ABBA – “Dancing Queen”
In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s wife. And at a crucial juncture in the plot, the narration shifts, mid-paragraph, from third person to first: the scientist’s “vanishing” was literal, and with a thrill of horror you realise he’s been observing the action all along.
What on earth does this have to do with “Dancing Queen”? The song turns on a similar effect. Of all ABBA’s twenty or so hit singles this is the only one with no first-person content – none of the “I” or “me” or “us” that populate almost all their records. Of course on one level this is coincidence – but the apparent lack of personal perspective is very unusual for ABBA. They’re a band who like to ground their songs in experience and who pay close attention to a lyric’s perspective; even a character song like “Head Over Heels” makes sure to establish its subject’s relationship to the singer, right in the first line. “Dancing Queen” is entirely in the second-person – the song is directly addressed to a girl, but its narrator has, like the scientist in the novel, become invisible.
And yet there she is, all through the song, the prism for its observation – watching the dancing queen from the sidelines, vicariously feeling her freedom, her peak. What makes “Dancing Queen” a masterpiece is how it is both joy and the witnessing or memory of joy, and so much of this is down to the seamless, extraordinary shared lead vocal: Frida and Agnetha’s voices combining to strengthen the chorus as it arcs upwards, but also shifting to softer, fonder registers as they wistfully look on – “leave them burning and then you’re – gone…”.
The music, when she first heard it, made Frida cry – but to stress the sadness in “Dancing Queen” would be to do it a disservice. It’s not envious, or regretful, or bittersweet – it’s a more generous ache, the recognition that “having the time of your life” is literal, that this moment might be as good as it gets, but still being warmed by the moment’s incandescence. “Dancing Queen”, like “Teenage Kicks”, is one of those songs that captures the feeling that being young, dancing, loving is also to be living more intensely and wonderfully than anything else. But “Dancing Queen” goes further, tries to share that fire – “You can dance! You can jive!”, suddenly the “you” is, well, you. And him and her and me.
The vocals in “Dancing Queen” betray that this inclusiveness is, ultimately, doomed: the music does its best to deny that. Certainly its beat is democratic – you rarely see anyone dance well to “Dancing Queen”, which is a different thing from the cheap shot of its being ‘undanceable’. Everything in the arrangement is vibrant, exciting – the trilling intro, the sashaying keyboards in the “turn him on” verse – but of course it’s all in service to the magnificent piano part, its fusion of rock rhythm with light classical swagger, its top-end chords as pure a joy as anything pop’s given us.
That piano line turned up again three years later, changed slightly in a pop world that seemed overturned, and it almost pushed Elvis Costello – a perennial sideline-lurker who’d long seen the tears as well as the grins in ABBA - to Number One himself. Even by then “Dancing Queen” had become ABBA’s monolith, and by their 90s revival it was omnipresent. There’s an irony, maybe, that a song about the fleet intense beauty of youth, love and movement should have become such an ossified monument to ‘perfect pop’ – but when I play it that really never seems to matter.
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Tom in FT /Popular • featured content/Pop • 8,103 views
I thought the pious bastard was still alive, Marcello.
Rosie – There were two branches of Fine Fare in Clapham High Street back in the sixties. Long long gone. Even seeing the name brought back memories. I take it they still exist in your remote corner of perfidious albion?
Mr Glaze passed on in February 1983, depriving a grieving public of the opportunity to witness his inimitable interpretation of Hayzi Fantayzee’s “Shiny Shiny.”
Peter Glaze can also be heard, if not seen, as a Sensorite in a poorly regarded 1964 Doctor Who story. Even from behind a rubber mask, and hobbled by having circular saucer feet, its still very clear that its him.
Err.. I rather fancy I was talking about t’other bloke. Peter Glaze was, of course, a comic genius. I’d love to see him featured in the “Curse of..” series but I’m not holding my breath. Ditto Lord Varney of Crouch End, who was still very much with us last time I looked.
Ah yes, I beg your pardon – pious Don “Not Vincent” Maclean who is certainly still walking amongst the living with his rib-fracturing humour and when not engaged in Crackerjack or Black And White Minstrel Show business – I’m sure he has stated many dozens of times that the latter was “not racialist” and that, look, we had “my coloured Brummie chum Lenny Henry” on the show (cue sternly worded letter from Mr Henry’s lawyers, swiftly followed by a letter of dismissal addressed to Mr Henry’s agent following the Premier Inns ad) – was to be found in such endeavours as Supersavers, a lunchtime ITV show which featured him wandering around the Co-Op in Solihull with a woman whose name I’ve long forgotten looking at the prices of cod and Omo. These days it would get an hour on peak-time Channel 4.
