Comments on: ABBA - “The Name Of The Game”

By: SteveIson

SteveIson — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:49:13 +0000

Brilliant-and prob my favourite Abba song too,it just sounds so original and distinct..I love songs with lots of different parts and textures like this-its like a little musical labyrinth..Really generous-spirited imo to pack so much music and suprises into 4 minutes..9/10

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:11:42 +0000

Still by the Commodores sticks out in my memory. More shipped in girls at our place, but 50% or more of the schools in Croydon seemed to be single sex.

Is this the place to mention Wigan Casino’s famous enders? I wonder if couples clinched to Jimmy Radcliffe’s Long After Tonight Is All Over while in the less comforting grips of speed paranoia.

Best ender I’ve heard in recent years - the Monkees’ Porpoise Song at a club in Burton-on-Trent.

By: Waldo

Waldo — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:11:20 +0000

I don’t think regulars would be surprised to learn that School Discos at Stockwell Manor usually ended up being followed up by a visit from Shaw Taylor.

By: crag

crag — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:26:25 +0000

Some great random indie “slowie last dance” memories of the 90s-
1-FBI, Edinburgh Saturdays 92 thru to 96 finished EVERY night w/Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground (see what they did there???)
2-Egg, Edinburgh(still going every Sat and still great)-the weekend Sinatra died finished with a massed singalong to My Way after a rather refreshed stranger, no more than 18 yrs old staggered up to me, grabbed my shoulder and said sadly “Oh, I miss him…”
3-A random dance night last year played the most bizarre “slowie” to close proceedings -the theme tune to “Birds of a Feather”…
Great days!!

By: mike

mike — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:18:59 +0000

Never went to any of the school discos, apart from the final one in my Oxbridge term; they were far too terrifying a prospect. We had GURLS! shipped in as well. Oh, the peer pressure.

By: DJ Punctum

DJ Punctum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:11:35 +0000

Basically, at my school, if you weren’t in the rugby team you could forget it since each player had approximately six girlfriends each.

By: Erithian

Erithian — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:48:19 +0000

Being at an all-boys’ school, we had to invite the local girls’ school along for a combined SD, which meant that most of us didn’t know any of the girls. Which I suppose made the embarrassment less crushing. I do remember a SD in mid-78 where a girl cleared the floor with an extraordinary solo dance to an early-78 number one and got a round of applause at the end. If I say she only needed the leotard to round off the effect I should *just* evade the clutches of Spoiler Bunny.

By: LondonLee

LondonLee — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:38:39 +0000

Did you say school disco?

http://www.londonlee.com/2007/05/school-disco.html

I’ll stop now.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:34:57 +0000

I have forgiven nearly all the songs I never copped off to, as it was hardly their fault. We’ll be getting to some of them in ‘09, posting rate permitting.

By: DJ Punctum

DJ Punctum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:16:58 +0000

In my teenage day it was strictly school discos only, and I gave up on those after a while as well. Never even thought of doing any of that stuff and got hugely depressed watching others happily couple to the strains of (especially) Barry White’s version of “Just The Way You Are.”

By: LondonLee

LondonLee — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:07:14 +0000

I did write a blog post on the nerve-wracking experience and etiquette of “the slowie” a little while ago

http://www.londonlee.com/2008/02/slowie.html

By: mike

mike — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:55:00 +0000

I love “bashful child”! And anyway, it’s a metaphor!

By: DJ Punctum

DJ Punctum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:33:10 +0000

Someone needs to tell Ronnie Wood about the inadvisability of “cruisin’ with my baby in daddy’s car” IRL…

By: Waldo

Waldo — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:15:34 +0000

The Swedes were an unstoppable train by now and it was all gravy, be it of varying textures. For me, TNOTG was an excellent piece of pop. True, the “bashful child” line we could have done without, but it’s no different to the Stones still writing “cruisin’ with my baby in daddy’s car” numbers when Mick and Keith were nearing their bus passes.

