Waterloo to Voyage: ABBA’s 50-year odyssey of reinvention, resilience and eternal life celebrated

British writer Giles Smith was 12 and sitting in front of the television when ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Fifty years later, the Swedish band’s music is arguably as popular as it has ever been: the Mamma Mia! musical continues to rack up record-breaking runs internationally, the pioneering ABBA Voyage virtual concert simulation is entering its third sellout year in London, and the band’s songs are familiar globally to young and old alike.

Yet, for 42 of those years the band hasn’t formally existed: they quietly ceased to function in 1982. In My My! ABBA Through the Ages, Smith sets out to retrace the ABBA story, to listen anew to the songs and to try to crack some of the secrets of their astounding success and longevity. Here, in Book takes, Smith shares three things he hopes readers will learn from his book.

ABBA were the masters of reinvention:

ABBA had a “glam rock” period but it lasted less than three and a half minutes, which is to say the length of Waterloo. Nothing they released subsequently sounded anything like that record. Indeed, nothing ABBA released sounded much like anything else they released.

What, exactly, is the thread that links, for example, Fernando, a Mexican-inflected campfire ballad on the theme of freedom in the form of a conversation between weary war veterans, with Money Money Money, a piece of vampy musical theatre with shades of You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two from Lionel Bart’s Oliver!? And what links either of them with Dancing Queen, a dancefloor-filler with oddly magnetic properties in its opening bars and a haunting tale of delusion in its lyric?

ABBA seemed to be starting over every time they put out a single – which rather explodes the common dismissal of them, back in the day, as un-riskily commercial. Who, in the disco-dominated mid-1970s, would have considered releasing Fernando, a song which features a fife and drum, to be the obvious commercial move? Yet it sold at least 10 million copies around the world and was number one in Australia for 14 weeks.

For the eight years that ABBA were properly with us, they were constantly shape-shifting, the only consistency being their melodic invention and the stickiness of those melodies. Consequently, you can pastiche the clothes – the loosely cinched judo outfits, the baby blue onesies, the minidresses with cartoon cats on them. You can pastiche the videos. You can even produce satirical mock-ups of individual songs, as Rowan Atkinson’s Not the Nine O’Clock News team did in 1981 by converting Super Trouper into Supa Dupa. But producing a pastiche generic ABBA song would be next to impossible. Where would you begin?

ABBA is a heavy band:

Hefty power chords thundering from an electric guitar are possibly not the first thing you think of when ABBA come up, but they are definitely part of the mix. Listen to the coda to the chorus of SOS, which has a surprisingly hefty guitar underpinning. Which would explain why Glen Matlock has always claimed that SOS was his inspiration for the riff that starts the Sex Pistols’ punk anthem Pretty Vacant. Unlikely, but true. There is a considerable, and perhaps under-estimated, power across the ABBA catalogue in Agnetha and Frida’s vocals, too. Björn once said, of the way those two voices blend together, “There’s a metal in the sound and you can hear it from far away.”