Waldo: I haven’t seen a Fine Fare in many, many years. The last one I remember was in Hull in the late 70s. I believe it got subsumed in the empire that is now Somerfield.
The HQ of Fine Fare was in Welwyn Garden City where I spent my teenage years and rare was the teenager of wasn’t employed by them in one capacity or another at some point. They also owned the Welwyn Stores, purveyor of gramophone records amongst many other things, and if you hung out in the record department of a Saturday, eventually you would meet everybody you knew.
Welwyn Stores is now John Lewis Welwyn, I believe, and no longer sells gramophone records.
hurrah, i have just found independent internets confirmation of my childhood memory of the crackerjack performance of Sparks “Something for the Girl with Everything” (possibly a sparks ‘medley’. it would probs have been in 75)
my mum grew up in welwyn, among other places, and every now and then we still find a tiny little “welwyn stores” sticker on some item that’s knockin round dad’s house
they lived in sherrards park road
ah, Don “the other one” Maclean. Without fail referred to as “Solihull funnyman Don Maclean” in local newspapers round our way.
Time for a checklist of all those words and expressions used in newspapers and never IRL:
madcap
funnyman
quizzed
bedded
tryst
romp
quipped
conquests
rip-roaring
love rat
rap (as in ‘Avram faces FA rap’)
a sex-act
I’ve seen Michael Barrymore described as the “The disgraced funnyman, 54″.
Paul Jewell’s recent travails got the headline “PREM. BOSS IN KINKY ROMP WITH MYSTERY BLONDE”, which I thought packed a lot of narrative into a few words.
I like the ‘mystery blonde’ bit, as if we are expected to know who Paul Jewell usually romps kinkily with.
another one: leggy
tot (as in infant, not rum)
pal
(i hate all these words, i could never work on a tabloid)
probe (usually precedes a “rap”)
Kop (as shorthand for Liverpool FC so the headline can be bigger)
Now (in the context of: the Mail gets even more aerated then previously at what the PC brigade is doing “now”)
NOW TOT PROBE PAL RAPS ROMP FURY FANS
is there a tabloid-hed fridge-magnet poetry set? i absolutely adore the energy of the compression to this kind of stuff, it is a weird semi-evil artform
In the summer of 1997 The Sun had what I still think of as the greatest of these cover stories; “RUNAWAY PERVERT LEERED AT MY TOTS”
Nearly 200 comments on this and I’m only registering my first – fashionably late as always. So, ABBA, good looking blonde and her mate and a couple of dodgy looking geezers. Yes they can write a decent tune and yes I fancied the blonde. Unfortunately I don’t fancy this song much. It just doesn’t move me in the right areas. I can’t dance to it (and I don’t want to), the lyrics aren’t particularly interesting (I haven’t personally felt the beat of a tambourine), I don’t like the lead synth sound, piano flourishes or dodgy vocal phrasing & I just can’t relate to the general upbeat nature of it. At this stage of their career it didn’t really matter – if you didn’t like this one then you didn’t have to wait too long until another one came along. Of course this just happened to be Money, Money, Money which I did like (a lot better than this). The fact that it is now totally over-played and IMHO over-hyped has not helped me to like it any better in the intervening years. 4
Rosie # 181 – Thanks for that. My family went shopping in Brixton too, particularly the “Arcade”, which was an amazing place and two department stores, Morleys and Bon Marche, which was anything but!
“a checklist of all those words and expressions used in newspapers and never IRL”-suprised no one has mentioned my favorite- the classic ‘bedded’ as in “Theakston bedded the 21 year old stunner”…
when Dancing Queen was number one,it was a wednesday when the chart was announced because of the bank holiday, Agnetha was known as Anna then, my 14 year old self found her attractive as well, if it had been 2000 it would have come straight in at no.1.
The last time I saw Crackerjack Peter Glaze was singing Arts for Arts sake, Ed Stewart was dressed up as Harpo Marx, no idea why.
For my five cents’ worth, how ’bout “tubbed”, meaning pregnant (as in: “CARAVAN MOTHER OF TWELVE TUBBED AGAIN!”)