The Winner Takes It All famously documents the marriage breakdowns within the band (although they denied it was quite so explicit). In doing so, they crafted the perfect pop song: great melodies (as ever), perfect singing, lyrics that resonate with people like us, a video that laid bare the emotional traumas being sung and the final, desperate vulnerability in the singing of the lines,
I apologise if it makes you feel bad,
seeing me so tense, no self-confidence
but, you see, the winner takes it all.
ABBA were a great gift in the 70s and early days of the 80s.
2 comments:
Very clever! Choosing an Abba song too poignant to mock!
Actually, Abba could arguably be the first band I liked, though mostly through peer pressure. When I was in primary school they were the band to like, so sometime around 1977 my mum taped off my Uncle's album (I can almost see the cover in my mind's eye, but have been unable to locate an image of it on the net; I think it was an early greatest hits double vinyl LP). So I knew all their stuff up to that date as a kid. And then later on I got independently to like that one that seems based on the pied piper of Hamlyn. And of course every adolescent was singing Super-Pooper incessantly, in an effort to annoy tweed-jacketed teachers who were clinging to their passing youth.
Anyway, this is a tough song to listen to really - so painful; yet how did they keep working together and singing this song? I couldn't have done it. I'd have decked someone.
ABBA's greatest hits was the first album I ever bought for myself (on cassette, along with ELO's Out Of The Blue - both bought off my Mum's catalogue).
And Arrival by ABBA was the first album I ever bought, a Xmas pressie for my Mum in 1975.
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