ABBA! ABBA! ABBA!

fabulosity

The last, and best.

The Visitors is their MASTERPIECE!

Hey you Dancing Queens: My life is as good as an ABBA song.

The Visitors is one of my all-time favorite albums. A shame it was their last and wasn't much of a hit. When All Is Said And Done should have been a huge hit. Can't believe they let Pierce Brosnan butcher it in Mamma Mia.

Even better than the real thing - ABBAcadabra!

Loved Soldiers from The Visitors

R5, he sounded like Pavoratti for that compared to what he did to S.O.S.

Voulez-Vous contains one of their best and most underrated songs, “If it Wasn’t for the Nights,” which should have been a single.

“The Day Before You Came” from The Visitors is another great, great song, as is “Under Attack” and the unreleased “Just Like That,” recorded around the same time.

The Day Before You Came isn't on "The Visitors" proper. It was only tacked on as a bonus track years after that albums release.

True, R10, but I don’t know how else to easily identify the songs that were recorded post-‘Visitors’ for a ninth album that never came to fruition. Original recipe ‘The Visitors’ is very good, but uneven—what was “Two For the Price of One” doing on such an otherwise mature album?—it becomes excellent, however, with the addition of the 1982 material.

Man I want to party with all you ABBA fans! Love the deep cuts.

If It Wasn't For The Nights is probably my favorite from the Voulez Vous album. I also adore As Good As New. Peak disco heaven!

"I've been so lucky, I am the girl with golden hair...."

When I was a child, I thought Agnethe here was gloating she wasn't born a brunette (presumably like Frida).

The “na na na” version of the unreleased “Just Like That,” recorded post-‘Visitors,’ pops up online every so often before Benny and Bjorn take it down. I advise anyone with an interest in ABBA to listen to it if they can—it’s a beautiful song and could have been another hit for them.

It’s interesting how the people behind the music often have a different perspective on it than the fans. Many of ABBA’s admirers consider “The Day Before You Came” one of their best songs, but Benny is on record as not liking ABBA’s recording—he thought it was a mistake to ask Agnetha to sing it so plainly, but I think that’s a major part of the song’s appeal.

There are so many actors that can halfway sing that should have been cast in Momma Mia.

Thank you, R15.

My father was transferred to England in '77 and I bought Arrival and Greatest Hits at the same time.

Love When I Kissed the Teacher, That's Me, Dance While the Music Still Goes On, Nina Pretty Balerina, So Long, Dum Dum Diddle and of course Knowing Me Knowing You and Dancing Queen

This is great....

I have never understood why this group was(is) popular.

Their appeal totally escapes me.

Honestly I never paid attention to albums per se with them, just the singles

Catchy and sometimes emotional songs that are well sung and that you remember. What's not to love?

I loved pressing the car radio button when an ABBA song came on! I did love that!

Another vote for The Visitors - one of my all time favorite albums. The whole band was phenomenally talented and their enduring popularity isn’t any mystery to me. I loathed the Mamma Mia! movie - the singing was a travesty, especially Meryl whom I previously regarded as a pretty good singer. Just awful.

No Take a Chance on Me?!

What I love about ABBA is how they flowed with the times. Some of their early songs are that "love your brother" music from the early 1970s. They then moved into the disco era with "Dancing Queen" and then moved into the self-centered 1980s with "Winner Takes It All."

Their best sleeper hit (probably overshadowed by Dancing Queen in dance clubs).

Great one, r26.

The American music press of the era of their first success did not understand the band at all. They couldn't hear the influences they were listening to in ABBA's very sophisticated musical compositions, including Swedish folk, pop, show tunes and classical. Frida even started out singing Jazz. Like the musical illiterates they were, the American critics thought pop music was primarily about lyrical content with a political bent, a la the awful, pretentious Bob Dylan. Europeans, with their superior knowledge of music and widespread music education, had no problem recognizing ABBA's brilliance. And the advent of their massive success only rattled the American critics more (I remember Rolling Stone's derisive review of SUPER TROUPER). Rolling Stone particularly did more to damage pop music than to promote it - their critics were a terrible combination of being slobs and snobs. Luckily they all lost their jobs. ABBA prevailed.

I've seen Frida many times out and about near Geneva where she's lived for decades. The temptation to accost and berate her for not getting those cunts together for a reunion tour is strong.

[R29] Apparently Frida, unlike Agnetha, very much enjoyed performing and the spotlight. She actually has a very interesting backstory. Her mother was a young Norwegian girl who had an affair with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation of Norway. After the war ended there was a huge backlash against those who had cozied up to the Germans, although in the case of Frida's mother it was a girlhood crush. Frida's mother died when she was very young and the grandmother who raised her relocated them to Sweden to avoid harassment.

