The sceptical eye might dismiss it as the unlovely detritus of Europop
A subterranean fire-trap of hen-night kitsch. But this would be to underestimate the semiotic thickness of ABBA’s art – and trust me, you really wouldn’t want to do that. The artefacts on display evoke, sometimes painfully, the band’s personal and artistic trajectory: the vanishing grins, the collapsing marriages, the tour-bus melancholia, their progress towards that bleak and clear-eyed final album, “The Visitors” – their Winterreise. It’s true that ABBA lyrics sometimes exhibit errors familiar to EFL teachers around the world (“since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand,” says the narrator of “Fernando”) but who else could have produced a song like their last recorded work, “The Day Before You Came” – an account of joy measured in the minutiae of depression, and possibly the only pop song ever written in the past-modal perfect tense? (“I’m sure I had my dinner watching something on TV,” reflects Agnetha. “There’s not, I think, a single episode of ‘Dallas’ that I didn’t see.”)
As good as new: a blouse worn when ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision song contest
In those days, though, no purchase was necessary. ABBA’s songs
and their attendant sensibility were part of the warp and weft of the culture.
My first clear memory of hearing them dates from October 1976, when the
wave-crash of notes that begins “Dancing Queen” blasted from the speakers at
Hull Fair and provided the soundtrack to a painful incident of childhood loss –
my letting go of what is probably best described as a racist helium balloon,
and watching its surprised expression recede to a black dot high above
Humberside. Fifteen years later, when I bailed out of university for a year in
order to avoid a former girlfriend, I found myself selling ice-cream in front
of “Chess”, Benny’s and Björn’s cold-war musical –
whose company manager seemed to regard the recent fall of the Berlin Wall as a
calculated assault on the box office. In the last lecture I had attended before
making my retreat, I’d listened to Terry Eagleton poke fun at fellow Marxists
who had “woken up one morning and found they had been hermeneutic materialists
all along.” No such strategy was available to the characters of “Chess”. How lost they seemed,
personally, in their unhappy love affairs, and politically, in an ideological
world that, on the other side of the proscenium, had dismantled itself shortly
before the opening night.
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