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Pursuits: Are Anderson and Ulvaeus in the same league as Lennon and McCartney?

If you are a Beatles fan, then you should try and listen to some of the early stuff recorded before they became famous:

live recordings from Hamburg and songs they did with Tony Sheridan. If you listen to it, then I guarantee that you will find it hard to reconcile the band in those recordings with the group that changed popular music forever.

 

There’s a lot of energy to the performances but there’s not even a hint of greatness.

 

   And yet, nobody now disputes that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the greatest songwriters of the 20th Century. Almost everywhere you go, you’ll hear a Beatle song: from bar bands, lounge singers, or even as muzak in elevators or lobbies. Long after the recordings will have been forgotten, the songs will live on.

 

   In the mid-Sixties, Tony Palmer, a respected music writer, wrote that Lennon and McCartney were the greatest writers since Schubert causing howls of outrage to emerge from other serious music critics. But now, I think most people would concede that their music is better than Schubert’s and will last longer.

 

   I wasn’t around in the early days of the Beatles. But I was at school in London when the Eurovision song contest was held in 1974. In those days, Eurovision was not the massive joke that it has since become. People actually cared who won and one or two songs from the contest have gone on to became standards that are still played today. (For instance, Cliff Richard’s Congratulations, which is still trotted out for birthdays, weddings, award ceremonies and the like. Ironically, Cliff didn’t win the contest. In a massive miscarriage of justice, he lost to a rubbish song called LaLaLa which was quickly forgotten.)

 

   From what I remember of the 1974 contest, we knew who the winners would be almost as soon as they performed. They were a Swedish group I’d never heard of, who sang Waterloo in perfect English and even persuaded the conductor of the orchestra to dress up as Napoleon. The band was called Abba and we all thought they were very good.

 

   But did I think that the group’s two songwriters, Benny Anderson and Bjorn Ulvaeus would go on to write some of the greatest pop songs of the Seventies? Did I even dream that over four decades after that Waterloo triumph we would still be hearing their songs? Did it even occur to me that people who were not even born in the Seventies would, one day, know each of these songs by heart?

 

   No, of course not.

 

   It was like the Beatles and the early recordings. Nobody could have imagined that two members of the band would go on to write songs that would live forever.

 

   Who can deny that Abba’s songs are now ubiquitous? They are like Beatles songs. Everybody sings them: from a woman humming on the subway to a singer in a cocktail lounge. They turn up again and again in background music. And every new generation is introduced to Abba’s music at some stage.

 

"Small wonder then that when Abba was offered an astonishing one billion dollars for a 100-data tour, Anderson and Ulvaeus turned the offer down. The songs were the point; not the group."

   As somebody who grew up in the Seventies and early Eighties, during Abba’s recording heyday, I admired Anderson and Ulvaeus for their ability to churn out hit recordings. But I never thought of them as writers of standards, of songs that would live forever.

 

   In a sense I think I was swayed by the musical prejudices of that era. The world was divided, quite clearly, into album artistes and singles artistes, between rock and pop. Led Zeppelin never released a single in the UK. Pink Floyd never specifically recorded a single after Roger Waters took over the band (though singles were pulled out of his long, meandering, sonic doodlings); these were rock bands who made albums that would live forever. On the other hand, there were artistes and bands who released singles with an eye on the charts. Most of the great singles artistes of the 70s are now forgotten. Do you recall Sweet, Mud, Alvin Stardust, or Hot Chocolate? They all had number one singles. But the songs and the bands are both distant memories. Because Abba was, essentially, a single band, we always put it in the same category.

 

   And perhaps Anderson and Ulvaeus did too. After the band effectively folded up around 1982, they graduated to other things, among them, writing songs for musicals. One of these musicals, Chess, co-written with Tim Rice, ran for three years in London and yielded two great songs. I Knew Him So Well and One Night in Bangkok.

 

   Then, something strange happened. Younger bands like Erasure began covering Abba songs. And two Australian films, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding used Abba songs on their soundtracks. Suddenly, Abba’s songs were back in fashion. Their compilation albums became bestsellers and the music reached a new audience.

 

   Anderson and Ulvaeus did not take this gift for granted. They collaborated with the writers of yet another musical, Mamma Mia, but this time they did not write new material. They just packed it with old Abba songs. When Mamma Mia became a worldwide phenomenon, a movie seemed inevitable. And because the film, starring a brilliant Meryl Streep was such fun, an entirely new audience was exposed to be music of Abba.

 

   Now the songs have a life of their own quite independent of the original recordings. Most people who like the music have only dim memories of seeing Abba perform on TV or of hearing the records. Small wonder then that when Abba was offered an astonishing one billion dollars for a 100-data tour, Anderson and Ulvaeus turned the offer down. The songs were the point; not the group.

 

   Are Anderson and Ulvaeus in the same league as Lennon and McCartney? No, of course, they are not. They have nothing like that range.

 

   But are they in the same league as the other great songwriters of the 20thCentury: Burt Bacharach, Cole Porter or George Gershwin?

 

   Oh absolutely. They are right up there with the best. And the longevity of their songs gives them the right to be ranked with the greats.

 

 

Posted On: 25 Apr 2015 11:02 AM
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