ABBA – “Waterloo”
One of the odd things about ABBA is that they didn’t really change pop. They are still widely loved and more widely bought, but nobody now sounds much like them, or tries to. They are the giant pandas of pop, world-famous symbols viewed with immense affection, but incredibly bad at actually breeding.
ABBA’s lack of impact beyond themselves is no reflection on their quality, or even their craftsmanship – we don’t build pyramids much these days either, but Cheops is still a wonder. And anyway there’s one area where ABBA did change everything. For the European Song Contest “Waterloo” is a year zero event – it brought Eurovision crashing into current pop, so effectively that it cut it off from the future. I’d say it took the contest more than twenty years to recover from this song, and even now ABBA-likes still enter and hope to grub up points from the dwindling nostalgists who think big melodies and bigger costumes are what Eurovision “should be about”. (A crucial Old Europe/New Europe divider – the former East didn’t know or care much about ABBA). Actually if you look at the contest performance now, the costume clash is ugly – Agnetha in a blue air-hostess outfit and Frida as some kind of gypsy farm girl. They’re also incredibly diffident, unco-ordinated dancers at this stage. But it doesn’t matter.
“Waterloo” is six months behind the Wizzard records that inspired it, but a six month time lag was still shockingly modern for Eurovision. And also, with all respect to Roy Wood, “Waterloo” is better pop than those tracks – tighter, higher-impact, zeroing in on its best ideas and using them to awesome effect. Ideas like the revved-up intro and the double beat at the start of the verse - “My my” – d-dum, a crisp guitar sound - “at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender” – an intriguing opening line, grabbing the audience at once (and how very ABBA that diffident “quite” in “quite a similar way” is).
The real glory of “Waterloo”, though – one of the finest 30-second passages in all of pop – is the second verse. The backing “aaaaa-aaaahs” that lead into it; the thunderclap return of the double beat, now pumped and piano-ed up, the ice-clear enunciation on “I tried to hold you back but you were stronger” (this bit of the melody is the song’s best hook), and then, after “giving up the fight” those ecstatic descending surrendering chords. The second half of “Waterloo” is the straightest Wizzard-lift, a really good rock and roll knees-up, but those thirty seconds, so stuffed with life and confidence and flamboyance – thats why I listen to this stuff in the first place.
And then they disappeared, as soon as they’d come, and the Seventies shrugged, forgot Eurovision and got on with it.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 3,087 views • Share/Save
Ah “King Kong Song” – that was my clear favourite on the Waterloo album at the time, although my favourite moment (or moments) were the strange, almost sampled, Slade-style crowd-clapping noises that briefly featured in the bridge sections of “Honey Honey”.
Oh, I think it’s quite simple what happened in the 1990s; the rolling cycle of acceptable revivalism (10 years ago = hideous; 20 years ago = cool; 30 years ago = classic) reached the 1970s, that’s all.
obv abba crit rep rised during the 90s – an entry in spin’s alt record guide, u2 covering ‘dancing queen’, w/ muriel’s wedding and GOLD helping breed a new generation of fans – but it existed (even stateside where rockism has a firmer grip) in some form beforehand at least enough for xgau to argue against the ‘abba are pure pop at it’s best’ line and lester bangs to wear the t-shirt w/ some contrarian (and yeah ironic, but probably as ‘ironic’ to skeptics as his count five fandom) pride. while there are more obv paths to abba than paths from them i’d say they’re definitely there – max martin, saw, europop the key ones but also (as he’d tell you again and again) stephin merritt who definitely holds abba as a model (THE model perhaps)(though his work rarely bears this fruit – the most abbaesque mag fields song that comes to mind is (ilx poll winning) ‘all my little words’ (and there only in the chorus)), and commonly drops them as what he means by ‘Pop’ (many many indie acts who say ‘Pop’ mean ‘abba’), a friend of mine interviewed him circa 69 love songs and he bleated on and on about how we need abba more than ever and how nothing like abba could chart now (er, then) due to radio being overrun w/ african american music (mind you a*teens were top ten at the time w/ an album of abba covers)(sasha frere-jones can cover the rest).
anyhow a very solid ’10′ for me.
also re: new europe and abba there’s a milan kundera essay (in testaments betrayed maybe?) where he rails against rock music for being too ecstatic and only capable of ecstasy (and false ecstasy at that)(i recall ‘irony’ and ‘guilty pleasure’ entering the discussion here also). it’s been at least ten years since i’ve read it but i’m pretty sure he was definitely speaking of Rock acts (i remember him writing of rock concerts w/ a repulsion that mirrors jack chick’s), ie. (ironically?) the same sincere ‘real’ music rockists would hold as an alternative to guilty pleasure abba. mind you as ecstatic a record as ‘waterloo’ is (the trumpet’s blare of ’she loves you’’s chorus extended to a full song and turned into ‘you love me yeah yeah yeah’) i’m sure milan kundera would HATE it. his loss.
Kundera is a TOOL (as p^nk lord has said elsewhere).
To accept Abba in the 2000s is arguably to accept the whole poptimist agenda
Possibly that’s only plausible if you adhere strictly to liking artists who take an explicit aesthetic lead from Abba (naturally I have great difficulty accepting any agenda, since it is easy for agendas to stiffen into a dull, constricting new set of rules which the next generation will have to trash, thus we get people tying themselves up in knots trying to explain why they think e.g. Abs > My Chemical Romance or vice versa) and by doing so I think one runs the risk of shutting several million other possible worlds out.
My, my… Abba won Eurovision with this in Brighton. Bearing in mind their subsequent undeniable deistic status in the world wide gay community, I can’t help thinking that God had been to Ladbrokes that day. You can bet on-line these days, Lord!
I remember very clearly watching Eurovision ‘74 and seeing Abba and falling for the blonde (to this day I still get their names confused). Sweden indeed was the country of the moment, Abba’s triumph running alongside the beginning of Bjorn Borg’s astonishing career. I too was bitten by the bug and “running away to Sweden” was very much on the agenda in times of stropiness, although it actually took me another twenty-four years to fulfil this threat, having “run away” to just about everywhere else in the interim.
“Waterloo” itself was a stonking hit and I knew it was going to win the moment I heard it, thereby surrendering a hitherto unswerving fidelity to Olivia Neutron Bomb, who sung the UK entry so sweetly. I think the dramatic Grieg-like use of the Piano during the hook gripped me most. As a sideline, I also recall hearing the Dutch entry (which actually charted here) before the contest and thought that it would be second behind Olivia. All this changed when Abba took the stage, the conductor dressed as Napoleon… By the way, let me now bury a myth. France famously didn’t enter Eurovision in 1974 and it has long been believed in some quarters that this was a petulant protest against the Swedish entry “Waterloo”, which was being sung in England and in English to boot (“boot” – geddit?). This is not correct. The Frogs actually pulled out because President Pompidou had just joined the choir invisible. Having cleared that up, if they had in fact entered, I don’t for one moment think they would have given the Swedes any points.
Another footnote is that the broadcasting of the entry from Portugal provided a trigger signal for a military coup in that country. Remember, kids, this was well over thirty years ago and the Iberian peninsular was not as agreeable as it is today. Next door in Spain, one General Franco was still in residence. That lad was a wee rascal, was he not?
When I was growing up there were few records in the house which had been purchased later than my father’s university days. Those I remember: a couple of Wings albums; some stuff by Kate Bush, Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre… and Abba. I think Abba records may be the first pop music I can ever remember consciously choosing to listen to (my brother and I liked ‘Money Money Money’ because it was quite jolly – but he also liked the intro music on a flexidisc titled ‘Teach yourself Heath’ which I think must have come with Private Eye, and I definitely preferred the Monty Python comedy albums to (what I thought of as rubbish old pop music). [For reference, only non-classical music played 'out loud' was early Pink Floyd and the Beatles.] The point at which I can remember ‘pop’ reaching me from the public, as opposed to the private, sphere, it was M’s ‘Pop Musiz’ and Bucks Fizz, so I guess Abba could still function as ur-pop template in my world. Of course growing my ears in the 80s, I didn’t hear any music that I really thought of as ‘AH! This is MY generation’s kind of pop music’ until electro and hip-hop tinged stuff was charting: tracks that stand out looking back include Love Bug Starski ‘Amityville’, Whistle ‘Just Buggin’, ‘Hey You the Rocksteady Crew’, and then Beastie Boys, P.E., Cameo, RunDMC and Aerosmith, but also the early UK housey stuff. (Obviously I caught the ‘cool’ virus a few years later and my taste died.) So Abba have not only always already been there, but have also always meant specifically trans-generational pop to me.
