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.
10
That last phrase is a subject that always interests me – you may recall that I talked about acting a lyric rather than simply feeling it in that old Al Green piece, but it’s a major part of my love for some other acts, such as the Shangri-Las or Dolly Parton. I think it’s an underappreciated skill, often lost in favour of vocal pyrotechnics (I often like these too, but there is sometimes a trade-off).
I know they’d written “adult” songs before (Knowing Me, Knowing You) but this one wasn’t as dressed up in bright pop clothes so it was a surprise at the time that ABBA could be this grown up, to me anyway. It felt like their ‘Send In The Clowns’ or ‘Rumours’
I think this is their last truly great single, I might quibble with a 10 but only a little.
I’d say “The Day Before You Came” is great. And maybe “The Visitors”. But this is better than either of those (I think it’s their best single full stop).
It’s another goodbye-to-the-70s single in a way – one of the titans of the era preparing to throw in the towel: more on that when we hit their actual last No.1 maybe.
This is an outstanding song, with a fantasticly judged performance by singers and musicians preventing it from becoming overblown or mawkish. Unlike ‘Crying’ this benefits from restraint rather than full on operatic emoting – although I can imagine it being howled through quite affectingly at karaoke evenings.
I love the way that the lyric moves from the personal to the cosmic. It may have been inspired by Cole Porter’s ‘Every time we say goodbye’ in the way that it invokes the indifference of the gods – although I envisage Odin and Loki in Abba’s case rather than Zeus and Hermes.
I really didn’t appreciate this fully at the time but this deserves a 10 without a doubt.
couldn’t agree more with the 10 rating. my parents loved abba when i was young and i really couldn’t understand it. flash forward 15 years to a tape my cousin made for me of her 25 favorite songs of all time. when this popped up, i was completely taken aback. this was not platform boots and snowsuits, this had real depth of feeling. it made me reevaluate everything i thought i knew about abba. i was in love. this is always the track i play for abba-haters. if the song doesn’t affect you, there’s sometime wrong with you. how could you deny THIS?
for me, the backing vocals make the song. notice they only come in during the most intense sections of the song. when the singer becomes overwhelmed by emotion, the backing vocal becomes the rational counterpart. having said that, their sound and melody are perhaps a knock-off of lennon’s “happy xmas(war is over)”.
this is abba’s masterpiece. while it vies with “SOS”, “One of Us”, and “Under Attack” for favorite status, I’m well aware of its superiority.
Indeed, a masterpiece. To my mind this is one of only two Number Ones in my lifetime fully deserving the whole 10.
As Tom rightly points out this is one of THE great vocal performances. At times you feel as if you’re intruding on private grief. Which I suppose, given the state of the Abba marriages at the time, we were.
Abba return to the top slot after a gap of two and a half years and their genius has not dimmed. “The Winner Takes It All” is a heart rendering concession of defeat in the game of love (“Nothing more to say. No more ace to play”) and we sit spellbound sharing her misery. But is this self-wallowing pity? It is not. The brilliance of this record is that there is never a swipe at the victorious rival or even at the lover she has lost. Instead there is a brave stoicism which we readily applaud as the narrator loses everything (“The Winner Takes it All, The loser standing small. Beside the victory, That’s her destiny”). There is, of course, reflection (“I was in your arms, thinking I belonged there”) before acceptance (“It’s simple and it’s plain. Why should I complain?”) and even though she offers a final brave challenge (“But tell me does she kiss, like I used to kiss you, Does it feel the same, when she calls your name?”) she knows her cause is lost and there is a handshake before the song ends with her howling into the night “The Winner Takes It All” and a magnificent piece of theatre leaves us with a feeling far greater than a woman being dumped by a lover with whom she is especially in love. This is not the end of a relationship. This is the end of the world.
You lot are all raving about this but sorry, no. Abba were never for me then and not now. Im not going to say their crap, that would be ignorant. Just to say that Abba are not on my taste list. I guess there will come a time when kids will look back to the stuff I like and slag it all off. I’m not going to do that here to Abba because you guys are clever and reasonable and I don’t want to look like a dickhead. I just think Abba belong in the seventies not in the eighties which is my decade really.
Just to say, briefly, that the moment when the swell of music stills for a second and Agnetha gets down to the nitty gritty with that “does she kiss like I used to kiss you?” is the single most arresting and brilliant moment in all of Abba’s work.
I think I’m closer to Marshmallow Hamilton’s interpretation of the last verse than Tom’s, the ‘but you see’ doesn’t show me a glorious flash of pride as much as a simple victory through loss – the twist is that there is no twist, that this isn’t turning into I Will Survive any time soon, the flash of a match and the realisation that that odd smell is petrol, and despite yourself you’re too close to get away now…
Okay, I suppose that is a twist.
There is something rather poignant about this being John McCain’s favorite song. I guess it’s appropriate.
Also also she singing it into truth, do you see, that the winner this time will take it all, the misery as well as the good times, as she has no more space for it..
This is why I don’t review things, I will nail any half-clever idea at all to a song.
Standing at No.34 this same week: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division
Just thought that should be noted.
Wait, I heard that John McCain’s favorite song was “Dancing Queen.” Which I guess is inappropriate.
This is now visually embedded in my mind as Claremont Road, Hendon FC’s former ground, as they would play this at the end of a home defeat while I trudged out to catch the 102 home (the bar was the winners’ enclosure).
I’ll go with Martin’s comparison to the Shangri La’s rather than a musical number – ‘Girl Group grown up’ is a rare sub genre, and this as good as it gets.
Best moment: “But tell me, does she kiss…” followed by a perfectly timed drop to near silence (cue awkward shuffling, pangs of guilt, remorse).
For quite a while now I’ve had a sinking feeling about an oncoming tsunami of mark inflation as we enter the period of the majority of Populistas. Part of this is resentment of the (perceived, hasn’t actually happened at least not yet) triumph of the 80s over the 60s (when it was new ground being broken), of production over performance. And, of course, that our first double-10 act should be Abba and not the Beatles! (Although had Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane hit the top spot it might have been a different story, might it not, Tom?)
Anyway, all that resentment should be unworthy of me. I’m 54 after all, and supposed to be grown up (although I’ve never seen any sign of that happening.) And I really can’t fault this one. It’s a quite masterful performance, which would have graced any period – I can certainly imagine this going down very well indeed in the 50s.
And I can’t have it both ways. I had a sinking feeling that Abba, whom I can’t remember ever not holding in high regard, were going to get a shellacking from the Populistas. I’m delighted that it hasn’t happened.
Semper sursum, as we say around these parts. (I had intended to attend last night’s FA Cup replay between Barrow and Eastbourne Borough as Waldo’s proxy, but a nasty cold has prevented me.)
Should-have-seen-this-coming-ages-ago watch: I noticed a copy of ABBA Singstar for the Playstation in HMV yesterday. Man that’s got to be one hard game (as anyone who’s tried doing ABBA at karaoke will testify), unless you can tweak it to put everything down half an octave?
I am struggling manfully against mark inflation Rosie! And while the 80s is certainly “my decade” it’s got its share or horrors as well as triumphs.
Everyone is right about the poigniancy and depth of this. The thing which I always find difficult to imagine is first of all, handing this wife to your estranged wife to sing, and then travelling around the world to perform it in stadiums together night after night!
A word for its placing in ABBA’s 1980 album. Its the second song, coming after the title track (which we’ll go on to discuss, a song about being in a hugely successful pop group) and then crashes into ‘On & On & On’ – a song, in part about going out and pulling, but with a slightly nightmarish quality of routine and repetition in the chorus. That great album really does have some narrative structure to it…
Sod how deep this is – it’s just a big, ace tune. But that sleeve: a little too casual for the grooves within.
#2 Watch: Two weeks of Diana Ross’ cartwheeling, Chic-orchestrated ‘Upside Down’, which would have been a great number one, too.
#19 – Yes, there’s a hall of mirrors effect at work here. Benny is splitting with Frida, Bjorn with Agnetha. Benny and Bjorn write a song about the end of a relationship, from the “losing” woman’s point of view, and then they hand it to Agnetha to sing. That’s borderline emotional cruelty, isn’t it? No wonder she gives the performance of her lifetime – but who is articulating what emotion, and for what reason?
We can only guess, but it was interesting to read Bjorn’s denial (in a recent Observer Music Monthly) that this song was in anyway a reflection of the band members’ emotional reality:
‘Well, with “The Winner Takes It All”, the basis is the experience of a divorce, but it’s fiction. ‘Cause one thing I can say is that there wasn’t a winner or a loser in our case. That’s fiction. A lot of people think it’s straight out of reality, but it’s not.’
Hmmph. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Interesting to read Peter at #8 saying that “Abba belong in the seventies not in the eighties”. Plenty agreed with him at the time, as their falling record sales in 1981 and 1982 showed, and certainly the spangly “Mamma Mia” version of Abba had no place in the early-to-mid 1980s… but in my mind, “The Winner Takes It All” forms the glorious overture to the groups’s second incarnation: Bleak, Wintry, Bergman-esque, All-Grown-Up, Sadder And Wiser, Post-Divorce Abba.
And maybe in some ways, Abba Mark II works so well artistically because the old Abba had no place in the Eighties. There’s a sceptral quality to some of these later songs (I’m not clever enough to use voguish terms like “hauntology”), as if we are listening to the ghosts of the 1970s, hanging around after the party is over.
(Case in point: the aforementioned “On And On And On”, whose underlying bleakness and alienation pokes awkwardly through the forced surface jollity. It’s a midweek Divorced And Separated/Twenty-Fives And Over Nite at the town centre disco, where everyone’s a little over-done, a little desperate, trying a bit too hard.)
At the time, the 18-year old version of me had no use for “The Winner Takes It All”. This wasn’t I wanted from pop at all, and so I zoned out on it with typical generational lack of empathy. 28 years later, I think it’s up there with their best material.
The key text in any reading of an ABBA of the 1970s/ ABBA of the 1980s dichotomy, must be ‘Happy New Year’, set on the 1st of January, 1980.
“Seems to me now
That the dreams we had before
Are all dead, nothing more
Than confetti on the floor
Its the end of a decade
In another ten years time
Who can say what well find
What lies waiting down the line
In the end of eighty-nine…”
Its sad, but what hope there is in it lies in the ability to carry on, and that the couple are still together.
#4 yes on the way the song suddenly opens out to reveal that the situtation is cosmically hopeless, it’s kind of a paraphrase of king lear’s “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods”.
but the line i love best is “rules must be obeyed”. nothing better sums up the grown up, matter of fact, northern european, un-rock n roll glory of abba.
in a mid-eighties smash hits yearbook (85 i think) there’s a feature where the stars list their favourite ever records. this is one of phil oakey’s and ever since i’ve not been able to hear this without thinking of his comment “so sad, so true”. it was a bit of a disapointment when i recovered the yearbook from my parents’ house recently and found he’s actually said something prosaic like “i like a nice sad song”
yes i second mike in ref. my callow indifference at the time — i was pro forma pro-abba in sympathy with a spiky pro-poptimist at my school (who i. set himself bold nd alone against the endless sea of poshboy prog, and ii. was dating a 35-yr-old woman aged 15 himself) (i’ve told this story before i think) but not to the extent of checking them, more like thinking “good for them” and carrying on ignoring them
lee’s is a good catch as comparison: i too was enough of a secret romantic nihilist to believe (back then) that curtis’s story was closer to some important overlooked truth than anything as compromised and negotiated and plain grown-up as this in-group scando-backstory (also, to be fair to teen me, the grimness in my own family’s domestic set-up was seriousness illness of a parent and how this was faced, not any kind of marital war)
now mainly (in my way more pragmatic middle age) what i get from joy div — that song anyway, which i have NEVER much liked — is misery and confusion and youth snuffed out needlessly: the abba approach seems, well, smarter and braver
(also — this only just occurred to me — i was very excited at age 20 at the way the likes of pere ubu were bringing a broader range of metaphors for life and love into play, specifically political metaphors; but actually this works both ways, doesn’t it? agnethe is unfolding the story of what happens to ANY adult allegiance, ANY engaged commitment, when it turns out not perfectly hermetic and two-way after all: how do you behave when the party grows away from you? dignity? tantrums? etc etc)
It is indeed hard to, er, divorce what was going on in Bjorn and Agnetha’s life from the narrative of the song, even if the circumstances might have been different. It’s like literary criticism that seeks to ignore anything you might know about the history or circumstances of the author when discussing the text (some lit-crit experts might be able to tell me the term for that).
That last verse (“you’ve come to shake my hand”) seems not so much pride or stoicism but the confirmation of the crushing nature of the defeat – he wants to part on good terms but she’s not having any of it because of what’s happened to her. (Marshmallow, it doesn’t seem to me like there is a handshake.) He’s relatively unaffected; she’s passive-aggressive with knobs on and perhaps justifiably so.
And if you felt the way I did about Agnetha, you’d be going, Bjorn, you clot, you’ve pulled way out of your league with her and now you’re dumping her…? It gets even more poignant when you consider her subsequent life.
Billy #23, nice thought about the end-of-decade tone of sadness. Your quoting of the “Happy New Year” lyric brought strongly to mind another bloke who at this stage of 1980 – indeed this very month – is returning to the fray with the message, as he put it himself, “How’s your relationship going?… Weren’t the 70s a drag? … let’s try and make the 80s good…” It’s not the first time I’ve alluded to his story this year, and we’ll come back to him very shortly.
I like Abba (I did at the time too), and I like this song, although I’m a little surprised at the gushing praise for it here. Personally, I’m willing to take at face value Bjorn’s claim that the song is fiction. Especially when he talks in that same article about songwriting as if it were a nine-to-five job. There seems to be a real investment around these parts in seeing lyrics as some kind of unvarnished autobiographical truth, that’s quite a romantic way of perceiving things I think. I think Tom is right to talk about theatre and acting in this regard.
