Abba-dabba-doo – will new music from Swedish superstars be worth the wait?

"OK guys, let's try not to be too OTT... ah. Too late."

When Swedish quartet Abba last recorded music together, I was 15 years old.

I know that, based on my youthful good looks, you’re probably thinking that was about 20 years ago. 30 at a push.

Miles out – it was 35 years ago. Following aborted attempts at a ninth album, they went their separate ways in 1983. As they never officially went on record to say they’d split up, you could argue this has just been a very, very, long break. More than long enough for other returnees, such as Take That, to grow up, form a group, have hits, split up, leave it for a while, get back together, have more hits, then gradually shed members.

Arguably still at their peak when they said “Thank You For The Music” and vanished, Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid produced some of the most joyous and infectiously catchy pop music of the 70s and 80s.

As with most music icons, it wasn’t long before they were viewed as cheesy, kitschy, yesterday’s hit-makers. The 1990s saw a turnaround, spurred by the success of the ridiculously successful “Gold” collection, and later the smash hit musical Mamma Mia.

Despite pleas for them to reunite, including an offer of a billion dollars to tour in 2000, the band clearly weren’t interested in the Money Money Money.

The first sign of a public reconciliation came as recently as 2016, when all four appeared together on stage for the first time at the new Swedish production of Mama Mia. Recent work on a “virtual reality” avatar tour (i.e. computer generated) seems to have brought them together again, with the truly surprising consequence being two brand new songs.

They described it as “an extremely joyful experience”, and one of the numbers – called “I Still Have Faith In You”- will appear in a TV special in December, with the digital (and younger) version of the group giving it it’s first outing.

You can’t blame the flesh and blood versions for not wanting to go out and perform it– the youngest of them is 68 now, with the other three all into their 70s.

So far, so spangly-jump-suitedly exciting. But there is one very important question – what if it’s (whisper it)... a bit rubbish? Trawl the albums – there is the occasional dud. I certainly can’t do some of the things I used to do when I was 15 nearly as well now, but the less said about that the better.

What if the mighty Abba spent 35 years keeping us waiting, and then provided us with something distinctly abbarage? Of course, there will be those that will hate it anyway, simply because it’s not ‘classic’ Abba.

There is a precedent, of sorts. When the remaining Beatles got back together with a tape of John Lennon’s “Free As A Bird”, it turned out that the magic was definitely still there. Of course it wasn’t 1960s Beatles. It was still damn good, though.

So - Q: Am I impatient to hear Abba’s new songs? A: Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

This post first appeared as the lead piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 4th of May 2018. The paper re-titled it as the slightly less inspiring "On track for another hit".

Excited much? Ohmygodyes. If you can't wait, here's something rather joyous from a couple of years ago, with a suitably over the top appearance from Rik Mayall, and plenty of the band's lyrics to spot hidden in dialogue, as well as some cameos from Abba themselves. Enjoy!

(CD A-Z: RCD Classic Collection 9 - Classic Blues.)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog