ABBA – "Mamma Mia"

Anyway, this seems like the most splendid of beginnings to whatever a new chapter might be called. Easy to forget that Abba were for some while in danger of becoming just another, if unusually sparkling, Eurovision one-hit wonder – “Ring Ring” and “I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do” only just scraped into the Top 40, and “So Long” missed the chart entirely. Apparently – and despite continued immense popularity at home and across Europe, as well as new, sustained and massive success in Australia (like Blondie, Abba hit really big in Australia before they did in Britain) – this really stuck in Bjorn and Benny’s craw since they viewed the UK as “the home of pop” in terms of Beatles idolatry and so forth.

So there’s more than a chance that “S.O.S.” was written very much with the British market in mind and even if it wasn’t it is compiled, as a record, as a song and as a performance, so skilfully and (emotionally) truthfully that their return to our Top Ten was more or less assured; such hurt yet such jauntiness, such classicism yet such perkiness.

“Mamma Mia” is for those who prefer the happy ending Abba (the Hallstrom Abba?) to the slowly dying Bergman Abba, and as with “Bohemian Rhapsody” my response to it was largely sexually dictated – Agnetha and Frida share lead vocals throughout and they show such smiling generosity of mind and spirit that it’s easy to fall in love with them; the descending intimacies of “Just one look and I forget everything” as they crouch down towards the listener (i.e. me) was a most, um, warming spectacle and immediately I didn’t want them to let me go. Further analysis of my reaction to this record is not suitable for a public website.

Abba were OK, one single every so often, fine.

But after being at an Abba ‘tribute’ band concert, realised I didn’t want them ONE AFTER THE OTHER STOP!!! NO MORE!!

The world of chart pop holds its collective breath, not quite sure how to follow what had just hit it. For the next year or so, I fancy, pop really doesn’t seem to know where it’s going. And the one act that can now come into its own, defining an era (the second half of the seventies) more completely and comprehensively than anything else, is necessarily a fundamentally theatrical one.

Once again, a significant change in the cultural landscape coincides with a change in my own life. I’m still a postgrad at Liverpool but as Mamma Mia hit the top I was settling in to teaching practice, my first experience of the real world of work. Its infectiously bouncy cheerfulness made trundling up to West Derby on a bus crowded with scallies through the rain just a little more bearable.

Abba always seemed a bit of a guilty pleasure at the time, and a lot of one ten years later. Although in ten years from now my daughter will be a big Abba fan and there’s no guilt to be had in shared delight. There’s no snarling anger there but hey, what’s not to like?

Waldo, have I never told my story of how I opened my front door once to find Julie Christie standing there? And spent some time on a bed with her? (The living room of the Notting Hill flat was full of kitchen stuff while the kitchen was being refurbished, so guests were entertained in the bedroom.) Surely I must have? I never tire of telling everyone else!

I think this is being sold just a hair short in order to leave room for future 10’s (in the future tense). I think the ‘transitional’ sound being identified here is really part of the strength of the record – the slightly (slightly) more down-to-earth instrumentation gives room for a little more vulnerability. Not to say that vulnerability isn’t present in the great “imperial” Abba singles! But both this and “SOS” are built around storylines of doubt, being unable to resist overwhelming emotional force, and so it’s helpful that the band themselves don’t feel like an unstoppable juggernaut. In that, it’s arguably a stronger record than “Waterloo,” which has too much bombast, not enough surrender. (This works on paper but falls apart in reality, where I think “Waterloo” is a better song…)

The reading of the phrase “Mamma Mia” as a “scrambled eggs” type placeholder is interesting, but off, I think – it *is* a rather goofy lyric on paper, but it works as an exclamation. Either this is a song about a forbidden lesbionic relationship (and I’m sure it’s been justly appropriated for that purpose by some fans), or she’s complaining about the situation to her literal mother figure (which would put a very awkward strain on the second person lyric), or…or, well, she’s just saying “Mamma mia!” which I admit most of us today associate primarily with the Super Mario Brothers Super Show.

I dunno – I find it an emotionally affective song, chockablock with hooks. Tom, you seem to give them credit for that while also holding it against them – to say that “Just one look!” is reminiscent of “Waterloo” sounds like good news to me! (But maybe I’m just biased by the fact that I *HATE* “Money, Money, Money,” and resent the notion that its piano part is in any way superior to the one here.)