#26 – And then there was Yazoo’s “Goodbye Seventies” (from, er, 1983):
“I’m glad that we don’t hear you any more, I’m tired of playing in your fashion war.”
Yes, thank goodness we left the style-obsessed 1970s behind, eh?
Our lodger, in about 1987 or so, had a double cassette compilation called something like SEVENTIES: THE DECADE THAT TASTE FORGOT. I remembered thinking that yes, the aesthetic problems of our time had probably been solved and what on earth would nostalgists of the 80s find to talk about.
It’s good to see one or two posters above questioning the recent critical re-assessment of Abba. I have always firmly believed that re-assessment itself to be firmly tongue-in-cheek.
Abba were a good pop band. It’s not their fault they weren’t English speakers, so their vocals can often sound stilted, disconnected, or almost androgynous. This is an accident of birth, not a ground-breaking innovation.
Their lyrics were often good, but often rather bad as well (“Money Money Money”, “Gimme Gimme Gimme”) and I do think there has been more retro-fitting of this band’s story than any other, possibly in an attempt to portray them as some sort of geniuses. I don’t know why that should be; why they can’t be appreciated for what they were – a damn fine pop band, but nothing more?
This is certainly one of their better singles, but I’m inclined to view the lyrics as a cynical (but successful)attempt to cash in, by letting listeners think this was what it was like to be Agnetha at that time. I somehow doubt Agnetha would have gone along with it if it had all been rather closer to the truth.
…..lights blue touchpaper and stands WELL back…..
I think the retro-fitting – which hopefully I’ve contributed to in my own small way ;) – is because the band NEEDED more retro-appreciation than most. They had a lot of factors going against them which tend* to lead to critical neglect: immense mainstream popularity; loved by women, and sentimentally loved by women at that; cross-generational appeal; European; a clothes sense that left something to be desired…
So to dig through this to get at what’s good about them required a bit of effort. In my reviews I’ve tried to pick apart why I think the craft of ABBA – the mix of performance, lyric, and music – is so effective.
There are substantial criticisms to be made of ABBA – their attempts at funkiness and dance music are often risible; their jokes were usually bad; they could often be trite; they weren’t (as Rosie says) particularly groundbreaking (their stoical grown-upness is a rarity in white pop but it had a mirror in adult 70s soul). But every band has flaws.
Maybe it’s just that most posters here think the gap between “a damn fine pop band” and “geniuses” isn’t especially large :)
*or tended – I’ll grant you the goalposts have moved in the last ten years or so, to the point where anti-ABBA opinion can now pose as unfashionably clear thinking!
I think the lyrics here are perfectly serviceable, but nothing more. There’s nothing particularly unexpected for the “break-up song” genre. And there are some clunkers in there: the gods may throw the dice, their minds as cold as ice, indeed. And some downright nonsense (the likes of me abide spectators of the show, say what?). I don’t think the lyrics can compare to those of the other charting break-up song referred to upthread.
The judges will decide
The likes of me abide
Spectators of the show
Always staying low
These are clumsy lyrics but not nonsensical – she’s saying her lack of agency as the loser reduces her to the role of spectator. (She needs a romantic John Sergeant figure obv.) It’s a bit unfair to quote the middle two lines though – it’d be like saying “All my failings take hold get a taste in my mouth, HEIN??”
Re: #25
I did note ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ because the songs are both wintry-cold dissections of failed relationships but in retrospect Curtis’ lyrics (good though they are) do seem a bit affected, a young man with pretensions trying to be profound and poetic about love while ABBA’s relatively more straightforward lyrics seem to carry more realistic weight.
I think I was primed to like this one because my mother was always a big fan of grown-up relationship songs, particularly ones about divorce and adultery (from personal experience) so the air of my youth was thick with the likes of “Me and Mrs. Jones” and “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” and as a result I’ve always liked songs that have the same adult and complex perspective as a novel or a movie.
as a matter of interest — i could google this but i’ll ask instead — did abba always also record their songs in swedish?
the reassessment issue is complicated by the fact that a generation’s re-visits to its past probably more or less coincide with any given member of that generation desire to look back and see where s/he was right and where wrong in past judgments and allegiances — was i a visionary popcult winner then, or just a sheep? which am i being now? is my ardent desire never to be seen as a sheep ever ever muffling my actual feelings (then or now); or obscuring my judgments?
(the advantage of the lyrics not being first-rate is that it foregrounds the non-lyric elements of the music, of course — which with abba were often strong enough easily to overshadow the clumsier attempts at expressing a subtle idea)
Oh I agree that bland lyrics will never sink a good song, they don’t have that much power. Only truly unavoidably awful lyrics can do that.
Talking of lyrics, I was interested to note on the WTIL wikipedia page that the song was reprised by Mireille Mathieu as “Bravo, tu as gagné” (having just looked at it on youtube, it’s exactly the same arrangement). Around the same time someone did a French version of the Sheena Easton hit “9 to 5″, translated (if translated is the word) as “L’amour c’est comme une cigarette”. But this must be about the last time they did that in France, translate a hit for the domestic market.
Someone more au fait with the French charts could possibly update this – but I do remember (in fact still have it on tape) Sylvie Vartan’s “Danse ta vie” which was the French version of “What A Feeling” from “Flashdance” – so that takes the practice into 1983 at least.
“The gods may throw the dice, their minds as cold as ice” is a splendiferous lyric about fate and human vulnerability. It’s like a pop Sophocles.
Am I the only person for whom ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ reminds them of ‘Pinball Wizard’?
#39 TBH it always makes me think of D&D but that is my trauma not ABBA’s :(
Ooops, late to the debate, and this was one I was really excited about commenting on…
Despite a suitably self-conscious awareness of and drift towards the new romantic synth pop fashion, I hadn’t left my devotion to Abba behind. And I was a proper card carrying devotee (no, it really wasn’t a fashionable thing to me), even, as I recall, subscribing to the magazine, an A5 pamphlet of dubious quality or content. All of which explains to a great degree my failure to engage with the Jam/Dexys school of recent #1s.
So obviously I liked this. And I think it stands up fantastically today, despite the familiarity, the endless revivals, the musicals, Meryl and the utterly bizarre Kylie/Danii cover of the other week.
All the 10s are justified because this is one of those very rare meta-pop records, that manages to do and signify to a quite remarkable intensity.
Firstly it is simply, on its own merits and with no external factors weighing in, as stark and plain a break up song as ever hit the charts. The slight second language clunkiness of the metaphor heightens, rather than dissipates the meaning, and as many have already said, Agnetha’s performance, carrying, in defeat, no histrionics is remarkable.
