The Way Old Friends Do: An Unreview of ABBA Voyage
This is not a review. I’m no better placed to review a new ABBA album than I am to review, say, a letter from a once close friend with whom I’ve had no contact for four decades. I’m happy to receive the letter. Memories of our bond will come flooding back. I might get a bit emotional, remember our shared history. But really, the bottom line? I’m just glad to have a bit more of that person than I did before. That was how I felt back in 2013 when David Bowie surprised us with Where Are We Now? – and clearly I wasn’t the only one.
For me, that morning marked an important realisation. We’re in correspondence with our heroes. Their records are the co-ordinates by which we chart our course through life. Each album is a detail in a picture that we’ll only truly understand when they’ve left us. That’s not just true of artists. That’s a broader truth that applies to all of us. Every day we spend here is a chisel-strike into a stone which will eventually sculpt a self-portrait that will only be finished when we are too. You only need to watch the news, or check in with certain newspaper columnists, to be reminded that there are some pretty ugly self-portraits taking shape now.
And it’s amid this prevailing bleakness that ABBA have returned to tell us that they’re not quite finished with their own self-portrait. We all knew they were working on a couple of new tracks for some unspecified project involving moving avatars of the four group members. So far, so Rock Circus. I imagined something a little like the Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison shows where images of those singers were beamed onto nets positioned in front of the band. Or perhaps Gorillaz shows where live musicians played among sophisticated laser projections of the animated band members.
You might have imagined something different, but I bet you didn’t imagine an entire arena being built in East London purely to pay host to a series of ABBA shows, for which Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn had given over their faces and bodies to a team of animators who would use the resulting information to create the version of ABBA we remember from their hit-making zenith. Lest we forget, the reason ABBA had refused all reunion offers prior to this point was their belief that nothing other than a reversal of the ageing process could justify accepting any of those multimillion dollar offers to reform. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to give us the thing we so desperately craved. It was more that they simply couldn’t.
When I interviewed them in 2002, that was clearly foremost in their minds when they pondered the reunion question. Björn’s depiction of that scenario sounded like the stuff of nightmares. Grimacing, he talked about “the looks on the faces in the audience as they realised we had grown old,”stopping only to make it clear that “there's no amount of money in the world that could persuade me to do that.”
The next time I spoke to them, it was 2010. I’d had eight years to try and devise a reunion that might circumvent Björn’s worst imaginings. There had to be a way, right? What I wanted to say was “Look, I get it. I don’t want you to abase yourselves either. Sometimes people think they want something, but when you give it to them, it turns out that maybe what they wanted was to travel through time. You can’t give us that.” But nevertheless, there was a reunion that somehow might give us something of what we craved, while allowing ABBA not to effectively become their own depressing tribute act.
This was my idea. I suggested that they could perhaps invite a few friends along to watch them perform a low-key one-off set – perhaps acoustically – of age-appropriate songs from their canon. Sure, Dancing Queen, Lay All Your Love On Me and Voulez Vous might not work in that setting, but plenty more would: I Have A Dream, Chiquitita, The Day Before You Came, I Let The Music Speak, My Love My Life. They could film the whole thing, and if they liked it, they could license it out to territories around the world. And if they didn’t, they could destroy all the footage and put it down to experience. It need be nothing more than nice memory for those invited.
When I put it to them, Björn was the first to respond, seemingly in jest: “We could sing The Way Old Folks Do!” – a play on the title of their song The Way Old Friends Do.
Benny, though, seemed more thoughtful. More, dare I say, up for it.
“Yeah, why not?” he nodded. As if working through the logistics, he then added: “I don’t know if the girls sing anything any more. I know Frida was [recently] in the studio.”
I pointed out that on her most recent solo album, six years previously, Agnetha was in fine voice. “If you can sing, you can sing,” Benny concurred. Then, a little later, “It’s not a bad idea, actually.”
Of course, such was the clamour for an ABBA reunion that the moment the interview ran, these quotes became a worldwide news story – and ABBA’s office was forced to issue denials that Benny’s equivocation amounted to anything other than a very hypothetical answer to a very hypothetical question.
All of which is worth dwelling on because the upcoming ABBA Voyage shows are the vindication of Björn’s stubbornness. In other words, what he was ultimately holding out for every time someone asked him about a reunion was a solution to the time-travel problem. Finally technology allowed it and in doing so allowed ABBA to stage a no-compromise reunion.
