And there is contemporary youtube footage of ‘the Baby Jump of the 70s’ with grinning (German?) kids gamely trying to dance to it. The Mungos look rather earnest which I wasn’t expecting.

You heard right: On a school visit in advance of Alice’s move up, I saw a sheet music plus dissertation of a piece based on “Britpop” standard structures…

Am slightly afraid to approach “Baby Jump” though – I am not old enough for “Baby Jump” to have been the “Baby Jump” of the seventies but I am still wary of its power!

“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.”

haha can you say BRITPOP REVIVAL kiddies? :D (i am told that they study britpop in GCSE music these days. it boggles the mind)

Flahr,Have you heard ‘Cumberland Gap’ yet?

‘Baby Jump’ might test this theory beyond its breaking point, though.

*I came into a load of HMV vouchers and felt I probably ought to go and get ABBA Gold. Also: a Bananarama best-of and two Pavement CDs

**this was also my reaction to *properly* hearing “A Hard Day’s Night” for the first time. it is worth remembering that racket is ALWAYS a good thing, and i look forward to discussing this in more depth when we reach “Only Shallow”‘s 34-week stay at Number One

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mixes we’d like to hear:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six

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.)

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.