Second is the interplay with the real life band/marriage scenario – and I’m firmly in the school of the song (and video) as one of the most extreme pieces of pop cruelty ever perpetrated. I think Agnetha’s contemporaneous quotes about the break up – Bjorn having moved in with her replacement the same week – rather back this up. And her subsequent personal and emotional history, or at least the tabloid version thereof, pile on yet more significance.
Finally for me is the notice that as a song it crystalised the changing emotional and critical trajectory of the band, while at the same time managing to stand completely out of the artist context in the musical/film/whatever afterlife, accumulating more and more emotional punch as it goes along.
Not many on the list that one say that for….
I’ll give you “the gods may throw the dice”, but “their minds as cold as ice” – come on it’s doggerel, it’s just there to rhyme!
the critical reevaluation of abba strikes me as somewhat unexpected, though ultimately logical. initially disdained by the “hipper” elements of the pop audience of the time, admired ironically by the end of the 80s, and finally honestly adored in the current day.
there is something intangible about abba, an x-factor that explains their unexpected triumph. personally speaking, my two favorite bands of all time are probably the beatles and the kinks – always have been, always will be. i LIKE them both very very very much. having said that, abba would probably not make my top top but i LOVE abba. i love them on a level i could never love the beatles – perhaps because i’m so familiar with the beatles, perhaps because of the sheer emotional force of abba’s music. i don’t believe i’m alone in my response to that music.
what is it about abba that invited sceptical brits and americans to give them a chance initially? what is it that continues to convert doubters and win new fans across the world? i agree with #22 about the spectral (or sceptral) quality of the music, but i don’t think it can be limited to their 80s output. even “dancing queen” and “knowing me knowing you” sound otherworldly in their own way. i also agree with #30 that no aspect of ABBA was planned, it is surely almost entirely a happy accident. but accident or no, there is something *else* there that i’ve never quite been able to pinpoint.
The gods dictate mortals’ destiny through controlling fate, acting with no compassion or empathy for the pain that their actions have on human beings.
Hence the gods’ minds are as cold as ice, both dispassionatly objective and yet causing excruciating anguish and discomfort for mortals.
Gold star to Bjorn and Benny for conveying all of this in twelve words which also rhyme and scan.
Re. #38: The practice continued in Germany until early 1984 at least. Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow” was a hit for Juliane Werding as “Die Nacht Voll Schatten”, and there was a German language cover of “Relax” called “Relax (Komm Tu Es)” which rather inverted the original sentiment!
Oddly, I also remember both “L’Amour, C’est Comme Une Cigarette” and Sylvie Vartan’s take on “Flashdance (What A Feeling)”.
see this is the song’s secret text — > “as flies to wanton boys are we chart popsters to the SO-CALLED HIPSTER SO-CALLED CRITICS”
as i recall — as someone desperate myself to grow up to become part of same* — the UK rockwrite establishment (late 70s, early 80s division) were pretty much unitedly pro-Abba at this date (even if they were divided about everything else)
*readers, i married it :(
There’s an issue of the NME, February 1981 IIRC, the first ever U2 cover, where two disparate articles are linked together ‘ABBA Vs. Crass’!
the UK rockwrite establishment (late 70s, early 80s division) were pretty much unitedly pro-Abba
hasn’t there always been a bit of a tendency for abba to be the rockpress’s black friends? see also “i’ve nothing against manufactured pop music, the monkees did some great stuff”*. in my day it was the nme putting kylie on the cover and using the entire two page story to congratulate themselves for putting kylie on the cover.
*most recently deployed by mark knopfler on “from the bottom to the top”, he then got his brace with “of course, there’s a line straight back from ["the message"] to the blues”
well, you missed off the last part of what i said, pink c: the point i was making was that, when it came to abba (if i’m remembering correctly) all factions agreed; so yes, the faction that was down with manufactured pop agreed with the faction that was perhaps somewhat uncomfy or touristy in its pop love… which faction is the more representative of the rock press of the time i am way too parti pris to say
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.
She stared at the songsheet in open-mouthed disbelief. They hadn’t been speaking or socialising much of late; how could they, both couples having divorced – any association was now purely professional. As professional as she always was, however, even she found it hard to be compelled to spend so much time with people to whom she was no longer that close – days in the studio, months on the road – and yes, it did hurt.
The fun seemed to have disappeared from their music, too. It was hard to believe that it was less than five years since the glee of “Mamma Mia”; harder also for the men to cope with the fact that it had now been well over two years since they’d last had a number one in the country they called “the home of pop.” Oh, all the intervening singles had gone top five, of course – they’d hardly vanished from pop – but there seemed something stilted about the treading of commercial water, as though they were forcing themselves to go disco. Well, where else could they have gone? A punk Abba? How sad a joke would that have been? So they’d tried different gimmicks – their first 12” remix (“Voulez-Vous”), giving Bjorn a lead vocal (“Does Your Mother Know?”), even trying to conjure up the Hootenanny Singers ghosts of old youth with “I Have A Dream.”
Now, the guys had been particularly upset about that one. It was a return to the nicer old days, and there was the children’s choir and here was the irresistible chorus to a song designed to be number one at Christmas. But then those bastards Pink Floyd, who NEVER released singles, suddenly put one out with their own children’s choir without warning! They shouldn’t say that about groups like that, they knew; still, it was difficult to maintain a straight face after reading Roger Waters saying that he’d gone off Abba about five seconds after he’d first heard them. That was a kick in two heads, but still they had to grin and settle for second place over the season.
They’d started recording the new album that March, and both she and Frida were concerned about the vaguely depressing nature of many of the songs being scheduled – “Our Last Summer”? “Happy New Year” with its cold final warning of “May we all have our hopes/Our will to try/If we don’t we might as well lay down and die…you and I”? “Me And I,” with its conclusion of “Everyone’s a freak”? There was no doubt; the shadows of Samarra were closing in on them. Frida still carried on gamely, clowning around with the reluctant rest of the group for photographers, but really they were growing older, and growing apart. She could barely stand to speak to her ex-husband. No third party on either side; they drifted as extremely rich, hardly intimate couples have a tendency to do.
Still, this was something of a shock. Now she knew her husband didn’t write the words; that had always been Benny’s job. But of course he would have read them, set them to music – perhaps even sniggering in the back room at the suffering they intended to put her through? No, surely not; they weren’t exactly strangers to doing yearning ballads of lost love. Yet this one seemed ominously final. She thought briefly of the stories she’d heard about Ronnie Spector; kept a prisoner in her husband’s mansion while being forced (at gunpoint, some claimed, or was that just a past ingrate embellishing tales with retrospective relish?) to sing things like “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine.”
But no one was holding her hostage in Polar Studios. If she didn’t want to sing the song she could just refuse; if they pressed her she could always just walk out and quit – it wasn’t as though she needed the money. Besides which, she reminded herself through internally gritted teeth, you’re a professional. Just sing it. But turn their words back upon them; sing them as though you’ve never meant anything more fervently in your life.
She donned headphones and waited for the backing track to start up. A dolorous piano treated with echo and Wurlitzer, just like that odd “Video Killed The Radio Star” thing they’d heard in Britain a few months earlier. It plays the mournful chorus harmonies, and then stops, pauses.