To be fair, Abba were viewed in Britain at the time as a slightly more luminous Eurovision novelty, but a Eurovision novelty all the same – the follow-up (“Ring, Ring”) stopped at #32, the one after that (“So Long”) tanked altogether, and the one after that (“I Do, I Do, I Do” which frankly might as well have been the New Seekers featuring Hurricane Smith) struggled to #38. So it took quite a while before the Abba we know and love really got going; by ’75, Guys ‘N’ Dolls featuring HIDDEN EMBRYO OF NEW POP were giving them a fair run for their money.
Indeed, a 1975 feature in Record Mirror lumped Abba alongside Mouth and Macneal as “Eurovision fly-by-nights”.
Waldo – Eurovision, Abba and Brighton. Obviously three names with iconic status in the gay community *now*, but was it the case then? I’d have been too young to appreciate any link, but didn’t this predate the gay link with Eurovision, and when did Brighton gain its connection with the gay scene? I don’t know – any answers welcome. Certainly the BBC didn’t go in for sending up Eurovision with witty Wogan asides back then – the commentator was David Vine, also known for Ski Sunday and It’s a Knockout, who came out with phrases like “My goodness, he sold that song well!” – for the Portuguese entry. (Not surprising he did when you know of its links with the revolution. Odd Eurovision connection – the major who led the convoy of armoured cars into Lisbon was named Fernando).
A few years ago Q magazine ran a feature about the pop scene of the time, during the heyday of Atomic Kitten, S Club and Westlife, saying there had never been a better time to be a 12-year-old pop fan. And I thought – nonsense! I turned 12 while “Waterloo” was number one, and at that time there was Sweet, Mud, Slade, Queen coming up on the rails, Rod and Elton…
The older lad up the street was introducing me to his record collection – Purple, Sabbath, Zeppelin and lesser lights (never quite got Uriah Heep!) and his sister was introducing me to new feelings, albeit from afar – Diane Richardson where are you now? (A few years later I saw her with her new boyfriend at the same time as I heard Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” and that line about pretty women out walking with gorillas – how did he KNOW?!)
But I digress – anyway, for my 12th birthday I got an Alvin Stardust single (hmm, OK then) and Sweet’s “Sweet Fanny Adams” album. I wouldn’t trade what was around in 1974 for the S Club era – maybe there’s no bad time to have been a 12-year-old pop fan.
Blimey, David Vine – was “Waterloo” “the one they’ll all have to beat” then (used on innumerable occasions by DV on subsequent snooker/skiing commentaries)?
Of course, being 12 years old is always the best time to be a 12-year-old pop fan…
(They were playing “I Do x5″ in the pub last night, as it happens. “New Seekers feat. Hurricane Smith” is a perfect description!)
1974 was also the first year that the Eurovision language rule was relaxed, which basically meant that countries other than the UK and Ireland could field English language entries – a rule which was then reversed a couple of years later (can’t recall when), only to be relaxed again in 1999 (IIRC).
As for the overt gay sensibility within Eurovision, I’d say that it started gathering steam during the 1990s, with Sonia, Gina G and (most significantly of all) Dana International as key staging posts.
Can I be really naff and suggest to ‘o sobek!’ that any point she is trying to make is completely lost on me because trying to read her posts gives me a headache.
Tedious as it may seem, there’s a good reason for conventions like punctuation, spelling out words in full, and starting sentences with a capital letter. Not least because people like me who are old enough to remember Waterloo in its original incarnation are starting to need reading glasses to see the screen!
*other listings magazines are available*
Additionally, your first sentence should have ended with a question mark rather than a full stop.
Furthermore, as there is no qualifying clause in the second sentence of your second paragraph, it should have been linked to the first sentence by means of a comma or semi-colon.
I’m stopping this conversation right here.
“Official” Popular policy is that people can be as correct as they like – if there’s a risk of not being understood, that’s a risk I’m sure they know they’re running!
