Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A great ABBA album) (Abba Gold: Greatest Hits - ABBA)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Abba Gold: Greatest Hits - ABBA
Date:	01/11/09 (76 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some of the most perfect pop tunes you'll ever hear

Disadvantages: The very occasional drop from brilliant to merely good

It's easy to forget in these days of near-instant access - legitimate or otherwise - to just about any piece of music one might wish to hear (and quite a number one would not) but it's not that many years since the dread word "deleted" would make the heart sink, for it would mean a long trip around the second-hand record shops with no guarantee of success at its end. Such was the position with ABBA compilations in 1992: there wasn't a single one in print, and all you could buy new were the individual albums.

Then came ABBA Gold, and everything changed. One of the most successful albums in history, this record has managed sales of more than 4.6 million in the UK alone. Only Sgt. Pepper and Queen's Greatest Hits have sold more - ever. ABBA Gold has reached number one on the British album charts in three separate, and quite widely spaced years: 1992, 1999 and 2008, the last time propelled to the top by the massive success of the film Mamma Mia! Clearly its popularity remains undimmed - but does the music?

Happily, the answer is yes. You won't find much in the way of undiscovered gems here: ten songs reached number one, all but three of the others made the top five, and the only song which was any sort of commercial failure - "Thank You For The Music" - is now just as much a standard as many of ABBA's chart-toppers. Of course, the fact that a group sells a lot of records doesn't necessarily mean that those records are any good, but in this case we are hearing, for the most part, a happy combination of success and quality. Sound engineer Michael Tretow was clearly on to something when he latched onto Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" techniques and adapted them (more cheaply!) for the Swedish group that were to become ABBA.

The tracks are not laid out in chronological order, presumably in an intention to open and close the album with exceptionally strong songs. This aim has been achieved: the moment you hear the piano glissando that opens "Dancing Queen", you know you're in for a good time. Benny Andersson was apparently convinced that this would be a hit, and you can't blame him. At the other end of the track listing is "Waterloo", one of the very few genuinely good songs to have won Eurovision, and as with "Dancing Queen", the emphasis in "Waterloo" is very much on enjoyment: even a determined non-dancer like me has trouble staying still during this one.

In between, our ears are assailed with track after track of a sound which is hard to describe only because the group have reached that exalted status whereby "it sounds like ABBA" is genuinely the best explanation, and one that most people are likely to get at once. That combination of fabulous harmonies, slightly off-key piano and above all the band members' relentless energy has often been imitated, but seems most unlikely ever to be beaten for sheer verve. Although there are songs, most notably "Fernando", which are underlaid with a more serious message and even a degree of melancholy, even those can bring a smile, albeit one of wistfulness.

I'm not going to go through all 19 songs on the record one by one, since I'd quite like my readers to stay awake to the end! What I will do, though, is to pick out a few highlights, and foremost among those is "S.O.S." This is quite an early song, dating from 1975, and it reached only number six, but that doesn't stop it from being a most accomplished number: it has a fantastic piano part - always something likely to attract me - and a great, bouncy rhythm that belies the sense of loss and bewilderment displayed in the lyrics. "Super Trouper" is deceptively complex: despite its simple, thumping beat, the words speak of a band - ABBA, in fact - apparently "smiling, having fun" but in fact less than comfortable with the bright lights and big arenas, and needing the reassurance that "somewhere in the crowd there's you".

What else? Well, there's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight", which unfortunately is now known to many as "the song Madonna got that riff from". You can't blame her for borrowing it, as it's sensational, as is the slightly sinister guitar intro, but Agnetha's lyrics of yearning loneliness form an integral part of what has long been one of my favourite ABBA songs. "Money, Money, Money" has perhaps suffered slightly from over-use by the media during the credit crunch, but again the disconnect between the bouncy disco sound and the quietly increasing desperation of the lyrics will surely hit home to many. And "Knowing Me, Knowing You" has survived the Alan Partridge connection to regain its place as a surprisingly perceptive take on the end of a relationship - better, in my opinion, than the perhaps more highly regarded "The Winner Takes It All" (also on this disc).

ABBA Gold is a fine collection, to be sure, but there are a couple of points at which the standard descends from the superb to the ranks of the merely good. The one song here that I wasn't particularly familiar with, despite the number of people who have covered it, is "Lay All Your Love On Me", and to be frank I don't think I've particularly missed out. Apart from that distinctive descending note at the end of each verse, there's not much to it, and I'm not surprised that it hasn't become one of the really famous ABBA songs. And, though I feel a heel for saying so, given that half its royalties have gone to Unicef for the last three decades, "Chiquitita" does seem to have dated a bit, reminding me of nothing so much as adverts for cheap package holidays to Torremolinos.

Despite these minor criticisms, there's really very little wrong with this record. If I were compiling it, I might add "Ring Ring": although it was released in the very early days of the band, indeed before the name ABBA had been adopted at all, and was not particularly successful in the British charts, it has that trademark "ABBA sound" in spades, and would fit into this line-up with very little trouble. Still, if that's the worst omission I can think of, then we're not doing badly. Anyone with even the slightest interest in well-crafted, infectiously catchy pop music should listen to this.

Track listing:

1. Dancing Queen
2. Knowing Me, Knowing You
3. Take A Chance On Me
4. Mamma Mia
5. Lay All Your Love On Me
6. Super Trouper
7. I Have A Dream
8. The Winner Takes It All
9. Money, Money, Money
10. SOS
11. Chiquitita
12. Fernando
13. Voulez-Vous
14. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
15. Does Your Mother Know
16. One Of Us
17. The Name Of The Game
18. Thank You For The Music
19. Waterloo

The album is available, as of the time of writing, for £7.98 on Amazon. You can also listen to its tracks via Spotify for free, if you don't mind the adverts!

Summary: Swede dreams are made of this