She takes the biggest breath she has ever taken in her life, and begins to sing:
“I don’t wanna talk about things we’ve gone through.
Though it’s hurting me, now it’s history.”
But you bastards won’t let it lie, will you? she thought to herself. The song was one about a cuckolded, humiliated lover, forced to hand over the keys to her life to someone else. This wasn’t the noble, selfless grace of “Make It Easy On Yourself”’s self-sacrifice. No, the song is, she discovers, all about the necessity to grit one’s teeth as one’s life and purpose are being destroyed in front of her, defenceless.
The song builds up in intensity, as their ballads always tended to do, and she rides its waves – “I was in your arms,” “Building me a fence,” “Building me a home” are all sung as succeeding ascending steps of a spiral staircase leading to nowhere except a huge fall. She noted the Thomas Hardy allusion of “The gods may throw a dice/Their minds as cold as ice,” and all the while she is finding it less and less easy to control her flood of feelings, her surfeit of sorrow – “It’s simple and it’s plain! Why should I complain?” she nearly cries.
Then, the song pauses and lowers down to knee height for the difficult bit, the most bastard bit for her to sing. She feels as though she is stabbing herself as she sings it, quietly:
“But tell me, does she kiss like I used to kiss you? Does it feel the same when she calls your name?”
A woman divorced by her husband being asked to sing a song co-written by her husband wherein she asks her ex-husband whether his new partner is as good as she was. “But what can I say? Rules must be obeyed.”
Then the song fills up again, with distant echoes of keyboard and backing vocals – Frida is practically a poltergeist on the record – and as she reaches the penultimate chorus it feels like the end of everything. Again the quiet piano to give her a final, doomed chance of defiance:
“I don’t wanna talk if it makes you feel sad.
And I understand – you’ve come to shake my hand.
I apologise if it makes you feel bad
Seeing me so tense.
No self-confidence.”
She looks at him on the other side of the control booth, eyes burnished with hatred, visibly shaking, audibly trembling.
“But you see,” she says, “THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL!” And with that the job is done; she removes the headphones, is out of the door before the song has even ended. She will have to come back to overdub some backing vocals but at that second she never wants to come back into that studio again. And also the professional in her takes over; as a horribly real weepie it is likely to be one of the biggest hits they’re ever likely to have, even by their own standards, and, well – it has to be promoted, contracts must be honoured, taxes paid. It is still very far from over. But, just as she reaches the studio door, she catches in the corner of her eye Bjorn and Benny, sitting there, open-mouthed at what they’ve just recorded and listened to and watched; maybe even thinking this is far too raw to come out even as a B-side. Her performance is, she knows, genuine and candid and shrivelling and accusatory; she has sung her hate disguised as regret and gamesmanship right back at them. Yes, Agnetha, she tells herself, that was the greatest performance of your life, maybe even the most emotionally naked vocal performance on a pop record by anyone – and you didn’t even need to perform. You showed them, all right. 9, or 1, depending on which side of the control booth you happen to be standing
I’ve always wondered whether all the teens (and younger) boys and girls that grew up with Abba really got this song or was it bought by their parents who recognised the angst and emotion that for me is one of the great pop records. It set a benchmark for songs that are bittersweet from experience and unsurprisingly made the playlist for my divorce some twenty years later.
I have it on another playlist with Living Years, Fix You and We never went to church that I should probably title regrets and redemption!
PS Thanks Puntum for the above
Punctum…that piece of writing is one of the best pieces I’ve read on here. Thank you very much.
One thing I am reminded of are the fly on the wall films that peer in on the group dynamics in a studio situation. Most of us have seen Let It Be or Some Kind Of Monster which highlight the strain put on band members as the creative process becomes a chore or some cruel and unusual torture.
TWTIA becomes an intriguing case of the latter.
It must have been the fact that Bjorn wrote the lyrics, I assumed that it had been written from his perspective, but it’s actually written for Agnetha so she has to confront her own presumably suppressed anxiety over the divorce. With this in mind, the song becomes a rather uncomfortable listen. We become voyeurs. Which also implies Bjorn’s dignity is sacrificed for some cheap point scoring off the ex-missus. But he’s behind the glass watching her squirm. Dignity is the last thing on his mind. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, right? Only Agnetha takes the ball and runs with it. “Turns their words back upon them”. She pulls it off with style. Agnetha’s greatest vocal performance? Quite possibly. Logic would suggest Bjorn would try to sabotage such a powerful vocal in the mix out of spite, but even he must have realised this would sell like hot cakes.
And so the death of a marriage becomes product. A helluva way to make a living.
For me, this is the ultimate pop song from pop’s cleverest group. The line: “…and I understand, you’ve come to shake my hand” is sooo bittersweet. Perfect.
I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s comments, but this is actually one of my least favorite Abba songs. For wintry break up songs, I much prefer ‘When all is said and done’, and ‘Knowing me knowing you’, and for Brodaway-ish show-stoppers, ‘I wonder’ and ‘Thank you for the music’ (from the semi-musical that finishes off Abba the Album) have more variationm and for me a suppleness that TWTIA lacks.
I know that TWTIA is one heck of a performance by Agnetha, and the mind does boggle at Bjorn and Benny handing this one to her to sing (it’s funny to imagine that in something like the way Jared Diamond has fun imagining an easter islander chopping down the last tree on Easter island!), but finally the song just plods a bit to my ears. Benny’s piano throughout feels a little stock/generic to me, and the whole thing just grinds away turning into a bigger and bigger belting it out piece, but without reaching the heights of the best B/way belters (think Streisand doing Happy days).
A lot of late Abba songs have something a little embarrassing about them, but then there’s also often some delicious melodic twist somewhere that just can’t be denied. ‘One of us’, ‘Super trouper’, ‘Slipping through my fingers’ are three that come to mind that work like that. TWTIA doesn’t (to my ears at least) contain one of those hidden treasures to make the game worth the candle. So, it’s more of a 7 than a 10 from me for this one.
Was going to comment on the song (though not really much to add to what’s been said above) but alas got sidetracked by how unbearably self-satisfied that Paul Morley piece at #76 is, ugh
(I will charitably assume it has just dated rather than it was rubbish at the time too)
Er, #67 rather!
I’ve remembered what I was going to say now anyway, which is that “One for Sorrow” by Steps (not SB embargoed) rips this one off rather shamelessly.
Yes at the time it was fairly startling actually, and very memorable as a consequence. PM’s dreamy self-regard has been much imitated since, and lost most of the sharpness it then seemed to have: this was — as i think i said above — an enormously exciting and important piece for me, not so much for the tone and style, as just for the way he treats all the different songs and musics as voices in a conversation, a social argument… like posts on a comments thread almost.
OTOH the excerpt Tom quotes at #67 is clearly the sort of thing someone should be saying.