Erithian (#35) – Not for the first time in this blog, my tongue was firmly in my cheek with regards to the preamble to my comments at #32. I think the key word is “subsequent”, since I am unable to answer your question for certain and can only speculate. It is certainly the case that Brighton has always been linked with a bohemian way of life but I was a teenaged scally living in Stockwell in 1974 and have no knowledge of the town then. As for Eurovision, again without knowing for certain, its adoption as a “gay festival” seems to have been relatively recent but was almost certainly the consequence of Abba being similarly adopted. As a straight man, I am very much an unmarried marriage councillor here, if you get my drift.
Tom – I know you’ve hinted before that you had a soft spot for the Jive Bunny trilogy of number ones, but I recall a quote from one of the guilty men behind Jive Bunny defending their right to use somebody else’s music on the basis that Abba were using somebody else’s language. Kind of set me thinking about the relative levels of skill and intelligence in (a) nicking bits from other people’s greatest hits to have one yourself and (b) writing 9 number one songs in a foreign language. I always thought Jive Bunny were loathsome.
“Guilty men” is right. Scab bastards.
(in Dale Winton voice) But more about that when we get there!
I think “soft spot” is maybe overstating it, but we’ll get to those eventually. Top reasoning from the Jive Bunny dude though! Benny and Bjorn are among my favourite lyricists.
Re. Waldo’s #42: I’m doubly blessed, being a) in The Gays and b) a committed Eurovision fan (I’ve attended the final in person on five occasions). To my perspective, the show didn’t develop an overtly gay sensibility until a) overtly gay-friendly artists started entering it and b) the mid-1990s Irish stranglehold (four wins in five years, lest we forge) was loosened. Post-Dana International, there was a spate of knowingly “camp” entries, many of which referenced Abba, with varying degrees of kitschy pastiche or respectful homage. Now that the Eastern European nations (for whom the Abba days are a barely known irrelevance) have started to dominate the contest, that period now seems to be in decline.
But then it was won by Ugly Betty this year. (And Scooch were to Steps as Steps were to Abba.)
The Irish stranglehold was commemorated by that cherishable episode of Father Ted which I watched again on More4 just last night. “My Lovely Horse” – the best thing the Divine Comedy ever did.
Mike (#46) – I am grateful. Certainly the Eastern Europeans have got their claws into Eurovision now and bloody scary the android who won this year was, as Erithian says. Dear old Ken Bruce has actually suggested two contests, one for the west and one for the east. Doesn’t that just remind you of something? Yet, having said that…
It does represent a culture shift, though – as discussed previously on ILM, however, my reckoning is that something like that will happen since the Big Shadowy Cabal of W/European countries who actually pay for the contest are already cheesed off about being routinely fenced out of the top ten.
(And Scooch were to Steps as Steps were to Abba.)
I do like to think that Scooch’s richly deserved belly-flop might have marked the final nail in the “Ooh, let’s make it a bit camp and a bit like Abba!” coffin…
“as Steps were to Abba” – Whither Bucks Fizz or the little-remembered Deuce in this chronology?
RE: Billy Smart – yep, this is an Abba song that doesn’t sound like an ‘archetypal’ Abba song.
No coincidence, then, that it’s the only Abba song (OK, maybe, just maybe, Fernando…) that I actually like.
And I remember Deuce. I used to chronically fancy Kelley O’Keefe (sp?) when I was 13.
‘I do like to think that Scooch’s richly deserved belly-flop might have marked the final nail in the “Ooh, let’s make it a bit camp and a bit like Abba!” coffin…’
Yes agreed although I’m not sure taking a leaf out of Serbia’s book is really a step forward either.
We previewed this debate a little while back but haven’t got into it properly – Agnetha or Frida? I see Mike and Marcello both vote for the latter, but for me, while Frida was mighty fine, I thought Agnetha was possibly the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth. Especially in that “Dancing Queen” clip, although she wasn’t exactly the greatest dancer herself. Sadly, her outrageous beauty seems to have attracted very much the wrong sort in post-Abba years, rather a tragic story in fact.
Why she married her stalker rather than report him to the appropriate authorities is truly baffling.
Whereas with Frida you always felt that you could go down the pub with her and have a decent chat and a laugh, and in addition no one has worn jeans better than she, even though she is an actual living NAZI EXPERIMENT IN COLOUR!