And as for the tone of this flurry of activity, the key to it is also Björn. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a bigger ABBA fan on the planet than Björn. I think he’s the primary custodian of the legacy – and this self-appointed responsibility informs his historical misgivings about the “wrong” sort of reunion. Don’t forget that before ABBA, Benny and Björn’s experiences of pop stardom couldn’t have been more different. Benny had experienced critical acclaim and teen-adulation in The Hep Stars. Björn, by contrast, was in ploughing a family entertainment furrow with Swedish folk act The Hootenanny Singers. I suspect that Björn had no idea what he was capable of as a lyricist and vocal melody writer when he formed ABBA with Benny. And at some level, I think he’s still a little bit blown away by what Benny’s music managed to draw out of him. It’s a rather sweet trait that, if you interview them, reveals itself at unlikely moments.
In 2002, I spoke to them about the creation of Dancing Queen, which they knew was exceptional the moment they finished the backing track. “It’s nice,” said Benny, “if you can like a backing track, you know? But by the time it appears on vinyl, it's gone. It's over. You have no connection with it. You know that it's you, but you don't sit around thinking, 'Oh boy! Am I good or what?' It's not like that.”
What I mainly remember about that moment though, wasn’t so much Benny’s words, as the uncharacteristic silence that befell Björn in that moment. For him, it was pretty clear that actually, it was quite a lot like that.
If Björn’s uber-fan perspective informs a long-term determination not to compromise people’s memories of ABBA in their prime, other imperatives seem to be at work in the creation of the newly-landed ABBA Voyage. They’re present in the very first song to be released from the record, I Still Have Faith In You. Its position in relation to the ABBA canon isn’t dissimilar to that of Free As A Bird to the rest of The Beatles’ canon. In Free As A Bird, there’s no attempt to pretend that twenty-five years haven’t elapsed since the release of new music featuring all four Beatles. John’s original recording is used like an extended sample, an expedient by which Paul and George come to terms with the intervening years. There’s no sample in I Still Have Faith In You, but the sentiment is the same. It’s ABBA – well, Frida in this case – explicitly addressing the extraordinary thing they created together. And, as with Free As A Bird, it’s a song which also sees them asking whether or not that binding spirit still exists in some way.
It’s also the work of songwriters who decided early on that they have nothing to prove to the outside world. “Trend-blind” is the word used by Björn to describe the process of writing the songs. There was no attempt to look at what was happening in the charts or what was being played on the radio. Thousands of indie bands have earnestly declared that “we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus.” No-one believed them, but if ABBA were to make the same claims about ABBA Voyage, there are lots of factors to suggest they’d be telling the truth.
Let’s, for instance, head to the third song on ABBA Voyage. It’s a Christmas song. Remarkably, ABBA had never written a Christmas song the first time around, although they did come close. Happy New Year was the song that opened Side Two of Super Trouper. In the unlikely event that you’ve read this far but haven’t heard Happy New Year, then don’t be fooled by the title. It’s the most perfectly bleak musical evocation of that mix of ennui and self-loathing that takes hold on Boxing Day, when you’ve had too much of everything and the hope that you felt as recently as forty-eight hours ago has curdled into futility, a futility compounded by the fact that a nuclear bomb could, at any moment, kill you, but not before first melting your eyes in their sockets and boiling you alive from the inside out.
However, it’s now 2021 and ABBA’s Christmas song isn’t very much at all like their New Year song. It’s called Little Things. It’s Christmas from a grandparent’s perspective. It’s a picture box-pretty dawn dispatch from a silent house before the children have woken up. “Thanks, old friend, for packing Christmas stockings full of nice little things,” sings Frida before, perhaps inevitably, a chorus of children appear to bring the whole thing to a close. For some listeners, the sugar and corn quotient might be a bit much. But then I ask myself what the reaction would be if this had come from the pen of Paddy McAloon or Jimmy Webb. Is there anything more corny going on in here than you’d find in, say, The Christmas Song by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells? That’s the irony of appraising ABBA in 2021. The darkness that critics used to ignore in their music back in their heyday is now what everyone looks for in order to demonstrate just how much more was going on in ABBA’s music than, say, that of The Dooleys or The Nolans.