Was that the first in a series? I can imagine subsequent pieces of writing – after he’s set out his stall, so to speak – being a bit better.
no it was totally a one-off: came out of nowhere, never repeated
The excerpt Tom quotes at #67 is clearly the sort of thing someone should be saying.
Because clearly someone should say ’2+2 > 75′ ?
Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes, they do Otto, they just don’t understand it.
Someone needs to say things which aren’t said so that we can work out if they haven’t been said because they’re unpopular or they haven’t been said because they’re wrong. Saying 2+2<75 makes the people who think 2+2>75 explain why that is so (or find out that it’s not) rather than just complacently taking it as a given.
(not having heard the 12″ of Fantasy Island nor, indeed, Led Zeppelin III I don’t know which side is which here)
Well, at least that 12″ single is over sooner.
Saying 2+2 < 75 makes the people who think otherwise explain why that is so
Jesus, no. If someone makes an utterly bizarre claim (esp. without a very good supporting story, let alone without any supporting story at all), they almost certainly should not be taken seriously. Perhaps they’re nuts, or just trying to get a rise out of you or are engaged in some sort of ape-like chest-beating display/social manoeuver, or they’re just prone to mindless gainsaying and iconoclasm or…
You (Flahr) know chunks of Led Zep 3 if you’ve ever watched things like Almost Famous (which uses Tangerine in its final scene) and Rock School (which uses Immigrant Song as Jack Black’s best driving music).
I don’t know the 12″ mix of Fantasy Island either. It isn’t around in any of the obvious places on-line (whereas most fondly remembered 12″ versions of things are widely available – diehard fans like to share their best rareties), which suggests that it’s nothing special.
There is a supporting story surely, the rest of the article is all about being in a state of giddy delight about the charts/pop/the moment. In which case the really preposterous claim would be that a decade-old album could be better than a current thrill.
Sorry for no Popular this week btw, double column deadline and a lot of work on.
#89 – oh, I’ve heard “Tangerine” and “Immigrant Song” (I’d even heard it before the Viking kittens!) and indeed “Gallows Pole” (I believe this was school-related) but I’ve not heard the album as album, or even half the tracks on it. What I’ve heard I like. From hearing the normal edit of “Fantasy Island” I doubt his claim about the 12″ is true (if nothing else “Immigrant Song” is a lot more pop than “Fantasy Island”).
“If someone makes an utterly bizarre claim…they almost certainly should not be taken seriously.”
I don’t necessarily think we should trust what he says! But outlandish claims like that add to the colour and flow of pop/rock criticism, and I think it’s worthwhile having a couple of people around being contradictory for the sake of it; at best they might be right, at worst they’re amusing. I’m not sure people should be listening to what Paul says here, but I think it’s good that he says it. (Somewhere in the back of my head I want to make a vaguely Millsian justification of this but thankfully the rest of my head is telling me this is ridiculous.)
#90 – I think most of my sense of self-satisfaction from the piece is the result of that giddy delight; I’m not sure why, for me and in that piece of writing, the latter comes across as the former. Possibly because we’re out of the moment he’s talking about and now this reads like nostalgic bludgeoning
one of the things PM was good at was statements that sorted sheep from goats, actually — and this is one
swanstep’s idea that you can measure something’s value by your own inability to find it is way more bizarre than morley’s claim – which is more or less the claim that living in your own present is better than living in someone else’s past
Surely what Morley meant, regarding “Fantasy Island > Led Zep III” was “for fuck’s sake lets get away from the Rock Museum and just look at how exciting RIGHT NOW is!”. That’s the impression I got from that piece linked by Tom. It was an outlandish statement, but I guess it needed to be, in order to get the attention he needed from the engaged and the outliers, even now. And what Morley does in his insistent LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO ME! way is to try to bring the reluctant rockists as well as the pop kids onside.
For reasons that Mark S explains in various comments on his 5 years at NME across Popular, Morley simultaneously succeeds and fails in this venture, simply because the inky music press is approaching a seismic shift, that not only alienates a huge chunk of the inky readership, but also sets the writers on a collision course especially within the NME, ultimately ending in the re-formatting of NME as well as winding-up of MM and Sounds; the Death Of The Inkies. I’m not blaming Morley for this, after all, he’s a crucial character in the saga that is New Pop. On several levels, it was bound to happen.
Re “supporting story”: also worth recalling that this appeared in a rock weekly, so that the general argumentative context — including battlelines drawn, and so on — had been being unfolded in its pages for months
which is another reason the piece was so exciting, because form follows function: a magazine isn’t a book, it’s not one person’s idea unfolded long-form, it comes in clusters of bits, which wrangle and clash: this week’s chart (and this week’s pop magazine) are more important than some mouldy album, because they tell you about the jostle and turmoil of the world we’re in blah blah
who this appeals to is more a matter of temperament than sort of Logic of the Eternal Verities — certanly it appealed to me enormously then
‘some mouldy album’
Which was released 11 years before Morley was writing, the equivalent of 2000 for us now, or, put another way, to roughly half the distance back to Popular’s current horizon…. What?
this week’s chart (and this week’s pop magazine)… tell you about the jostle and turmoil of the world we’re in blah blah
Oh, maybe. Mostly though it’s about the present the way financial news is that endlessly comments on micro-/daily, sub-daily changes in stock exchange values (most of which is just random fluctuation and drift). All of that’s irrelevant to non-insider, long-term investors, and has almost nothing to say about the broader economy or its politically proper understanding). The jabber of those people, their mixture of hyperbole and breathless present-centrism and high-velocity name-dropping and brow-beating designed to provoke action ‘Buy!’/'Sell!’ is… familiar.
I dare say that Morley’s enthusiasm appealed to me a lot at the time too (how could it not? year zero proclamations confirm a kid’s default stance in the world). How wonderful it was to have someone tell me that I didn’t need to listen to Led Zep or to decide for myself what I thought about them, I could just cut directly to the chase of the present, and, heh-heh, just know that anyone who listened to them was a moron (or something).
the general argumentative context — including battlelines drawn, and so on — had been being unfolded in its pages for months
Yes there was supporting material spread around. Unfortunately it was tended to be just more of the same hyperbole and in-group-/territory-marking and name-dropping. So, e.g., the next week it would be some Julian Cope B-side > Revolver.
Looking back, I’d paraphrase the appeal of Morley et al. to my young self in a slightly different way than I would have said at the time. Returning to the the original provocation, Morley was saying to me at the time not really that Tight Fit 12″ > LZ3 but something more like the following:
‘Sure LZ3 is great. Everyone knows that. Everyone also knows that this piece of trash single is relatively worthless. Hence everyone knows that Tight Fit 12″ < LZ3. That's easy. But follow me down this very obscure pathway of esoteric knowledge that only I possess, thereby becoming part of an insider-group that most people aren't even mentally capable of joining, and I'll show you a perspective from which the converse of that conventional wisdom is true.'