I also like the way that on the back cover of the Waterloo album – same set-up as the front cover, but with the band missing and old Napoleon left staring out of the window – Frida hasn’t quite got out of the way in time. That struck me at the time as quintissentially Frida-esque!
“Why she married her stalker rather than report him to the appropriate authorities is truly baffling.”
I’m gonna find out where that Welsh bird from “Torchwood” lives and jolly well stalk her!
Blimey!I never noticed the(bleedin’ obvious now its been pointed out to me)Wizzard similarities before! Makes sense I guess since Roy Wood recorded a version of this very tune with Dr and the Medics in the mid-80s at the height of ABBA’s supposed irrelevance.
Surely the weirdest thing about “Waterloo”(and IMO there was nearly always SOMETHING odd abt ABBA’s best tracks that you could usually never quite put your finger on- perhaps one of the factors why they were, in time accepted by the rock snobs of this world) is the contrast between the melody and the lyrics. Any song in which the verses are if anything more catchy and hookladen than the chorus instantly qualifies as a classic pop tune while the lyrics seem to be an admission of defeat not to the the power of love but rather to the realisation that to only pine for the romantic ideal often can only result in loneliness and unfulfilment. They are hardly of the “Hey Ive just realised you really ARE fantastic after all lets hook up” school of much 50s teen pop.Instead they seem to be about somewhat begrudgingly leaving the Mills n Boone fantasies behind settling for a grown-up “relationship” with someone rather less than perfect with all the disapointments and compromises this can mean rather wishing yr life away alone. The relentlessly cheerful performance says “hey, could be worse!” while the lyrics are firmly in ‘glass is half full’ territory. Optimism Vs Pessimism. The score is a draw.
Blast! I of course meant ‘glass is half empty’ not full!
“” while Frida was mighty fine, I thought Agnetha was possibly the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth.”
A lot of punters around this way were with you, but jumped horses when Frida straightened out her hair – go figure.
Snif – compared to how Australia felt about Abba, we Brits just sort of didn’t mind them (as seen in Abba The Movie). Didn’t they spend over half of 1976 at number one in Oz?
That i can recall, “Waterloo” was a hit, then “Honey Honey” (re-released?) moderately so. It all hit the fan with “Mamma Mia”. The Oz equivalent of Tops Of The Pops, called Countdown thrashed it, and it was on for young and old from then on…at the end of each show there’d be a countdown of the national top ten, and the credits would roll over the music clip of the Number One act. It got to the point where they were playing Abba so much that they’d put something else on just to have a change.
The movie was shot during their Australian tour which caused no small amount of uproar with the punters – standard concert ticket price back then was about ten dollars – Abba had the cheek to be charging fifteen (they were bringing a full orchestra with them, mind). Dark mutterings were heard about whether any act could be worth such an enormous sum.
I’ve been away, and most of what I would have said about this (and The Rubettes and Ray Stevens) has already been said by others. So I’ll just add some personal reminiscences on ABBA.
I have distinct memories of watching Eurovision ’74 with my family. It was probably the first year I was old enough to stay up and see the whole thing, including the voting/result. It may also have been the first year we had a colour telly.
Some of my 70s Eurovision memories are conflated with recollections of watching “Jeux sans frontieres” around the same time (another EBU-sponsored inter-europe contest with a big scoreboard). But ABBA in Brighton were distinctive enough to stand from this blur of memories. Obviously in our family were ‘patriotically’ rooting for ONJ. But, as others have noted upthread, it was pretty obvious from the get go that “Waterloo” was a winner. And by the time of their encore performance that night, I’m sure the chorus had lodged so effortlessly in our minds that the next day my sister and I could sing it still.
On the question of ABBA’s reputation before ABBA Gold and the surge in their popularity in the 90s, I can’t recall a time when they were ever not granted at least a grudging respect. I remember an occasion in 1979 (I’d have been 14 or thereabouts) where one of my schoolfriends received some ridicule when the conversation turned to pop music – which NB it had never done before then, that I can recall – and he cited ABBA as his favourite group. But he made an eloquent case in support, and I suspect our mockery was more to do with the fact that ABBA were so much part of the fabric of pop by then that it was more seemly in a teenager to support something a bit more dangerous. Secretly, we all agreed with him. The friend in question went on to become a huge heavy metal freak in his 18th year. (Hi Chris – you were a true poptimist before its time.)
