ABBA – "The Name Of The Game"

The groove doesn’t quite sashay, nor does it fully recoil. The palindromic introductory bassline comes forward and then backwards, as though indecisive about whether to commit or to retreat, walking the same square foot of pavement.

The singer has clearly been hurt, or even destroyed, by an unnameable pain of her recent past (see “Knowing Me, Knowing You”) and any confidence she might once have possessed has been shattered. She is reapproaching life with such tentativeness it’s arguable whether she’ll survive the second foot of sidewalk. “I’m a bashful child beginning to grow” – sung by a woman who in 1977 had already passed thirty.

But that’s what life does to some of us, we both know that; and the triumph of “The Name Of The Game” is to witness its protagonist slowly and painfully piece herself together again as a functioning human being, capable of receiving love as well as giving it – “It seems to me, for every time, I’m getting more open-hearted”; note the serenely rolling four-beat lines as opposed to the staccato two-liners of its predecessor.

“I was an impossible case/No one ever could reach me,” she confesses, “But I think I can see in your face/There’s a lot you can teach me” – and the poignantly fragile way she sings that last line (you can palpate her tremble) makes you want to hug her right here and now. Then the bold rise to the blossomed chorus: “What’s the name of the game? Can you feel it the way I do?” with its brash acoustic guitar thrash – you only notice after several hundred listens that it’s playing “Wild Thing” – before falling back to highlight the singer’s still fearful doubt: “Tell me please, ’cause I have to know.”

Brilliantly, the instruments then drop out to leave a low-register close harmony acappella backdrop with just one bass drum pulse, as the singer leans towards the microphone to caress it and know that glorious intimacy once more – or is it for the first time? You can picture her scarcely holding her balance on the romantic tightrope as she trembles through “And you make me talk, and you make me feel, and you make me show” – turn the volume up and there’s a sudden golden ray of maximalist light: “WHAT I’M TRYING TO CONCEAL”; yes, it’s the exuberant, life-adoring human waiting to be released, liberated – then back to a near breathless request for a pledge: “If I trust in you, would you let me down?” before the demand turns into a torrent of transient dread: “WOULD YOU LAUGH AT ME IF I SAID I CARE FOR YOU?” behind which latter half-line there is a gorgeous and typically Abbaesque baroque flourish of post-Dowland lamentation harmonies. “Could you feel the same way too?”

The second verse is make or break, and she knows she must be nothing if she can’t be open and honest: “I have no friends,” she whispers, “No one to see/And I am never invited.” Then, again, the confessional: “”Now I am here, talking to you/No wonder I get excited.” Her delivery is becoming gradually less vulnerable, though she teeters hugely on the line “But it means a lot to me” so that you are left in no doubt that it means life or death. Within the second chorus she retrieves her lost confidence, as the harmonies multiply into artful counterpart: she’s asking him if he feels the same way while her conscience thinks inwardly (“I was an impossible case,” “Got a feeling, you give me no choice”), and when it comes to the second “make me” triptych her voice is no longer shaky; she knows that it is not a unilateral love, she is emerging out of her previously stifled chrysalis, and she knows that he knows that this is happening; she has been rescued, maybe both of them have been rescued, have rescued each other. A shining doorway back to life; wondrous and multidimensional, and its light is so radiant even now that I almost faint in awe of its benevolent genius.

My most favourite abba, and again this is all without ever really listening to the words of their songs, or imagining they meant anything. musically it’s packed, and the step ups and down into each section and the changes in mood work so well for me.

and again it’s just about my my memory of the song at the time. this was when they had finally wormed into my consciousness.

##2 and 3 – Wow, there’s not a lot you can say after that. That’s the particular (and probably unanticipated even by you, Tom) beauty of Popular – that you can get to see certain songs through the eyes of people who not only love them but have hugely relevant life experiences to bring to bear on them; and people you’ve come to know yourself through their postings on this very forum. Those of us who have learned something of DJP and Mike’s backgrounds will gain a lot of understanding from their perspectives on a song like this – the redeeming power of love in one case, and hope battling against unrequited crushes in the other. My own appreciation of Abba is growing the more I read these threads, and thanks to the two of them for their openness.

I like the idea that narratively “Knowing Me Knowing You” predates this song by, say, a year and “The Day Before You Came” predates it by a week or two. You know, there could be an entire dramatic narrative driven by Abba songs. Someone should do that.

The thing which is always surprising about this when you haven’t heard it for a while is just how slow it is. For a pop classic, this would be surprisingly hard to do any sort of dance to. This elongated pace compels the listener to hear the song from the singer’s perspective, with the elementary drums and very upfront bassline acting as a heartbeat, emphasising the unbearable magnitude of this declaration, making it life itself (as it would be…)

And I can’t agree with Tom about the brass feeling squeezed in. It needs that hesitancy, I think – imagine how crass a big karaoke fanfare might be. Every scrap of hope and joy that is achieved by the end of this song has really been earned – and the vulnerability and tentativeness of the declaration is such that the great triumph of this single is that it manages to avoid any trace of sentimentality in the finding of love at its conclusion.

Well, my clod-hopping attempts at Smoochy Dancing certainly never counted…!

I was about to say that I could never have contemplated smooching to a song like this – but then I remembered that the first song I ever smooched to wasn’t a million miles removed from “The Name Of The Game”….