Something like this was the real source of Morley's appeal to me at 13-14. It and the merry dance though cool stuff it introduced me to was fun and even intoxicating for a few years, but ultimately I was ill-served by stepping into the cocked sling-shot of all of Morley's views and preferences. How exciting to be signed up for the frontlines of a battle and to see the world that way! I would have been better served by listening to more of the past in a fairer way in high school, broadly surveying and making my own mind up about conventional wisdom rather than embracing esoteric views too quickly.
Returning to my financial news comparison. When I saw that long Joy Division documentary a few years ago (around the same time as Control), and got to see how close Morley was to that band, I felt (possibly unfairly) a little irate. From the other side of the world, I had relied on people like Morley for something like objective advice about what to check out etc.. I'd always thought of him as a kind of independent analyst, but I now saw that that was an absurd image to have had. He was completely in the tank for his mates, had what would be called in the financial press, massive conflicts of interest. It made me cringe at how gullible I'd been (and possibly still am to some extent – cringing cuts deep that way).
One thing Morley achieved with pieces like this one is make the NME a bit more on the ball. God, if you wanted to read about pop music in 1980/81 Smash Hits was miles ahead of the inkies (the odd writer, like Betty Page at Sounds, or Thrills at the NME aside).
As Mark says a magazine is a cluster of bits, not a book. Smash Hits – Hepworth’s dull AOR leanings aside – pretty much presented a united take on contemporary pop, and indeed helped evolve New Pop through its presentation and writing style.
Pre ’82, NME was really quite dull and worthy and miles off the track in comparison.
A lot of the time we writers are hurtled, or jettisoned, into writing by loss of one kind or another. For some it’s compensation, for others it’s a battle – often long and muddled – to put that loss into perspective, so that the future might get through more easily, and I don’t necessarily, or only, mean the future of music.
Apart from the unforced eclecticism of his tastes – as they stood in my teenage years, at any rate – I guess that’s why I’ve felt closer to Paul Morley than any other music writer, since both his kickstart into music writing and his maturation as a music writer – “maturation” here meaning the formation of his stray strands of ideas into a cogent engine of thought and (hopefully) prophecy – were provoked, more or less, by two losses. First, he lost his father at the same age, give or take a year or two, that I lost mine, and both were suicides of a kind (my father did not strictly speaking commit suicide but I cannot deny that he spent many years building up to his death, willing it to happen).
Second; well, I don’t suppose losing Ian Curtis is remotely comparable with losing one’s partner of half a lifetime but IC’s suicide was the key trigger that set New Pop in (im)proper motion; speak to any of its major proponents and they’ll tell you the same story; that death drew a firm, starkly dark line under what had henceforth been building up (but to what?) and it was time to infiltrate the bloodstream of the mainstream with one’s ideas, philosophies or far-from-plain daftness, however one chose to do it.
But in almost all senses PM wouldn’t exist as the writer that he is without Joy Division; imagine if you can the sheer wonder that your mates, the blokes with whom you hung out in the pub, who one moment were a crappy punk band and then somehow SOMEHOW made the quantum leap into WTFness and then that this cheeky bastard of a singer with whom you sometimes played a round of darts suddenly found the key to otherness, to his own stupid immortality, and how the hell did he get there, even if by getting there he was dragging himself to hell, and knew it?
The emotional, bloody ties are too close to disentangle, too firmly (umbilically?) connected for PM ever to become the dreaded spectre of music writer-as-waiter, ticking off what’s good this week and what’s off – when reading a writer I have to be able to get into his or her life, try to understand who or what is driving them, since without the life of the mind, music writing is not worth minding.
It was those losses which catapulted PM into a world and situation where SOMETHING HAD TO CHANGE (or the world might fail?) and so his writing of the New Pop period carries a rare emotional resonance and spiritual ferocity, even when New Pop was clearly thrilling him to bits; witness his delirious singles column in the November 1981 issue of The Face, an oasis of ecstasy marooned within too much premature/imprecise mourning and grumbling (there’s far too much Steve Taylor). Who wouldn’t want to have followed – and maybe, if one had the nerve, even SURPASS – him?
As for “Fantasy Island” and LZ3; at the time the latter was thought very far from “great” or “classic,” an oddity stuck between two Rock Monuments, and the former was pretty much sneered at or disregarded. Yet “Fantasy Island” is, as with “The Land Of Make Believe,” an allegory about Thatcher’s Britain (just as its transatlantic contemporary, Blondie’s “Island Of Lost Souls,” was about Reagan’s America) and producer Tim Friese-Greene suggests angles and spaces – particularly in, but not confined to, the twelve-inch mix – which point both backwards towards the angelic trudge of “That’s The Way” and forwards towards Spirit Of Eden (which he himself produced). So I’ve always taken PM’s words not so much to be the fatal dart poisoning what Reynolds in Monitor called “the petrified doxa of Rockism” but a way of drawing our attention to both records, the subtle undertow highlighting the excitable (and in my view totally justified) urge to get on with NOW, knowing that the tide was with “us” (even if only for another week), that THESE ARE THE DAYS (to complicate the picture further, I thought the 12-inch of Robert Plant’s “Burning Down One Side” better than either at the time, while “Moonlight In Samosa” is exactly what a fusion of LZ3 and “Fantasy Island” would have sounded like).
There is plenty wrong with the piece, and I thought so at the time too; the Pigbag and Junior jibes are unworthy attempts to haggle with RD Cook and NME soulboys, whereas for me one of the most important attributes of New Pop was to get the kind of music back into the charts which “rock” had more or less banished or ousted to the paddocks (pace Mark S on “African Waltz”). Without the expanded horizons which it enabled, New Pop would have been worth nothing. But that is far outweighed by PM’s life-or-death NEED to communicate that now might be all that we have (cf., of all records, Wolfsbane’s Massive Noise Injection) and that we should live in it, inhabit it, but not stay there. Would that there were more of this in music writing now; but the greater challenge may yet still be the one which RDC threw down – to change our views about music, to see that it all connects, even the remotest and cobweb-strewn of corners, and perhaps, if we’re extremely lucky, change the way music is made and – the next step that nobody dared take, I mean, who do these music writers think they are? – change the world. But that gamble, for now, is between you and me.
@95. To extend your bracingly Marxist / Bourdieuian analogy with the financial media, different forms of writing can be valuable for different purposes. If you know what you are doing, you can make a good living out of breathless present-centrism and sub-daily changes in stock market values. I guess you could say that is a good description of your classic Popist: they are the day traders of music fandom.
Morley, meanwhile, you might think of as having been like one of those newsletters covering speculative mining companies or Silicon Valley start-ups. He has some stock invested in the subjects of his stories, but you don’t mind because his insider knowledge and understanding are so good, and he shares so much of what he knows so eloquently. Perhaps he should have been more open about that investment, but until music journalism gets regulated by the FSA, I don’t really think you can say he had any obligation to reveal it.
He is far from the only journalist ever to be a part of a scene that he chronicled, of course. And as I understand the career structures of the British music press, there is a huge incentive for every writer to overstate the quality of the bands they are covering. Nobody gets cover stories and four-page features saying: “This new album’s a bit dull, really. Nothing much to see here.”