Oh and on the Richard Cook thing, which MC countered with a Robert Wyatt example – didn’t Wyatt himself argue the same thing as Cook circa 1982? I remember an interview with Wyatt on Radio 1’s Saturday afternoon magazine show – around the time “Shipbuilding” was released – where he bemoaned rockism and pointed out that most rock musicians can’t even write as well or play their instruments as well as pop musicians do.
yes, to the best of my memory, wyatt has always been pretty rigorous about this — and he says it again the recent issue of wire
(cf the AWESOME “King Kong Song” as played often at Poptimism)
Mixes we’d like to hear:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
I don’t follow you when you say ABBA didn’t change pop.
Surely, very few changes in pop will last forever – for instance, you don’t hear a lot of The Beatles in the music popular among today’s kids, but it isn’t like that means The Beatles didn’t change pop.
And ABBA did. Human League cited them as a major influence. Same with several of the other early 80s synthpop or new romantic acts. Sure, synthpop and new romantics didn’t last, but they dominated the early 80s scene. And without ABBA (and Giorgio Moroder) it is hard to imagine synthpop ever happening.
what abba i think HUGELY did was demonstrate that you didn’t have to be part of the extant social structure of rock and its discontents, to find a way “out” of it (which in a sense all the glamsters who were ex-brit-60s-kids were: isn’t this jonathan king’s complaint about the 70s?); you could — by virtue of being swedish — never have been IN it
Mark, if you ever look at this thread again I’d like you to elaborate on what the “it” is that people are trying to find a way out of. (Your sentence structure would make “rock” this it, but surely that’s not right; at least, I can’t think that the glamsters/glitterers thought they were trying to get out of rock; in Creem the idea would be, “We (the glitter-glam-punks) are the real rock ‘n’ roll in comparison to the Eagles” (which isn’t fair to the Eagles, but who the fuck wants to be fair to the Eagles?).)
My idea is that this “it” here is like a Superword but without a word. So there is a general feeling that leaps from person to person and generation to generation that we want to get out from under something, but what that something is keeps shifting and changing. “Out from under something” is the quasi-permanent structure, but there’s the continual search for a something that one needs to be out from under.
will do!
LOL ABBA is the Alpha Flight of 70s rock: to 90% of the population the native country is the whole point.
I think I get what Mark was trying to say, somewhat…’74 was still seven years before I was born, plus I’m an American, so I don’t really have a clue, but by then glam was pretty widely disseminated across the British youth, wasn’t it? But it was still a youth-sub-counter-culture wasn’t it, still in a state of insubordinate subordination (=rebellion) to the dominant trad Brit culture (as well as blues-rock-metal establishment, but that’s slightly besides the point). To hear Waterloo’s Suffragette City/1812 Overture hybrid (which btw is not at all f***ing cheesy; those verses are not only a mighty fine hook, they’re pop music’s Demon Drop), there must have seemed to be a sort of link between ABBA’s outsider status and glam’s. Plus the basic fact of hearing glam rock from Scandinavia must have been a (welcome or unwelcome) confirmation of glam as a sort of force that transcended the locus of aforementioned trad/dominant culture (but then again I wasn’t there, and Mark S’s professed ignorance about Waterloo’s affinities with Glam implies that most glam cadets were not really in a state of receptive awareness when it came to ABBA being a Glam ally) (which is prolley appropriate considering I’m not even sure that glam was even looking for allies in 1974, considering that according to Mark S, the nature of glam rebellion was not revolutionary-aggressive like punk, but much more like star-struck self-involvement?)
Whatever, it matters not…
You ever hear Eddie Izzard’s routine about the American Revolutionary War paradigm in American movies, where all the villains have British accents (eg Star Wars) and the friends/allies/mentors are French (eg ?????). I propose that all glam/punk/disco counterculture-revolutionary movies from here on out have at least one friend/ally character with a Swedish accent.
In honour of ABBA.
Ugh.
A generous appraisal of this record might run something like this: “It’s a brilliant record – for its genre. You just have to like the genre.” But this jingly, tinny, overdone piece of bubblegum uses a dubious metaphor to boot. Am I the only one to cringe at the notion of a seduction resembling Napoleon Bonaparte’s last stand?
Didn’t like it then. Don’t like it now.