I’m not denying Abba were being mis-used as a punchline by 1986-87
it’s just interesting that some of the smarter musicians of the decade still revered their records even before it became trendy again.

I vividly remember being at an art school party circa 1984 and my mate put The Osmonds’ “Let Me In” on the stereo and a couple of us got up and sang along to it very loudly — perfectly seriously with no hint of being ironic (I swear I was a bit teary-eyed by the end. Yes, I was drunk but it’s a lovely song!), but I’m sure most of the people in the room thought we were joking. Next he put on ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’ by ELO by which time everyone realized we were being perfectly serious and started to have serious doubts about our taste.

I think even back then I resented the cloud of kitsch that had quickly enveloped the pre-punk 70s – this was my childhood and was trying to reclaim it.

Having said that, i still think the period of approx 84-87 still seems largely dismissed by todays tastemakers. I’d imagine stating what a great record, say, “You Wear it Well” or “Crazy Horses” was in the mid 80s would be greeted with howls of derision in “hipsterville” circles yet ten years later after the dust had settled such comments wouldnt have raised an eyebrow but i cant imagine many of todays young dudes claiming a love of Sly Fox or Spagna for example to gain “cool” points.

Not that any of this affects the quality or otherwise of the actual music of course. Merely an observation…

Also, I agree with you that Oakey etc. name-dropped Abba a fair bit in the early ’80s, but that did seem to fade away. By 1987-1988 one hardly ever heard Abba anywhere, and I vividly remember spending one afternoon in particular looking for some Abba cds and the only ones I could find after trekking around a few stores were expensive yet dodgy Japanese pressings of individual Abba albums. And this was in frickin’ Sydney, city of brides, Abba-central! It really was a quite remarkable state of affairs, perhaps especially for a singles-oriented band whose biggest seller *originally* was a compilation (called ‘The Best of Abba’ down under and something else in UK). I certainly wasn’t alone in being cheesed off about this state of affairs, hence the explosion that Gold represented in 1992. On a personal level, I doubt whether any single cd purchase has ever made me happier – I’d been in a state of Abba deprivation for a few years in a way that now seems quite unbelievable or even impossible.

Throughout the early 80s New Pop period they were continually lauded by various artists/New Pop sympathetic writers and on multiple occasions by Phil Oakey.It seemed the consensus back then by the anti-rockists that they were the pop masters.
Blancmange covered “The Day Before You Came” and had a hit with it before the original had hardly left the charts.
And not exactly hip but showing they even had muso like old rock type props for their sound/production Genesis and Phil Collins used their studios/worked with them.

44: and didn’t “Valerie” from “Back in the Highlife” era Steve Winwood provide a large part of Eric Prydz’s massive club and possibly embargoed at the moment pop hit from a couple of years ago?

Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” seemingly did have a sort of underground (metal) following in the UK however as at the start of the millennium (2001/02) I found myself on more than one occasion at a rock disco in Sheffield owing to my then girlfriend being from a rock background (and the place had a nice atmosphere too!). Every week they would play the Journey track in the main/classic metal room and all these rockers loved and obviously knew it and so it seems that it had already become a bit of a cult classic in those circles in this country at least as early as then.

and that’s bang on by whoever mentioned those annoying “I love the 80s” type programmes and those same “celebs” who would pretend to “remember” things when you just knew they were the kind of people who obviously didn’t have a clue about any of the stuff they were pretending to be nostalgic.

Further down the line, we have Bono attempting phone the President night after night from underneath a GIANT LEMON!?! But again, I am getting a little too far ahead.

Journey are bad enough, just hope the same thing doesn’t happen with Kiss.

The power of US cultural hegemony is rewriting our cultural history: Halloween takes over Guy Fawkes and now apparently we were always Journey fans.

And 23 years on, this publication is the template for every other issue of Mojo and Uncut…

I have some affection for old-school Q, looking back, though I saw it as the enemy of what I stood for as an MM/ John Peel teenager. I can see now that it was clearly written by a lot of droll and literate middle-aged fellows, with a range of interests that went beyond pop, in features like the Q charts or Tom Hibbert interviews, which were always really funny. This strand of journalism has long since disappeared from Q, but lives on in The Word, a much more pleasurable read than Mojo or Uncut.

On the broader point, obviously nations are built on constructing shared pasts that never were.

The Face, also a monthly, but not entirely devoted to music also seemed to be at the absolute centre of Hipsterville.

it seems to me that a big difference with q was not so much that it evented a historicised view of pop, i.e. rock (the q canon seemed to be taken pretty much wholesale from those slightly earlier paul gambo ’100 greatest album’ coffee table books, for a start) but that it had a very calm, ironised, tone of voice that was very different from the more factionalist mne and mm of the late eighties and much more like the i heart the eighties tone you get everywhere now. this sort of thing had crept into the nme by the time i was reading it in the early nineties – hence the jibes about men sitting around in smoking jackets making jokes about pop.

(obv *i* collected nmes and sounds and etc, but i was a writer, and mad)

and 55 i think there was a canon loooooooong before Q came along, NME and MM had been myth making and list making for *years* surely?

(and i totally doubt we are the first generation to experience this rejigging of history to include stuff that’s only become a value since: on the contrary, i think we’re a generation so over-saturated with the documentation of trivia* that we’re unusually aware of this process as a falsification)

Something that happened a lot in ’86-’87: Levi 501′s, leather biker jackets, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe (Athena top-sellers) all get referenced, copied or re-hashed around this time. Rock ‘n’ Roll deaths of the ’50s get re-examined. There’s a demand for ’50s americana everywhere, even in the movies.
Then in ’88-’89, the psychedelic era gets similar treatment…but that’s for a later discussion.

Anyhow, there’s a similar path back to the light for Abba. Bjorn Again start up around 1988 in a certain sense selling Abba to hipsters in a quasi-avant garde arts festivally way. I guess Bjorn Again have continued, but really they became fairly redundant once Abba’s own stuff was back in increasing near-perennial high rotation after 1992.