Here and elsewhere, the atmosphere is actually something not dissimilar to the “dignified” family reunion I tried to pitch to them back in 2010. That is to say, you often feel like you’re eavesdropping on a gathering that is primarily taking place for the benefit of the four people hosting it. Underlying so many of this record’s most moving moments is an unspoken “Do you remember when we did this?” directed not so much at us, but at each other. Just A Notion finally sees the completion of a sketch whose only previous outing was the ABBA Undeleted medley on 1994’s Thank You For The Music box set. Given that the original sits in the timeline between the turbocharged disco of Voulez Vous and the autumnal introspection of Super Trouper, it isn’t hard to see how this quaint roll’n’rock throwback to the group’s early years didn’t make the cut.
If you’re talking Proustian rushes though, there’s really nothing on the album to touch the repurposing of the piano glissando from Dancing Queen as Don’t Shut Me Down bursts into action. For many of us listening the other week – not expecting to hear a second new song immediately after I Still Have Faith In You – that was the moment that ABBA’s return started to feel like a sublime fever dream. But it wasn’t the only moment. If you gathered yourself in time, you would have also heard little melodic nods to classic shoulda-been ABBA single If It Wasn’t For The Nights. My initial response when hearing these moments was “Was that deliberate?" Artists unconsciously plagiarise themselves all the time. But then there’s Keep An Eye On Dan, whose final notes reference the opening notes of S.O.S. and there’s Bumblebee, which has Benny setting his keyboard on Fernando mode. In both cases though, the role of these playful flourishes is, as much as anything, to raise a smile in each other, and perhaps anyone else who might be listening.
As for the songs, it’s the hymnal Bumblebee that gets a little more devastating with each listen. It’s the sort of eco-elegy that’s hard to imagine emerging from the pen of a younger songwriter. Perhaps Stormzy, Dua Lipa, Slowthai and The 1975 also find themselves occasionally moved to tears by the relative scarcity of bees in their gardens, noting the “clumsy, erratic flight” with which they bumble “from thyme to bluebell/from hyacinth to lily rose,” but Frida’s performance here is perhaps the key differential. It’s a (perhaps unconscious) echo of Agnetha’s vocal on 1981’s Slipping Through My Fingers. On that occasion, it was the sight of her daughter accelerating into adulthood, never to return. Here, of course, the stakes are vastly greater – “a world where all is changing/too fast for bumblebees to adapt” – and the outcome unknowable to its 75 year-old singer.
If only because of how weird it is, Keep An Eye On Dan is the song on ABBA Voyage that’s easiest to imagine having a life outside of ABBA’s own canon. If you hold to the view that: (a) songs aren’t written but cosmically bestowed upon songwriters by some sort of higher power; and (b) that same higher power occasionally screws up and gives a song intended for one artist to someone else entirely, that might explain what Keep An Eye On Dan is doing on ABBA Voyage. This sort of pensive, muted, synth-assisted power pop is precisely the reason why some of us buy lesser known albums by The Cars or even the young Kim Wilde. It’s also pretty great, as it turns out, when ABBA do it. That’s Agnetha taking the main vocal, but really the elephant in the room is one of those bizarrely specific lyrical plot lines from the lyricist who, lest we forget, also gave us Two For The Price Of One (about a man who answers a lonely hearts ad placed by two women) and The Visitors (about a Russian dissident waiting for the knock on the door that will effectively end their life). Our protagonist here is also waiting for a knock on the door, but this time it appears to be her estranged husband who is due to take her challenging son (Dan) away from the weekend. You need a catchy chorus to support lines as conspicuous as “He gets out of hand if you let him,” and this certainly meets the brief.
