay for Benny and Bjorn to bear the lines of age, but women, especially Abba women, must look like they always did.
And do they need the money? I mean really? I’ll bet even today the royalties from record sales and downloads, not to mention from radio plays, must still be enormous. If you are fabulous rich, why do you need even more money? Abba were always reluctant live performers anyway. What will have changed?
I hope Abba resist the reunion, like Robert Plant denies us the Led Zeppelin reunion and like David Gilmour denies us the Pink Floyd reunion. I am not desperately interested in the nostalgia circuit per se, although I am going to see Bad Company and Kula Shaker later this year, but I know the millions do. Good for them. But I hope Abba resist the urge and the money to play the old songs. We’ve got them all on CD and DVD and nothing will sound anywhere near as good as the originals.
Thank you for the music, Abba, and what great music it was. I’d rather remember you as you were, rather than on a nostalgia trip just for the money.