They are a relic of a time when white people who acted like white people still had a fighting chance at success in the music industry. That went out with the 80's.

R28: that's a nice bit of revisionist pop-cultural history (and gratuitous America-bashing). When ABBA were at the height of their commercial success, in the late 1970s, they were considered deeply uncool by British and European music journalists of all stripes, who all had hard-ons at the time for post-punk bands like Joy Division, Television, Wire, and other 'seminal' groups. ABBA were considered bland to the point of embarrassing, nerdy, and unfashionable. I have a relative who's a life-long ABBA fan, a big name in the ABBA 'community', believe it or not, and when he was 16 years old he was bullied and ridiculed at his Belgian secondary school for liking ABBA; a group of kids even broke his albums when he brought them to school with him. Admitting you liked ABBA back then was the equivalent of being 30 years old today and telling people you attend One Direction concerts, or whatever the popular boy band is right now.

It wasn't until the 1990s that 'serious' music journalists began singing ABBA's praises and marvelling at the apparent sophistication of their compositions and it was finally "okay" for music snobs to acknowledge and appreciate their musical achievements. I happen to know this, because I grew up in the Netherlands and read the British and German music press religiously throughout my teens and twenties.

I actually wonder if you were even around back then, R28, as ABBA were notorious for being loved by the public and disdained by the music press. And yes, that includes your 'enlightened' European music journalists. Critical success eluded them for many years.

r28, during the 1970s there was so much fantastic popular music being made in the U.S., especially in my home town of Detroit, that it was very easy to overlook ABBA. I got through the whole decade barely being aware of their existence. It's true they didn't get that much airplay on the radio stations or in the clubs that mattered to me and my friends, but that wasn't down to snobbery. Stevie Wonder and Iggy Pop were made for us, ABBA wasn't.

Its because of Agnetha the group never reunited. She had problems with booze and is a bit fragile mentally. From the DM:

[Quote]She lives a reclusive existence on a huge farm in rural Ekero, an island near Stockholm, preferring the company of dogs to humans. She is said to find any kind of travel extremely stressful.

[Quote]She is single, and her grown-up daughter Linda, 43, Linda's partner and their three children live on the estate. A three-year affair with wealthy socialite Bertil Nordstrom is over and she is barely seen at the beach house she bought reportedly as their love nest.

I do remember, too, that Abba was loved but not respected. Today young DLers would call it Frau-music, the 70s equivalent of, I don't know, Celine Dion. As a gayling in the late seventies you could enjoy Abba only secretly when you were supposed to prefer rock. (Same with Roxette later). Abba music was very good but not cool.

And r28 postulates a rational access to Abba. European superior knowledge of Swedish folks music was not needed to 'get' Abba. I think what r28 really meant to say: Americans didn't have the musical background to feel the music. Pop, folk music, Belcanto were styles European inhaled as babies and grew up with. They were used to it and therefore felt the coziness and familiarity of Abba right away. In return hip-hop, rap and everything that is mainly rhythm, not melody based had to be 'learned' by Europeans first before they started to appreciate it.

Agnetha often talks in interviews about who her biggest music inspiration was when she was growing up; of course it was the divine Connie Francis. You could say that without Miss Francis there would be no ABBA.

When is Cher's second ABBA album coming out?

Big Abba fan all my life. Agnetha fan, too. Agnetha’s autobiography is easy to read but interesting. She got lost, in a way, after Abba but seems happy today.

I'm going through a bad breakup and this song pretty much sums up everything I feel. Played it around 50 times today.

What's an album?

r32 The Carpenters were the same back then. Hopelessly uncool, but as time went on they were recognized for the great musicians they were.

I loved their singles but probably never really heard most of the albums, and really know their stuff from ABBA Gold.

The Carpenters, Bee Gees and ABBA all had the uncool label. They were too often lumped in with bands like the Osmonds, Jackson 5 and Captain & Tennille, who often had very Happy, Up With People kind of songs (at least the first few albums for C&T).

It was later that the Carpenters, Bee Gees and ABBA were reappraised by critics, who realized that despite the simplicity of the music and its broad appeal, all three bands often had a layer of sophistication and/or melancholy under what seemed to be a sunny sound.

[R44] Abba's music was hardly "simple." Their lyrics, maybe sometimes, but not their music.

I have respect for ABBA for leaving the party early, instead of hanging and embarrassing themselves. So many bands and artists keep going when they're past their prime and it's just sad.

As Grace Slick said "old people don't belong on a rock and roll stage. They look stupid and need to retire."

Hanging ON and embarrassing themselves.

[R46] Agnetha was only 32 by the time her work with ABBA was over.

Imagine being set for life by the time you're only 32!

I remember seeing this ABBA performance on NY kids show Wonderama! I like all the songs played here pure nostalgia.