Fans of ABBA’s power pop side will be no less enthused by No Doubt About It, which draws on the same fuel source that yielded 1977’s under-celebrated banger Hole In Your Soul and another off-piste fan fave Lovelight. Along with Don’t Shut Me Down, it’s hard to see how it won’t find a place in the set when the Abba Voyage shows begin. Once again, at moments like this, you’re reminded that Voyage is clearly the work of four people who aren’t trying to blend in with the present pop quotidian. Even back in 1977 when they were sharing screen time with Noel Edmonds and Posh Paws on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Benny and Björn carried themselves with the air of visiting Swedish delegates from a Plastics Expo at the National Exhibition Centre. As a seven year-old fan gazing at them from the sofa, that was the exact reason for my fascination with them. How were these sober, sensible, placid men responsible for a song like Knowing Me, Knowing You which so accurately portended the nuclear winter of divorce? ABBA were my Haynes Instruction Manual to Adulthood. If I paid close enough attention to the lyrics, then I wouldn’t be caught unaware when it was finally my turn to be old and bewildered by the passing of time. I remember the shock I felt when Frida sang, “In our lives, we have walked some strange and lonely treks/Slightly worn but dignified/But not too old for sex.” That was useful because, aged 12, I genuinely believed that sex was something for which you did eventually get too old. Like penny-for-the-guy or squash (both the drink and the sport).
And then there was Our Last Summer from 1980’s Super Trouper album, a remembrance of a hippy-era courtship in Paris that ultimately fizzled out, its protagonists maturing into relationships that swapped youthful spontaneity for the prosaic certainties of middle age. And yet, as that song’s solitary fruity rock powerchord served to underscore, perhaps there’s something in those first trysts that’s worth holding onto. What’s implied in Our Last Summer is made explicit in two songs on Voyage: When You Danced With Me and I Can Be That Woman Now. Opening Side Two of the album, the latter song sees Agnetha singing “I’m not the woman I could’ve been/But I can be that woman now.” For me, that’s the better song, playing as it does into familiar latter-period ABBA scenarios: messy might-have-beens mediated through implied exchanges in serviced Stockholm apartments.
The Gaelic backdrop of When You Danced With Me sets the scene for a reunion in Kilkenny between the lover who left town and the lover who stayed. Whilst ABBA’s folk side might be the secret sauce that gives songs like Chiquitita, Soldiers, One Of Us and I Have A Dream their occult power, it doesn’t sound like you’re hearing ABBA’s folk side on When You Danced With Me. I’m not getting much of what Benny once referred to as “the melancholy belt” which runs above 59 degrees [latitude] “from from eastern Russia, through Finland into Scandinavia.” What I’m getting instead is something that might come in useful if they end up setting Mamma Mia! 3 in Dublin.
And for anyone who needs to be reminded what Benny Andersson is capable of when he elects to siphon the Nordic noir elements seemingly abundant in his DNA, it’s all waiting for you on the closing track of Voyage. On the one song that formally dispenses with pop arrangements, Ode To Freedom seems to strain at something as intangible yet tantalising as John Barry’s later orchestral work (The Beyondness Of Things, Eternal Echoes) with a time signature that dances us into an uncertain hereafter. It’s an uncertainty compounded in this case by what, along with Don’t Shut Me Down, is Björn’s most affecting lyric on the record. If, as they’ve been vehemently insisting, these are the final new ABBA songs you will ever hear, it all ends with Agnetha and Frida singing that freedom might be a chimeric construct and therefore impossible to truly honour in song. It’s not necessarily how we would have expected ABBA to close their account but then again what is there about this project that was “expected”?
And that’s why this really shouldn’t be taken as a “review” of the new ABBA record. And because this isn’t a review of the new ABBA record, I’m about to say something that I would never dream of saying in a review. But every word of it is true. Sometimes when my parents come and visit our house, they don’t say very much. I catch them in the corner of my eye, just sitting there watching my family doing the normal everyday stuff that families do together. Happy that they’re still around to see what happened to their kids and their grandchildren. Just like the protagonists of Little Things. And, of course, it’s a two-way thing. They sometimes catch me watching them, somehow trying to reconcile where we came from to who we are.
ABBA Voyage can be whatever you want it to be. But for me, it’s a record in which I get to watch the group which acted as a Greek chorus of my childhood years enjoying each other in the third act of their life. They didn’t have to leave the curtains open so we could see what happened when they all got together again. But not only did they do that; they put it on a record. And really, there are no words to quite convey just how grateful I am for that.
ABBA Voyage is released today (Nov 5) by Universal Records, but then you probably knew that. Thank You For The Music – An ABBA Celebration ft. DJ sets from Little Boots and Pete Paphides, Spiritland, South Bank, London, Nov 6, 8.30-late. https://ra.co/events/1468965