The Abba insurgency: art and science

Half a century years after Waterloo, the world’s most joyful pop group still unsettles cultural elites—and fills dancefloors.

Switzerland’s hosting of the Eurovision Songs Contest involved an overflow football stadium, filled to capacity to watch on a massive screen. Naturally, they sang Waterloo. The song’s now 50 years old and seems now to unite generations and nations. Eurovision started in 1956 but Waterloo, in 1974, is seen as a kind of musical big bang: unleashing a kind of musical universe that is still expanding - and deserves more exploration.

Like all overnight successes, Abba had been trying to get it right for years. They were rejected as Sweden’s 1973 Eurovision entry with their song Ring Ring – rejected, that is, by a Swedish expert panel (the curse of jury conservatism, with us still). But the track sold well abroad, encouraging Abba to come back in 1974 with a number intended to break the mould by eschewing the usual mid-tempo ballad and dispatching a musical thunderbolt. For the first time, a jury of ordinary Swedes would be choosing the Eurovision candidate and this was Abba’s chance to break through.

Waterloo was written as the band’s two men, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, jammed together on the piano. They didn’t agonise about lyrics to pierce the soul of a continent. They weren’t chasing profundity. They were chasing joy. They had a great tune and needed a three-syllable title that wouldn’t need translation. Stig Anderson, the group’s manager, thought about “Honey Pie”, but the Beatles had done that. He came up with “Waterloo” while thumbing through a book of quotations. It was perfect for Eurovision. Bound to please the Brits. He knocked together the words in an afternoon.

It was sung by Benny and Bjorn’s respective partners, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog. They’d try to stand out in spangles and platform shoes. The outfits are now in the Abba museum in Stockholm but what it doesn’t say is they were garish for a reason – under Swedish law, tax relief was offered on costumes as long as they were so outrageous that they couldn’t be worn on the street. The end result worked as well in Stockholm as it did in Brighton. And then, the world. Waterloo became the greatest-ever Eurovision success.

But there was a bizarre exception: the British panel awarded Waterloo nul points. Here was the great Abba conundrum: they produced a song inspired by British glam rock, named after a British military victory, that was so popular with ordinary Brits that it would go to UK No 1 (as eight more Abba songs went on to do). But that night, the British judges rejected Abba – perhaps feeling they were too crude, too lowbrow, too much like good fun to count as real music.

This was certainly the verdict of Sweden’s music establishment, who seemed shocked at Abba’s victory. So much so that Sweden didn’t actually enter Eurovision in 1976, nor was the contest broadcast on television. It was behaving as if it had unleashed a pop monster.

Dancing queens vs cultural commissars

Such a reaction can only be understood by the ideological challenge the band presented to the prevailing musical orthodoxy of the time. Socialistic Sweden had embarked on a cultural strategy devoted (amongst other things) to mitigating “the negative impact of commercialism”. Abba’s success posed a conundrum to Stockholm’s cultural commissars: if Waterloo and Mamma Mia! were so trashy, the lyrics so absurd, why did the people seem to like it so much?

Critics who had seen the Beatles, Hendrix and the Stones emerge in the 1960s could not quite believe what was happening: was the next global musical thing really a cabaret act from Stockholm? To Johan Fornäs, a Marxist critic, the band’s success was a sign of a sick capitalist society. But the blame, he said, should lie with “the society that causes people to have no energy, or desire, to do anything other than listen to Abba after coming home from work.” (A curse that seems to afflict us still 50 years on.)

The workers of the world were indeed uniting – but under Chiquitita rather than The Internationale. It was pop music’s own quiet Cold War offensive: the Soviet Union (which at one stage tried its own austere Intervision song contest) to rival Eurovision saw Abba records like Americans now see Chinese EVs: a foreign curse, which they could not stop people wanting or buying.

Across the iron curtain, punters were going mad for Abba. They’d heard Western pop before, but never of this quality. The Soviets, in a panic, tried to limit such corrupting influences by placing quotas on imported pop. In 1976, Poland used its entire foreign album allowance for 800,000 copies of Abba’s album, Arrival. An excellent choice.

The critics held the cheery pop genre in such disdain that few recognised what Abba was doing right. Abba took their music more seriously than anyone, making their schlager pop into an art form. Their studio, Polar Music, became the Swedish equivalent of Abbey Road. They’d work and rework vocal harmonies and riffs. A memorable chorus was not enough: they needed a catchy motif and an instantly recognisable intro. The “oom pa-pa” in Super Trouper, the “ah-haaa” in Knowing Me, Knowing You – these are the small things that made Abba’s music so addictive. And such fun.

The science of Super Trouper

Listen to Super Trouper today on headphones; feel the effect when the chorus first comes on. Agnetha and Anni-Frid recorded multiple takes of the same harmonies, layering their own voices over and over. This doubling and tripling thickened the sound, creating a lush, almost choral texture — as if there are ten singers, not two. Abba would record different vocal takes across the stereo field — one slightly left, one slightly right — giving a sense of space and movement. Then add plate reverb and subtle echo to make the voices sound huge and emotionally resonant. It had custom EQs; 3M digital tape machines. In short, Abba banged: for a million reasons that fans didn’t know or care about.

This is how so much of art shines: for technical factors you never acknowledge. When I was at The Spectator I used to liken the office to Polar or Prince’s Paisley Park: a place where you’d apply techniques, art and science, where creators would work with artistic technical geniuses to make magic.

Polar’s tricks would be copied by artists from the Sex Pistols to Madonna. Abba Gold is now in one in ten British homes, more than any album except Queen’s Greatest Hits. By no coincidence, Queen is about the only band less fashionable than Abba – it’s hard to go out of style if you were never in style. But, at a wedding reception, you’re far more likely to hear Dancing Queen than any songs by Queen. If the groom’s from one country, and the bride another, everyone will dance to Abba.

The Swedish group’s songbook has become a kind of common cultural currency, cutting across boundaries: secular hymns for the world. The 2008 film, Mamma Mia!, had A-list actors murdering two dozen Abba songs. It was panned by critics, yet became the highest-grossing musical in Hollywood history. Once again, it was a triumph of popularity over fashion – the formula first tested in Brighton. And that’s why, 50 years on, we’re still thanking Abba for the music.