Richard Cook - Abba - The Singles: The First Ten Years (NME, 1982)

 

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". 

Sounds and Reggae

Picking up from the other post, one thing that has struck me for a while now, thanks to Soundsclips and Zounds Abounds scanning issues of Sounds from the late '70s and early '80s, is how regularly they covered Jamaican music.

You think of Sounds and the things that spring to mind would be Oi! and Bushellism, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. And maybe if you knew your British rock paper history, you would also think about Jon Savage and New Musick, and the "grey overcoat" Fac-loving thing associated with Dave McCullough, at least until he flipped for Postcard and his own version of poptimism. 

But alongside all that - the many flavours of ROCK -  Sounds consistently covered reggae and dancehall. Put Jamaican and Black British artists on the cover. 

(They also covered funk and soul, did pieces on early rap and hip hop). 

NME was probably even better at covering these areas, but Sounds did a creditable job.  

Especially considering this was verily the Dark Age of Rockisme. Or so we are told. 

A lot of the late '70s coverage is coming from Vivien Goldman, before she jumped to first Melody Maker and then to NME. But there were other writers who kept it going deep into the Eighties, including Eric Fuller, Jack Barron and Edwin Pouncey. 

And not just the roots-rock-rebel stuff, they also covered reggae at its poppiest - lover's.

Fuck me, they even had David Rodigan review albums

Even Gaz Bushell wrote a bit about reggae now and then

And not just reggae...