(#6 – thanks for that, Erithian.)

Hm, yes – But its not a single that seems to automatically position itself as being a “slow dance number”- when compared to something like the definitive example of the genre that we’ll get to in 1978.

Incidentally – and reading your Donna post today made me think of this – when did the ritual of ending an ordinary disco (at a venue like a Students’ Union, say) with a slow dance – die out? It seems to have been going as strong as ever for most of the 1980s, but by the early and mid-nineties, it was something that I never – once – came across, despite feeling culturally primed for it through the recounted experiences of older boys and girls. Did acid house kill it off?

I’d have this down as a 9. No song, by Abba or anyone for that matter, has ever described so beautifully or so accurately what it’s REALLY like during those early uncertain days/ weeks of a new love affair – the fear of exposing your feelings, the shifting sense of self and all the awkward adjustments this entails, and above all the hope that something real and long lasting may eventually emerge.

Shame that none of these complexities were ever captured in the video, which as I recall featured Benny, Bjorn and the girls guffawing over a game of Snakes And Ladders.

“Did acid house kill it off?”

That’s what I used to think (and I also thought Acid killed off a lot of good dance music in London clubs), though I also thought it could just have been that as the 80s moved along I was hipper and had more money so was going to more fashionable clubs in the West End where they never played a slowie anyway. For all I knew they were still playing them at Tiffany’s and The Cat’s Whiskers but I’d just left that world behind.

I do remember a club called ‘Discotheque’ at Busby’s on Charing X Road which tried to revive the suburban disco style in a very smug ironic way (getting people to do the rowing dance on the floor to ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ for example) and they played a slowie at the end which they called ‘The Erection Section’. My girlfriend at the time was from Essex and hated it, “I thought I’d escaped this crap when I left Essex!” she’d say.

‘Hollywoods’, somewhere in Essex, did seem to possess a legendary reputation as the quintessence of a certain type of British nightclub experience in the early nineties. Many times and in many places I heard it referred to by those who had been there, a kind of word of mouth notoriety.

(Incidentally, someone should do some research into the effect that coming from Essex had on young women in that period, after the distasteful ‘Essex girl’ joke mania of 1991 (and, to a lesser extent, ‘Essex man’ winning the 1992 election for John Major). Certainly, every young woman who came from the county for about five years had to refer to and dwell on the idea of their coming from an unusual place when they first spoke to you – in a way that was part defensive, part proud. The idea of coming from a place where young women were supposed to be thick and promiscuous left something of a psychic wound for a generation, I think)

I think that one effect of dance culture was that it marginalised the prevalence of mainstream pop in places like Students’ Unions, with nights out being allocated to large niche genres (various forms of dance, rap/ R & B, indie, 70s and 80s music). So in 1994, you’d rarely get the opportunity to dance to Take That and East 17 in such a place – which I’d have quite liked the opportunity to do.

Incidentally, I’ve forgotten, wasn’t this sampled by The Fugees (forget where)?

The slowie continued to find a place, albeit less inescapably, with dance DJs – I recall one saying that no DJ could afford to be without Unfinished Sympathy for that end-of-the-night slowie section. Obviously you wouldn’t regularly get that in all clubs, because in many there isn’t the same sense of having an end point where everyone went home when lots of DJs played sets in succession and it went on until daylight.

Ah, come on, nobody slow danced to OW! oh ok……

I never did have a slowie disco moment. I was both too cynical and too coy.

Billy #20 interesting stuff re Essex. i do think it was unfairly singled out as you could find those same stereotypes in Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, the remnants of Olde Middlesexe etc. just as easily really. The ‘thick and promiscuous’ thing, unpleasant as it was, surely applied all over the country really tho (perhaps it was just sheep-like laziness on most comedians/commentators part).

Could be false memory syndrome but, if I remember right, the girls ‘seduce’ the scared, sweating therapist. Visuals don’t quite live up to audio.

How can you tell when an Essex girl has an orgasm?

She drops her chips.

I won’t contribute to this thread’s sudden taste for Essex girl jokes (sorry, how did we get here again?) – but I do fondly remember a DJ recently introducing a Level 42 track with the words “Listen to this and your socks turn white…”

Billy – you don’t still travel on the Blackheath-Kidbrooke line do you? We’re living spookily parallel lives if you do.

Ah, those vast painted deserts of graffiti…

Someone needs to tell Ronnie Wood about the inadvisability of “cruisin’ with my baby in daddy’s car” IRL…

I did write a blog post on the nerve-wracking experience and etiquette of “the slowie” a little while ago

http://www.londonlee.com/2008/02/slowie.html

Being at an all-boys’ school, we had to invite the local girls’ school along for a combined SD, which meant that most of us didn’t know any of the girls. Which I suppose made the embarrassment less crushing. I do remember a SD in mid-78 where a girl cleared the floor with an extraordinary solo dance to an early-78 number one and got a round of applause at the end. If I say she only needed the leotard to round off the effect I should *just* evade the clutches of Spoiler Bunny.

Never went to any of the school discos, apart from the final one in my Oxbridge term; they were far too terrifying a prospect. We had GURLS! shipped in as well. Oh, the peer pressure.

I don’t think regulars would be surprised to learn that School Discos at Stockwell Manor usually ended up being followed up by a visit from Shaw Taylor.