I seem to have gone into hiatus on my "All the records by 40" Project. It's not that I haven't been playing music, quite the opposite. If I travel anywhere on my tod, I always have my mp3 player with me, and at 4629 tracks it has a reasonable cross-section of my music collection.
So I take the project up again with a pop CD. I am not quite sure what to do about cassettes. I shall be without cassette playing capacity until I can be arsed to buy a cassette deck to plug into my amp.
And quite fittingly, the first album that comes up is by Abba (quite shocking that the HTML-writing community hasn't come up with the code for the trademark Abba reverse 'B'. Fittingly, because, although I originally randomly began pop/rock CDs at 'Jones', Abba is alphabetically apt, and in keeping with the fact that Abba were almost certainly the first group that I really liked. I mean apart from The Wombles etc, and they don't really count. I even had an "Abba Songs for the Recorder" book. Okay, I admit it, I've still got it.
That was when I was a child. As a cool teenager I entirely repudiated Abba, which later proved to me how stupid the adoption of cool is. Abba's legend goes on. And why? Because, pretty consistently, they wrote fabulous songs, and performed them ably. It's easy to sneer at poppy tunes, much harder to emulate them. And it wasn't as if they were all bright and shallow. On this, effectively their Greatest Hits Album . Supertrouper, for example, has a dark sound to it, and the mood as expressed in the lyrics is ambiguous. Facing 20,000 of your fans, how can anyone be so lonely. But at least 'you're in the crowd tonight'. I suppose performers the world over have similar fixed feelings. and it was this song that first made me realise that the showbiz life wasn't all glamour. Billy Bragg also does it splendidly.
I find it fascinating to follow the trajectories of their private lives through the chronology of their songs. The Winner Takes It All is really quite weird - written by the blokes, sung by Agnetha, I think in the aftermath of her break up with, Benny or Bjorn, I used to know who was married to whom. Heck, I saw Abba the Movie at Sale Odeon. I was that big a fan. And I tell you what, if they played the Dome for £500 quid a ticket, I'd be there! It ain't gonna happen. One of Us is in much the same vein.
My absolutely favourite Abba song is "Thank You For the Music", and, let me tell you, I love nothing more than bopping round belting it out loud, using the remote control as a pretend microphone. but I can't right now. I have my earphones on; Jimmy's watching a film in the next room, and he thinks that a whole album of Abba is too much. It's only a single album, I protest. But singing with headphones with witnesses (think of my poor neighbour...) is a no-no.
All of the rest of the world thinks Dancing Queen is the best Abba song. It comes on pub juke-boxes a lot and I can rarely resist the temptation to get up and dance. I think just about anybody can dance to it.
We bought my father Take A Chance on Me for his fiftieth birthday. I am not sure he particularly appreciated it!
Another of my favourites is I Have A Dream, another of the break-up songs, very melancholy.
Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight, the anthem of every* single woman and many a not so single one. Musically, another departure from the stereotypical sunny happy Abba. And had a Sitcom named after it. As did, of course, Knowing Me Knowing You aha...
Fernando is damned hard to play on the recorder, I can tell you.
And then there is the difficult Does Your Mother Know? At the time (Junior 4 - or Year 6 to you youngsters) I thought it was cool that Abba had gone all punk with heavy guitar riffs and I wanted to buy it with pocket money. But my parents put their foot down with a lame you already have too many Abba records... I can't believe that Radio 1 played it without batting an eyelid. Does it ever get any radio in these less innocent days?
Overall, a bloody good album!
* straight, obviously
