There’s even some superior early-hours chillout: an unexpectedly dramatic country-pop epic, ‘ Eagle’ (Abba do Fleetwood Mac and beat them at their own game), and ‘ The name of the game’, whose introduction is the sound of bedroom lights going off and stockings being shed (though judging by the video it could just as easily be the sound of someone dealing the cards for another round of rummy). At midnight, it’s ‘Dancing Queen’, shimmying onto the floor in a cascade of multi-tracked grand pianos, or ‘Take a chance on me’, flirty and determined hungry eyes across the room. They bubble and fizz, and the giddy foam overruns the glass but while the first few glasses are warm and tingly, there’ll be tears later and hangovers in the morning. Listen to a few Abba songs back to back and you might be startled by the number of sighs and shrugs among the high-on-life harmonies. What I hear more than anything is unabashed longing. Yes it’s big and shiny –still possibly the most brilliant studio production in the pop canon, in the true sense of that word – but the sheen is so frequently misleading. And by that I don’t mean the clichéd conjectures about wife-swapping that invariably dog lazy commentary on the group. Still, as a lover of Abba more generally (and who isn’t?), it’s their ambiguities that always intrigue me most. You still won’t find it on my playlist though. The line is not ‘fucking in the moonlight’, but ‘walking in the moonlight’ (though you can see how I jumped to the wrong conclusion when it’s followed by ‘love-making in the park’). Of course, when I grew up, and the internet happened, and lyrics became searchable, I finally laid to rest the mystery of ‘Summer Night City’. Ah, I used to think, thank God ‘I Wonder’s round the corner. So my solution was to talk – to chatter incessantly – through the entire track. Only you can’t when the tape is playing, and asking it to be fast forwarded is just giving it even more attention than it deserves. Well, that’s the last thing you want to have to encounter with your parents present, even if you’re sitting in the back of the car. No, it was the fact that Abba were singing about… coitus. It wasn’t the music that was the issue with me as a child anyway.
I don’t think many people would consider it a peak – though it went Top 5 in the UK, even Bjorn has admitted it’s ‘really lousy’ – but while its clog-heavy disco thud is a bit annoying, I’m not sure I could find anyone who actually blanches on hearing that first, clashing chord. Even now, I have an irrational hatred of ‘ Summer Night City’. I knew that the next track was about to leave a trail of mess all over the speakers. And every time we got to the final strains of ‘Chiquitita’ (a sort of bierkeller, clash-glasses, slap-knees schlager fadeout) I used to get a pit in my stomach. The most played album of all was Greatest Hits Volume 2, which contained so many of those gleaming popjets d’art that define their incredible sound: ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Knowing me knowing you’, ‘Gimme gimme gimme’. Far from the sunny, happy foursome that grinned from my Dad’s album covers, I actually thought they were a bit rude when I was a kid.
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