My defensiveness of this song, of course, stems partly from the fact that I’m a very freshly-minted fan, having only really gotten into their stuff since last December… from what I’ve discovered so far, I love all their stuff from this period, including the maligned, chart-negligible singles discussed above….

Mamma Mia is in a transitional phase in its own history right now. What I always considered a good, but pretty uninspiring Abba classic, has with the musical and the upcoming film version has the potential to eclipse even Dancing Queen as the shorthand track for Abba for a new generation. Indeed when you look at the urge to make a musical out of Abba songs, there would seem to be much better songs to base your narrative upon (not least Dancing Queen which has a whole Billy Elliot plot embedded within it). So now the throwaway exclamation of “Mamma Mia” actually has a subject – the mother in question with her three liaisons.

(Trailer here – Meryl Streep seems to be having a lot of fun).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzhxHsqQvsI&feature=related

This is odd, what with what Tom calls Benny and Bjorn’s showtune impulse, that this is less showtuney. It is also interesting that unlike “We Will Rock You”, Mamma Mia is nowhere near as convoluted at stuff its songs in (there is thankfully no character called Fernando in it). But I’d be surprised if the film wasn’t a hit, and seeing what happens to Abba’s already pretty much rehabilitated profile anyway this year. 32 years on, Mamma Mia is about to have a a whole new high.

Yes! Yellow – as in shiny yellow New Pop, so six years later is very apt here (and the next number one is also going to have a bearing on New Pop but SB’s eyeing me up closely)…

Oddly, ‘Money Money Money’ was the one Abba song that we all knew at primary school at the age of four and five. Maybe it was the threefold repetition and very obvious rhyme…

This is the only Pied Piper I remember from that period, Cosgrove Hall christmas stop motion animated one which was k.creepy (and excellent to boot).

http://www.toonhound.com/piper.htm

Erithian – Hmmmm…

Rosie – Pleeze don’t elaborate on bett mit Julie, lest you wish to push sweet Waldo (who has committed no harm) completely over the edgey!!

I only came to ABBA in the 90’s and i must admit my appreciation of them doesnt extend beyond the hits and due to my scant chronological knowledge of their work(I knew Waterloo was came first and The Day Before You Came was last but inbetween the release order of their singles becomes pretty vague to me) i’d always thought Mama Mia came from the later part of their career as I felt it sounded less like a band in the process of perfecting their sound and more like an effortless,if a little contrived, piece of craftsmanship by pop past masters-a Lady Madonna, say, rather than a From Me to You.

Certainly its a song built around a hook rather than vice versae but it’s still a superior piece of writing and would be pride of place in most bands songbooks-it only palls (very) slightly when its compared to their other(later, as it turns out!) hits.

As i mentioned above i’ve always known ABBA as pretty much only a singles act but if Tom or anyone else would like to recommend any albums tracks to me it would be much appreciated…

i think we had this discussion a bit on a previous thread: from the off there had been rock-critical (writer) voices saying “listen you ear-stopped mung-beans ABBA ARE REALLY GOOD” but this line somehow did not really take with the rock-critical (reading) public for some years <— this being a madey-uppy sociological “reception-theory” version of “we loved them all along but as they were uncool couldn’t admit it”

one little upcoming attitude sea-change: punk briefly (re)made the 3-min single and the hook into primary values in the way pop and rock were talked about, as opposed to elements to be suspicious of or supercilious about, elements that (good) rock “transcended” but “mere” pop halted at…

certainly from my pitiless year-zero buzzcocks-fan perspective, abba were on the side of good from 1978-ish — added to which there had been a strange and difficult fellow at my school (i’ve told this story before) who loudly favoured abba over all prog, weathering the callow scorn of his contemporaries, and i had always admired his lonely proto-punk nerve for this (even tho i didn’t like him much)

previous discussion here, in “waterloo” thread obv, actually takes quite a difft shape than i remembered (and i see i promised an explanation and/or clarification of some hard-to-follow on-the-fly claim which — shockah! — i never gave)

Re. sinkah post #13 on “Waterloo” thread; I think there was a little more connectivity going on with Abba but not oppressively so – possibly best worked through as we come to each individual number one, particularly the next one as I plan to do some Tommy Cooper-style sleight of hand theorising with that.

(actually it’ll be more in the line of forgotten by everyone except Mark and me James Burke BBC1 series Connections)

“Leave me now or never” is the hook that really suckers me, the “ne” of “never” offering more room to play than the “sist” of “resist”. But perhaps that’s just me.

I’m still feeling young here but can’t remember a time without Abba – and they soundtracked my childhood even more comprehensively when big sis started buying records. That’s years away yet.

These days it would be Alan Titchmarsh doing the voiceover and “ooh isn’t it a funny old world?”

Many of JB’s connections and intertwining threads were extremely tenuous but it provoked the viewer to think (laterally rather than linearly) and it went out on peaktime BBC1 (Thursdays?). Very much a formative influence on my own theories about music writing and, as you say, a reminder of an age where public broadcasters aimed to stimulate the highest common denominator of its audience rather than patronise the lowest.

I’m too young to remember James Burke, but anybody who got a namecheck in a Human League song (The Black Hit Of Space) was obviously a person of considerable merit.

As I recall “Connections” was on a Tuesday night, and for much of its run it was in a double-header with the drama series “The Voyage of Charles Darwin”. Quality stuff, I didn’t usually get much homework done on a Tuesday at that point.

Griff Rhys Jones in “Not the Nine o’Clock News” did a great parody of James Burke’s style (Google tells me it was broadcast on 14 April 1980!) along the lines of: “The whole thing could be explained very simply. So why isn’t it? … (much more in same vein) It all boils down to five words. I’m. Clever. And. You’re. Stupid.

there was much to make fun of with JB. his columns in the Sci Am read a bit like parody.

Ha ha, that promo is great – Bjorn and Benny as the world’s oldest schoolboys!

Particularly touching is the way that it evokes real human awkwardness on the part of both the kisser and the teacher – as would actually happen in real life. A contemporary video would add a familiar veneer of psuedo-sexiness to the thing and ignore the vulnerability.

I’m really, really sorry, and I know it makes me sound like a grumpy old rockist, but I can’t stand Abba. Sorry.

Although their worst is yet to come…

RIP Ola Brunkert

Tom – absolutely spot on. My guess (and I might be a little too young to have got the drift, but I hope you’ll understand what I’m aiming at) is that – this ties in to the whole “Guilty Pleasures” concept – there is a reason why they’ve been rehabilitated.

At some point in the early 90s, someone, somewhere, with a bit of ‘cred’ said that they actually quite liked Abba, and a lot of other people who felt they’d be mocked for it all went ‘Look! Hip Person X likes Abba, so it’s OK for me to like it too.’

And then all the (sensible) people who didn’t give a rats hoot for hipness became, for want of a better word, validated, and it all grew up and exploded.

This does not, however, excuse some of the abominations we’re about to hear *hides from spoiler bunny*

I look forward to reading (what I anticipate will be) the many ABBA entries, and responses. Because, as an American, ABBA:America has always existed as such a very different entity and experience than ABBA:Europa (or would it be more accurate to say ABBA:Earth[sansUSA]?) In America, ABBA had one big hit “(Dancing Queen”) that was percieved as simply one song in the big disco wave, and a few mid-level hits (Waterloo, Fernando, and Knowing Me, Knowing You). So while I was vaguely aware that this was THE all-conquering band that defined its era for pretty much the rest of the globe, they were never that big a deal in the States. (To pick one obvious example from roughly the same moment, Peter Frampton was much, much more *present*, simply as a part of everyday life in America, than ABBA ever was at that time. For which I truly apologize.)

So I’m eager to read what everyone has to say, both critical analysis and personal recollection. Because it’s an odd feeling to have missed out on the phenomenal aspect of a pop phenom – particularly one that has now shown itself to be a permanent part of the cultural landscape (a landscape that now includes America, thanks to “Mamma Mia” – the musical, that is).

As for my reaction at the time, I thought “Waterloo” was exciting and fun, “Dancing Queen” was lost on me due to my blinkered Midwest white guy’s kneejerk dismissal of anything remotely disco, “Fernando” was a puzzler (“Really? A song about the Spanish Civil War?”), and I don’t think “Knowing Me, Knowing You” registered much one way or the other. I think my common reaction to each record was how strange they sounded, simply because there seemed to be a total lack of black influence.

Now I like a lot of ABBA – although I lean more toward the peppy, up-tempo numbers, versus the ones that sound more like show tunes. In fact, I think hearing “Bang-a-Boomarang” on the B-side of some single was the moment when I first thought, “OK, I think I’ve missed something here,” which led me to buying the two Greatest Hits CDs, followed by the first few albums. They still seem strange in their lack of black influence – although better informed listeners may very well point out what I’m missing on this count – but they also often times seem wondrous in their pop glory, and their deep love of the whole idea of Pop.