At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing - to cry out:
"ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"
A poptimist, obviously - responding to an uncontrollable contrarian urge from within.
At the time I thought that - alongside its Tourettic quality and irrelevance to what we were talking about at that moment - that this was a really silly opposition to make. As if you had to choose, or to rank one above the other. Isn't Poptimism supposed to have freed itself, and all of us, from such binaries and hierarchies, rather than simply inverted them?
(Some years later I watched a doc on ABBA and concluded that they operated just like any other "artistically autonomous unit" from the mid-Sixties onwards. They were a proper band, writing their own material and producing it themselves, aspiring to superhuman levels of craft and musicianship, with lyrics that grew increasingly adult and emotionally sophisticated. Structurally, then, ABBA were "rockist" - operating very much not like a boyband or girl group (bossed around by producers, singing words written by professional others). So ABBA's true peers at that time would be Fleetwood Mac, as opposed to The Jacksons.).
Perhaps the outcry was based on a sense of historical injustice, ABBA having not been given their fair due?
Well, they are the first entry in the Spin Guide to Alternative Music, so some respect had been granted in the 1990s.
And in fact, if you go back to the music press of the time, you will see a fair amount of positive commentary on ABBA's pop genius.
And it came from musicians too: Elvis Costello famously described them as a big influence on Armed Forces (the dramatic piano cascades of "Oliver's Army", the sleek bright tightness of the sound throughout).
Okay the Richard Cook review is a little retrospective,and after the event, coming out in 1982, but hey look here's Dave McCullough raving about them in their "imperial phase" real time.
And then a few years later you have Paul Morley describing Human League as the new ABBA.
My ABfav ABBA tune
What a strange, super-sophisticated song structure! So many hook-full phases, such great playing.
Number 2 would be "S.O.S.", jostling hard - equal probably - with "Dancing Queen".
