Bjorn Free

A couple of suggestions from Abba’s more indie-rock side:
My Love, My Life from Arrival (Kiwi band Bike did a great cover here)
Disillusion from Ring Ring.

@Tom, Excellent. I’ve really enjoyed your first couple of entries (and I also really enjoyed Marcellos’s piece about the Abba’s Greatest Hits collection recently, esp. his big-upping of ‘So Long’ which I’d never quite given credit to before).

I assume it’s outside your remit, but I recently came across this performance from Frida in 1967. She’s prodigiously skilled and poised. Looking at that it’s easy to imagine Frida fans from the ’60s (and her teachers perhaps) originally tut-tutting that with Abba she was squandering her talent on pop music for kids, and that she was ‘slumming it’ by signing up with Benny and Bjorn in the 1970s. And one wants to say things like ‘Well-played B&B. What were the odds that Sweden would turn up two world-beating singers and beauties at the same time and that one band would get both of them, let alone be able to bind them tightly enough to stop them flying away to work with other people?’

How weird that I made the mistake twice! It’s obviously lodged in my head. If it was shonky pirate MP3 labelling I’d understand it but no, it’s all CD rips.

@Tom. I enjoyed all of your OWOB entries, esp. perhaps the final entry on The Day Before you Came. Loved the Shangri-Las comparison there (I think the Shangs’ melodramatics were one of Abba’s pole-stars).

Unrelatedly, I’d like to recommend something to Popular mavens.Talk Less, Say More is a new-to-me band that overall sounds a bit like Fad Gadget and Chris Knox (vocals may require some acclimatization in other words!), and also a bit like Talking Heads, The The, and The Beta Band. Their (net-only) label has made their whole album England Without Rain downloadable free/pay-what-you-like here. The album is 12, roughly 3 minute songs, and it gets poppier as it goes along (w/ Sky Over Everything, Black Eyes, and Double Helixxx being early standouts). Worth a listen.