I remember the moment I did connect with it — more than 20 years later, on a summer holiday lazing in a beach-bar on an island in Thailand, and this came on (coz they played ABBA for all the Australian tourists) and my reaction was, “You know, when you come to think about it, maybe they were quite good after all.”

I think that is the core of my issue with this song, and the rest of the ABBA canon. It never felt relevant to me when it came out, even though, as a 70s teenager, I was their target audience.

Trying to think yourself back into your mindset more than 30 years ago is bound to be selective, but I know my mental bookmarks at the time were saying “ABBA, Boney M, stuff like that” — which was undoubtedly better than the bookmark that said “Chicago, David Soul, boring stuff like that” or the bookmark that said “Bay City Rollers, crap like that” — but it was still filed away in a general category of “not for me.”

Listening to it now, I can see that it is very good, and I can feel what has been described here as the sadness it contains– although it seems more like wistfulness to me — in a way I never felt at the time. But still my problem is, why it took 20 years before I realized it was “quite good really, after all”?

So, I reckon, it comes to a question of relevance.

ABBA were never relevant to me, at the time. Nothing they did ever spoke to anything that was happening in my life. They were always there, cute songs on the radio, but they never meant anything. They never spoke to me.

To me, the sadness — wistfulness — is that they only started to speak to me 20 years later. Was that what they intended?

Still, it’s “quite good really, after all,” I suppose.

It’s probably down to the ossification that you so correctly pinpoint. This has become so much a song regarded as “Perfect Pop Music – END OF!!!” – when it really isn’t – that it’s changed for me from a pleasant if throwaway distraction to a pain in the arse. How many times? – NO MORE FUCKING ABBA!!!!

“I Want You” by the Inspiral Carpets and Mark E Smith.

She’s not really the intended audience, but the chorus (“You wear the crown!”) would fit.

I know a number of us on this site are or have been DJs. So here’s a challenge. You’re behind the decks at a Royal bash, you’re playing “Dancing Queen” and you spot Queenie strutting her stuff on the dancefloor. What do you cue up next to see whether she stays out there or sits it out? (A certain controversial Number 2 hit is not allowed on the grounds that (a) it’s too obvious and (b) it could earn you a spell in the Tower.)

Surely at some stage in her life every right-thinking girl has a gay best friend who’s ever-keen to prime her with lavish G&Ts, all the better to share the spotlight when DQ grabs the floor?

Must be a 10.

(BTW I played I Want You from youtube just before I went to bed the other night. Big mistake. Kept me awake and not because of my usual aversion to Mr Costello’s voice – OA apart). Powerful stuff.

If they really were a top Tory, then their name would have been used, because the reader would have recognised it.

I think you’ll find that DJ Punctum mentioned it in post #185.