FEATURE:
Groovelines
ABBA – Dancing Queen
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ONE reason why I want to include ABBA’s…
PHOTO CREDIT: Allstar Picture Library
Dancing Queen in this feature is that ABBA Gold has spent over a thousand weeks on the U.K. chart. It is an amazing achievement! I am not surprised that an album with so many ABBA classics has been in the charts all this time. Released in 1992, it is wonderful to realise how many people have bought the album. It is a real classic. On 16th August, Dancing Queen turns forty-five. The lead single from their fourth studio album, Arrival, the song is one of the most loved and popular in all of ABBA’s catalogue. I want to bring in a couple of articles that dig deep into an absolute classic track. Whether you see it as Pop, Eurodisco or something else, it has endured through the decades. It is a track that we all know and can sing along to! It became ABBA's only number-one in the United States. It topped the charts in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., Germany and Rhodesia. That is quite a feat! The first piece I want to quote from is from the ABBA website. The origins of Dancing Queen are really interesting:
“A boogaloo beginning
The video for Dancing Queen was filmed at the Alexandra's discotheque in Stockholm.In early August 1975, ABBA were fresh off a summer tour of Sweden. But there was very little time for rest: for one thing, there were new recordings to be made. After their breakthrough with ‘Waterloo’ the previous year, the group had released their third album, simply titled ABBA, in the spring of 1975. The album yielded hits like ‘SOS’ and ‘Mamma Mia’. However, in the 1970s most major acts were expected to release an album every year, so the Andersson/Ulvaeus team was already working on new material.
On August 4, Björn and Benny entered Glen Studios, located in a Stockholm suburb, where they would spend two days recording backing tracks together with the session musicians. They brought with them the melodies for three new songs, all of which at this point only had nonsense lyrics – and titles that were equally preliminary. One of the songs was called ‘Tango’, but later turned into the more familiar ‘Fernando’. Another carried the working title ‘Olle Olle’, but was destined to remain unreleased. Composition number three, finally, was titled ‘Boogaloo’, suggesting that it had something to do with dance rhythms. And, indeed, this was the song that would eventually become ‘Dancing Queen’.
Agnetha and Frida giving their all in the Dancing Queen promo clip.Björn and Benny gave a lot of thought to how they would best achieve the dance feel they were after. For inspiration they turned to George McCrae’s 1974 disco hit ‘Rock Your Baby’, a pioneering recording within its genre. Added rhythmical influence came from the drumming on the 1972 album Gumbo by Dr. John, a favourite of ABBA session drummer Roger Palm and engineer Michael B. Tretow.
A good, solid backing track was put together for the song, consisting of drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. As basic as it was, just this first stage of the recording was enough to provoke a strong emotional reaction from Frida. ”Benny came home with a tape of the backing track and played it for me,” she recalled. ”I thought it was so enormously beautiful that I started to cry.”
Agnetha taking on the part of the dancing queen. It would take several months before the recording was completed, however – few ABBA songs had such a long journey from start to finish. It was ABBA manager Stig Anderson who came up with the title ‘Dancing Queen’, writing the lyrics in collaboration with Björn, and in September, Agnetha and Frida added their vocals to the track. But even as late as December 1975, Björn and Benny were still fine-tuning the recording, adding further overdubs.
The queen is snubbed
Agnetha and Frida in a typical profile shot.By coincidence, it happened that both ‘Fernando’ and ‘Dancing Queen’ were completed around the same time. ABBA wanted to release a new single in March 1976, and were unsure which of the tracks to choose:they knew that both had a strong hit potential. However, Stig Anderson insisted that ‘Fernando’ was the right song to go with at this point – a ballad seemed like a fresh contrast against the previous single, the uptempo ’Mamma Mia’ – and Björn and Benny eventually agreed with him. ‘Dancing Queen’ would have to wait another five months before it reached record shops.
On August 16, 1976, the ABBA single ‘Dancing Queen’ was finally released in Sweden. On the B-side it featured a song called ‘That’s Me’, taken from the ongoing sessions for ABBA’s upcoming album, Arrival.
The record sleeve featured ABBA posing in white hats, a picture that became one of the most widespread images of the group. The photograph was taken by Ola Lager, who was responsible for many ABBA single and album cover pictures. The ”white hats” photograph is said to be one of the group’s own favourite images of themselves”.
Even if you are not an ABBA fan, one must surrender to the sheer joy of Dancing Queen. My personal favourite ABBA track is Super Trouper (from the 1980 album of the same name) – though Dancing Queen would be in the top-five for sure! Last year, The Guardian listed their favourite one hundred U.K. number-one singles. They placed ABBA’s Dancing Queen at nine. This is what they had to say:
“The dense arrangements in Dancing Queen’s final mix make it especially magical. Their Phil Spector-obsessed audio mixer, Michael B Tretow, talked through the layering of the song in a 2001 BBC pop music series, Walk on By. Multiple tracks of percussion, stuttering guitars, synthesised strings, clavinet and vocals filled every second of the song with nagging pop hooks. In the same documentary, Nile Rodgers said he was hugely inspired by this approach to songcraft (in 1976, he was in the early stages of putting together Chic).
Dancing Queen was premiered in June 1976 in a suitably regal setting: a gala to celebrate the wedding of Sweden’s King Carl XVI. By the autumn, it was an international smash, with even smirking music press critics recognising its brilliance. “Any band that can make even disco sound like the Ronettes can’t be all bad!” crowed Robot A Hull in Creem. “It’s fodder for the masses in its least derogatory sense,” wrote Tim Lott in Sounds. New wavers loved Dancing Queen too. Elvis Costello cribbed its piano line for Oliver’s Army and Chris Stein admitted that Blondie’s Dreaming was “pretty much a copy of Dancing Queen”.
Although some of its lyrics have dated (“You’re a teaser, you turn ’em on” might not pass muster today), the bulk of them capture a sense of boundless possibility. Our dancing queen is looking for someone to dance with, but “anybody could be that guy” – the thrilling mystery of the future from the perspective of youth gleams in those words. A verse later, we’re told “anyone will do / You’re in the mood for a dance”. Even in the less progressive mid-1970s, having someone to dance with was far less important than the dancing itself.
“And when you get the chance,” we’re told, we become the dancing queen – that small word “and” positing this transformation as an inevitability. Today, the song’s legacy still delivers this message. Its way of bringing people together was underlined in the Abba film, Mamma Mia, as an ever-growing crowd gathered to sing it while roaming the streets of the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi. (This montage was revisited, with even bigger crowds, in its 2018 sequel.) Theresa May’s arrival to the song on stage at the 2018 Conservative party conference also showed us its transformative power: the right-wing press briefly turned in her favour in the midst of Brexit negotiations because of it (the Daily Mail said she’d “danced her way back to authority”)”.
When it comes to transcendent and iconic songs, there are few as big and important as Dancing Queen. It is no surprise that the song is the lead track on ABBA Gold. Nearly forty-five years after its release, people are discovering this song and being lifted by it. One hopes that the Swedish group (Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad) reform or record new music together – there have been rumours circulating for years. The magnificent Dancing Queen is…
ROUSING, glistening and truly uplifting.