ABBA - “The Winner Takes It All”
“The Winner Takes It All” is pure theatre. In the sense that it’s a showstopper - Andersson and Ulvaeus had been getting itchy with the singles-albums routine and thinking towards the stage for a while, and this song by itself pretty much demanded that an ABBA musical come into being one day. But also in the sense that the song’s context is a performance - a final performance, with an audience of one - and the song is a sequence of desperate, doomed ploys by its singer to win over that audience, even as he’s flipping up his seat, putting on his coat and hat and walking out of the show forever.
This isn’t to say “Winner” is at all phoney - these ploys aren’t really trying to mask the singer’s underlying emotion, which is anguish. But there are plenty of songs about anguish: this is a song about attempts to use it, or spin it. The song, like “Maggie May” or “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”, takes place in real time; a monologue. The attempts fail - but gloriously.
The first ploy is negotiation - don’t worry; I’m not here to rake over old embers, we’re reasonable people, we both tried our best. The music is gentle, reassuring - the falling piano melody that dominates the song is stately. The chorus, restrained on its first appearance, has a philosophical air.
And then the tone changes, the song becomes a guilt trip. Since we’re reasonable people, how could you let me believe these things? “Building me a home / Thinking I belonged there” - that slightly elongated, stressed “me” is the first hint of steel in Agnetha’s performance. The music has stepped up its pace, the pianos more urgent. There’s more venom in the singing as the song’s trap is sprung: if only fools play by the rules, and life is a dice throw - this metaphysical turn the song’s only lyrical mis-step - then the outcome of the reasonable game is still in doubt. The chorus, second time round, is more strident, more desperate.
The third ploy - a frontal attack. “But tell me, does she kiss, like I used to kiss you?” Agnetha has never sounded sexier, all caressed sibilants and soft vowels, then the regal sweep of “deep inside”. Rules must be obeyed, she shrugs, and the message is - throw the game! But the moment passes: resignation returns, and there’s real bitterness in “a lover - or a friend?”.
Which leaves just abjection, the real last throw of those dice: the music subsides, and for the first time the singer sounds broken, hesitant, perhaps horrified by how the conversation is turning out. “Seeing me so tense - no self-con…fidence”: it’s pitiful. And in the end, with a flick of the voice - that conspiratorial “but you see” - her pride returns, and the ranging final chorus is a defiant self-justification of what she’s just put her audience (him, and us) through.
On the video, the members of ABBA laugh and clink glasses, reminding us that there’s a third layer of theatre here, the public disintegration of a real life marriage. That layer’s become shorthand for the whole song - “Winner” as a divorce epic. But the specifics are unfair on the song: as “Dancing Queen” was to their world-beating peak, “Winner” is to the wintry late ABBA - a monumental combination of supreme craft and bittersweet subtlety. And more - it’s one of pop’s great pieces of acting.
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Tom • 2,174 views •
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I have to say that I don’t remember much in the way of conspicuous Abba-love from the rock press at this stage. I remember Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks declaring his intention to buy their entire back catalogue in a 1978 interview (now, that DID throw me)… I remember a broadly respectful but still slightly snotty NME cover feature from the same year… and I recall a clutch of positive reviews for “Does Your Mother Know” as a Feisty Little Rocker or some-such. But not much more than that.
And a search of Rock’s Back Pages reveals a yawning void between Kris Needs’ broadly positive (but still a bit sneery) live review for ZigZag (December 1979) and Richard Cook’s glowing NME review for The Singles, The First Ten Years (December 1982) - which a) reads like he still feels the need to fight their corner against the prevailing consensus and b) makes no mention whatsoever of anything recorded after 1978.
I’ve seen the “early, funny stuff” argument advanced re. ABBA before - in Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth the piece on Luv’ takes the view that Luv’ were the band you should have got into when ABBA got rubbish (sometime in 1976).
The critical revisionism of the mid-late 90s and on though tends to focus on the late, unfunny stuff - all bleak Scando wintriness, like some kind of pop Ingmar Bergman. And the early stuff gets more ignored now, which is a shame, as there is room in the world for “King Kong Song” as well as “Like An Angel Passing Through My Room”, and also you have to contort yourself around the problem of “Two For The Price Of One” if you want to argue that The Visitors is some kind of icy Nordic masterpiece of frozen grief.
(Though Taylor Parkes’ Melody Maker piece where he argues exactly this is still one of my favourite bits of 90s rock crit.)
i’ll dig through my tattered old singles pages if i get a moment tomorrow, i think that’s where i’d find the evidence i need, if anywhere (rocksbackpages has a lot of selection bias, formal as well as personal) — what i’m getting at really is that all kinds of otherwise argumentative people liked and had affection and approval for abba, without necessarily (all) thinking they were “important”, which was (in those days) coded rather differently than vinyl’s “damn fine pop group”; but if i’m picking this vibe up from anything concrete, it’s from (admittedly barely remembered) comments and comparisons and references in pieces NOT about them, rather than articles actually dedicated to them (where the “lasting importance” issue kicks in)
haha i think the most surreal thing about richard’s 1982 review is that he talks about the late 70s as if it were more ancient and distant than the age of the pharoahs — and he is making an argument for hypercanonic importance (he’s saying they were more radical than the pistols!); i totally agree that this level of support was unusual then
I don’t remember much ABBA love in the rock rags back then either, but then again it was a long time ago and all I remember now is trying to decipher what Paul Morley and Ian Penman were banging on about. Julie Burchill might have been a fan because it was music the proles liked (though she was writing a column for The Face at this point in time)
If there was any serious evaluation of them it was probably along the lines of an anthropological field study: “The simple natives are more advanced than you would think. They have a sophisticated understanding of melody and verbal communication.”