I disagree with Tom regarding the arrangement. IMHO, it distinguishes the number, the trumpet weaving around the chorus and hook brilliantly. I can only amplify an earlier point in another place that it remains astonishing that this group (and these songwriters) came from a stright-laced, order-enriched Nordic country only usually associated with alcohol at prohibitive prices and suicide (one surely qualifying the other) but certainly not popular music. Abba’s salad years also ran precisely parallel with those of compatriot Borg (1976-1980) with the fabulous Wallander and Edberg still to come. Pop music has rarely been better served. And nor (pardon the pun) has tennis.

By: DJ Punctum

DJ Punctum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:15:18 +0000

Ah, those vast painted deserts of graffiti…

By: Billy Smart

Billy Smart — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:55:34 +0000

I still take that line whenever I go home to my parents. It’s meant many things to me over a lifetime; going up to town, going to school, going to work, going home when I’ve been living in other places…

There’s a really interesting passage in VS Pritchett’s autobiography when he writes about taking that same train in the early years of the twentieth century.

And someone wrote ‘The Red Flag’ on that route in between New Cross and London Bridge!

By: Erithian

Erithian — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:43:04 +0000

I won’t contribute to this thread’s sudden taste for Essex girl jokes (sorry, how did we get here again?) - but I do fondly remember a DJ recently introducing a Level 42 track with the words “Listen to this and your socks turn white…”

Billy - you don’t still travel on the Blackheath-Kidbrooke line do you? We’re living spookily parallel lives if you do.

By: Billy Smart

Billy Smart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:55:23 +0000

In December 1991, at the height of the Essex girl phenomena, and while we were all still in mouring for the recently deceased singer, I heard some drunk ask “What’s the difference between Freddie Mercury and an Essex girl?” just before I stepped off a train. I was almost tempted to go on from Blackheath to Kidbrooke and provoke my mother’s ire by being half an hour late for supper, to be able to catch this (doubtless witless) highly culturally specific to the moment example of British cultural history.

By: LondonLee

LondonLee — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:32:30 +0000

How can you tell when an Essex girl has an orgasm?

She drops her chips.

By: Doctor Casino

Doctor Casino — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:40:57 +0000

Quite possibly my very favorite Abba song. Others have done a really lovely job in articulating why that might be, so I’ll just add that this is a song I must have heard in the background somewhere around age 7 or 8 - as I have a very clear memory of adapting the tune to being about Dr. Doolittle, whose adventures I was skimming in a book laying around my elementary school. The actual source material faded while I maintained the Doolittle-themed memory, but somehow when I saw the song’s title on the back of Greatest Hits, Vol 2, it all came back to me instantly and I bought the record without a second thought.

By: wichita lineman

wichita lineman — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:34:04 +0000

Could be false memory syndrome but, if I remember right, the girls ’seduce’ the scared, sweating therapist. Visuals don’t quite live up to audio.

By: thevisitor

thevisitor — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:03:24 +0000

I’m with Will (14) on NOTG’s spot-on evocation of new love in all its vulnerability and is-it-ok-for-me-to-let-go-ness. Hearing it, aged eight, was like being given a free sample of emotions I wouldn’t get to properly use for eight or nine more years. Bjorn said that this song was written for a scene in Abba: The Movie where someone is opening up to a psychiatrist (it’s been so long since I saw the film that I can’t remember if such a sequence was actually used). Like the rhythm section’s almost involuntary funkiness too.

By: SteveM

SteveM — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:57:31 +0000

Billy #20 interesting stuff re Essex. i do think it was unfairly singled out as you could find those same stereotypes in Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, the remnants of Olde Middlesexe etc. just as easily really. The ‘thick and promiscuous’ thing, unpleasant as it was, surely applied all over the country really tho (perhaps it was just sheep-like laziness on most comedians/commentators part).

By: Billy Smart

Billy Smart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:55:22 +0000

Re 27. If you “hate the brass band bits” you should try to avoid ‘Two For The Price Of One’ on ‘The Visitors’, where - once the twist of the song has been revealed (the protagonist thought that he was getting an offer of troilism, but it turns out that the girl wants him to meet her mother, the most enormous brass band arrangement comes lurching in, as if to signify “That’s the punchline, folks!”.

It’s not their best moment.

By: SteveM

SteveM — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:50:13 +0000

I never did have a slowie disco moment. I was both too cynical and too coy.