And, to push the analogy even further, the best writers actually create value in the music they are covering. Firstly, in a cultural capital sense: if Morley writes great pieces about Joy Division, then people you respect are more likely to like them, so being a fan is more worthwhile for you. You might think of him as being like Jim Cramer, or another widely followed stock ramper; it can be worth buying the shares they tip, because they are so they can move the markets. Another vital skill for music writers is being able to spot bands that are going to go on to become big, so you can get in on the ground floor with your investment.
Second – and this is where financial writing and music writing part company – the greatest music writers can add value to their subjects. Morley, Penman, Bangs and a few others have had a huge impact on what I listen to and what I get out of it, because of the perspectives and ideas that they reveal. I am sure, for example, that I would enjoy AR Kane and Teena Marie much less than I do if I had not read Simon Reynolds and Chuck Eddy.
I don’t think you should be beating yourself up over being gullible. If you were caught up in a hype bubble, well it was fun while it lasted, and that is life in the market for ideas: cultural capital can go down as well as up. Certainly in Britain I would say there are lots of people who think that the hype – the overstated claims, the overheated prose – is all part of the fun, even an essential part.
Eleven years from LZ3 to FI: what is our modern equivalent of LZ3? ‘Is This It’? ‘Kid A’?
well, as i say, it’s a temperamental thing — and swanstep’s description of the temperament it awoke in him and pandered to is quite a lot different to the one it awoke in me, and i don’t think that’s just the age difference, and him now despising poor silly teenage swanstep: he enjoyed the elitist narrowing, and compares it to a particular kind of niche journalism; while i was loving the opening up, the sense of setting a stage where everyone could speak to everyone else, where past could meet present on equal terms — and quite soon ended up incredibly frustrated and unhappy that the ideal i’d perceived here (and still do, though it’s self-evidently a period piece stylistically and trapped in the ambit of a single week’s top singles) was being pushed out of the space, and that the space was already narrowing
and both these elements were/are clearly there, scrabbling with one another
as i say, i saw this piece and still see it as a counter to an extant review format which no one expected to be dispensed with — the singles column had already dealt with maybe half these songs as they came out and before they performed: so to me this particular format was the opposite of ahistorical: it was a way of taking stock of how meaning arises and changes in collective and semi-uncontrolled contention over time (by which i mean the formal contention of a singles column is one person’s selection, out of the serendipity of the singles box in front of him; but the formal contention of the charts is the consequence of thousands of semi-independent decisions); and had this lasted as format, there’d have been the chance to observe also how the chart itself was changing, narrowing maybe, or opening up because the responses were written down at the time
the potential for revision being a beginning of history: and the acknowledgement of the role of the audience — the idea that quality is NOT just the fiat statement of a small band of self-declared experts, but something that emerges from the clash of one with another, of the surges of mass taste with the trends and fashions of elite taste
it’s true that journalism deals with history (and wider structural viewing) badly: it deals with it badly when it ignores it, and it tends to deal with it just as badly when it pays attention to it — so that while the comparison of pop writing with a particular kind of financial pulp journalism is superficially suggestive (and cheekily funny), this is exactly the point when the deeper structural view would be kicking in to say, well, OK, they do look alike so ARE they alike? How are they the same and how are they DIFFERENT? If superficial instant response is off the table for the moment, what’s really going on here? The object of attention gets to be allowed to interrogate the framework of examination: or all you’re doing — which is what most journalism does as it grabs hold of the non-journalistic disciplines, is flashy comparisons to affirm pre-standing prejudices. If you strip this column out of its context — not a very “historical” thing to do — and scale it up so that all pop writing is imagined as similarly morley-form, well yes, you can conclude all kinds of things. But it arose in and against the context it was actually from…
And as i say, it’s not as if the format on show prospered historically: quite the opposite, this was its one appearance, and insofar as the rock papers did indeed become more niche, to their detriment, it was “mouldy album” syndrome that was increasingly bedding in and causing this: they gradually stopped mixing film and telly and books and politic into the same jostle of discussion, and set about firming up particular readerships more and more in their pre-chosen prejudice of what proper tried-and-tested test-of-timed rock was. Which is why you get all the angry barely literate kids in the comments to old Tanya posts: angrily telling us that Pink Floyd are beyond criticism, and Tanya must be the kind of person (often “chav”) who likes [insert flimsy pop name of the moment] [today it's GaGa, obviously: it's nearly always women]
Certainly I think the glib ahistorical shallowness swanstep perceives and dislikes was more a product of this reinstatement of the belief that ROCK was really about routinely producing these weighty masterpieces of importance, thatall could/must agree were actually what mattered for the music to have purpose, and — as a consequence — the entire rhetoric of criticism year-on-year bent itself to the pseudo-revelation of the new one and the next one, and about pre-fashioning a ready constituency of agreement… and of course it’s a corrosive pressure to produce “work for the ages”, especially when you have internalised this suspicion of the craft of building work for the instant, here-and-gone (this is why a lot of the music that’s merged from this bedding in, let alone the writing about it, is so joyless and unfunny and unself-aware — humour is situational, crafted for the now).
Lastly, yes of course there’s something absurd about pouring so much exegetical attention into a fleeting and flawed column in a rock weekly from 30-odd years ago, especially when also defending its claim that something well-regarded and then only 11 years old is not as important as something flimsy happening right now. (The elephant in the room here all along being that L3 is easily my favourite Zep LP.) But this is how you do actually find what matters and what doesn’t: you play with the boundaries of conventional and recieved assumptions about same, and see where it takes you. Or you cling to them, and make up nice stories about where you’ve been stranded. I’m not the person I was when this column hit me; and it hits me today in all kinds of different ways, obviously. The person I was then was wrong about a lot of stuff — including maybe the role this “type of thing” had in fashioning those elements of my then-future, my current present-and-past that I dislike — but there’s certain elements, about the pleasure in the outcome of the encounter with people not yourselves, and indeed the trust in it, which still speaks to me pretty strongly.
And to bring the whole thing back around to ABBA and Eurovision, it’s rather pleasing to note that the much-debated “Fantasy Island” started out life as a contender for the Netherlands’ 1982 Eurovision entry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ym4GRuGvfw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIig8CqIV4o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XtRnCDTrhM
(The Dutch had a rather convoluted system that year, whereby three songs were each performed by three artists. That don’t sound good to me.)
In the end, the Led Zep-conquering pop giant had to surrender the ticket to glamorous Harrogate to this slice of almost-amazing oompah blandness, complete with an all-female backing group including a Toksvig-esque drummer who can’t wink properly. 8 whole points on the Eurovision scoreboard were the cosmic punishment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdngRL1vZRs
Abba, their long-faced last days, and their final b-sides, Cassandra and You Owe Me One: http://besidethebside.blogspot.com/2012/01/abba-cassandra-you-owe-me-one.html