ok well my singles review archives so far come up pure DUD from my theory’s PoV, bah — at least in ref 77-81, abba just didn’t get a mention by anyone whose cuttings i’ve kept (there is even more selection bias here of course): except j.burchill being drive-by snarky about “the day before you came”; i haven’t hunted through 82-85 yet
(it’s intriguing that they almost never get lumped into the collective denunciations of bloated bigwigs, either — of which there are unendingly many at this date — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as they say, but these were times when no one was afraid to hate! however this is a slim reed to build my argument on…)
…but surely the reason they weren’t lumped in as “big wigs deserving of denunciation” back then was that apart from the odd supposedly “controversial” and deliberately contrary article they were looked on as merely “pop” and existing in a universe completely divorced from the rock canon and hence not even worthy of criticism by the average rock writer of those days
no, andy, not so, not really — as you’d immediately see if you were looking at the singles columns i’ve been reading this evening, which are full of all kinds of discussion of pop and the charts, right alongside rock (and alongside lots of other stuff also): the line between rock and pop was (or was potentially) a LOT more fluid in the late 70s and early 80s than it became afterward; the argument about which was important, and why (and what was wrong with rock and what was wrong with pop) was all really heightened, but not in a way that’s terribly easily unravelled from our hindsight perspective; in particular, it’s REALLY misleading reading back from the settlement in the early 90s back onto the late 70s, because the media set-up and the surrounding attitudes really weren’t very similar at all — what you’re calling the rock-pop divorce was (i would argue) a lot more complete at the end of the 80s than it was at the end of the 70s
(tho to repeat the caveat: as it perhaps unsurprisingly happens, the writers i’ve kept stuff by were exactly NOT the “average rock writer”; they were the unusual and interesting ones, to me then; the issue of how representative they are is obviously a bit fraught — do you want to the worst as the essence, which seems unfair, or the best, which probably distorts things a bit?)
i know i promised a big post on all this last week - i’ll try and get it up tomorrow, it’s half written (it got bigger than i expected)
This must be around the same time as Pete Wylie’s now-famous ‘Rockism’ interview.
Yes I suppose the new pop ethos did start to come in about 1980 with the more forward-thinking interesting writers but surely there were still plenty of unimaginative, peddling the old “rock-canonical-partyline”type writers around the turn of the 70s/80s who would have thought Abba were beneath them or written about them slightly more positively in some ridiculous ironic way.
The kind of writers who felt the need to slag off pre-punk rock bands because however unacceptable they found them (wor had been told to find them) they were “rock” and appealing to the same general constituency of serious rock fans.
i think the wylie “race against rockism” interview was in early 1981
p^nk s #50 (belatedly), true. i’m probably too tainted from reading late 80s/early 90’s NME&MM where there just wasn’t a genuine pop lovers faction (maybe david quantick at a push), it was either routine ‘huzaah, thousand yard stare are here to save us from the banality of this pop mush’ or ‘look at me, i love aqua, that’s right AQUA! got a problem with that indie boy?”
big post as promised (warning: ridiculously big)
From a note on the Swedish-to-English grammarians out there, it should of course be
The gods may throw a die as dice is plural. So there is an opportunity for those who find this lyric clunky to REWRITE ABBA, as it strikes me that die is easier to rhyme than dice.
their minds as sweet as pie
what Pete says is all very well, but in the world of real people “dice” is effectively both singular and plural.
I love this song, but I think I have listened to it enough.
I recall gushing praise from Morley for Tight Fit’s “Fantasy Island” at the height of New Pop. Rightly so, too. I don’t think he mentioned Abba by name. But as Abbalite goes it’s pretty fantastic.
“The 12″ of Fantasy Island is actually better than Led Zeppelin III”
NB I am not sure I agree with this. The 7″ is not better than Led Zeppelin III, but there might well be enough improvement in the 12″ for me to side with PM.
re 67 - blimey, that takes me back. It’s interesting to see that he was peddling this line back then. ‘Words and Music’ is pretty much this article remixed and expanded to book length with extra lists
re clumsy lyrics - I like the fact that the lyrics aren’t always coherent and a little awkward - it fits the mood of the song and makes it seem more immediate and less rehearsed
better than Led Zep III, haha that’s a ludicrously brilliant comparison. I’d forgotten that.
I love Led Zep III actually - my favourite Zep album.
OMG OMG OMG that Paul Morley piece, thank you thank you thank you! It had a stong influence on my thinking at the time, and I can still remember parts of it more or less verbatim.
What a fantastic Top Ten that was - 12 June 1982 to be exact pop pickers. So I’m guessing that must have been the NME for 19 June? I must try and get a copy of that one.
It’s the only NME from that entire era I own (aside from a couple of Xmas specials) - complete fluke!
i think that piece is responsible for tom contacting me to tell me about freaky trigger and his new “message board” — i had written something somewhere about how great it is (which it is), one of my five favourite music pieces ever
Imagine a barfly sloping up beside you and attempting to establish eye contact before slurring, “I don’t wanna talk” – and at that point, you know he’s going to tell you his life story whether you like it or not. The Winner Takes It All is a tour de force of drunken self-pity. No conjecture, this. Bjorn opened a bottle of red wine and started writing. By the end he had more verses than he could possibly use. By his own admission, he didn’t usually drink and write, but The Winner Takes It All came out in one sitting, and you can sort of tell by the sense of emotional unravelling that characterises that music and words. It’s also worth noting the sadism involved in writing the lines, “But tell me, does she kiss/Like I used to kiss you” and then getting your ex-wife to sing them. Ouch.