ABBA, Arrival (1976)

Where bought: not sure. This purchase screams to me 'had a twenty pound note and bought something costing about 14 quid and bulked out the buy with something random from the second-hand bin'. If I had to take a guess I think it was from Sound Records in Stroud. But I wouldn't swear on it with my life.

Maybe this was bought with one eye on returning to DJing in latter years? This would have been quite a brave step and wholly self-ignorant of the years when I did DJ and was rather poor at it. I just don't know what people like to dance to outside of the established canon of floor-monsters. My choices are usually more frantic and atonal than people would like to shake a leg to, ordinarily.

The latter-day awfulness from Benny and Bjorn, ABBA's chief songwriting duo (occasionally manager Stig Anderson chips in), has cast a mythos over the achievements of this era that hasn't hampered appreciation of the two other 1970s megapoppers Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees. Yes, we have two Mamma Mia films, but at what cost?

Songs like 'Dancing Queen' don't even feel written. They feel like they were hewn from natural substrates and polished into existence. There's more detail in a diamond than you could plan in a constructed object. And yet: written they were. I think may even prefer 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' more these days; it moves from cool practised aloofness to proggish kiss-off to a melodic profusion.

This is an album (evidently, Professor Brainiac) and I sense that enjoyment and desire to keep hold of this lives and dies in the seven tracks I'm not familiar with. Side A starts inauspiciously with 'When I Kissed The Teacher?' - I suspect there was some deliberate marketing to the perverse - but glides along on gossamer wings. 'My Love, My Life' is an understated ballad, and though 'Dum Dum Diddle' is a little bit UK holiday camp 1973, it glues the side together creditably.

Side B has 'Money, Money, Money' on it: again, a sly shifting in tempo and temprament that suggest that the pains and gains of prog didn't just lie in 'prog rock'. Like a lot of ABBA songs, it's the exuberance straight after the chorus that sends the tune into a new stratosphere. 'That's Me' was a single but I'm unfamiliar with it: a nice jaunty disco-ish song with a banjo. Not sure it lives with their greats, if I'm honest. Even on lesser songs there's a total unfuckwithable power from Agnetha and Anni-Frid's unison voices. 

Unwisely they partially abandon this winning philosophy on 'Why Did It Have to Be Me?' where Bjorn takes the lead on a slightly Eurovision version of 'rollicking bar-room piano boogie' music; it is kind of obnoxious to be honest.

Recovering good sense, the side finishes pretty strongly with 'Tiger'. Despite a musical being made out of ABBA's hits, 'Tiger' feels more ready-made for the West End stage's demand for narrative, character, and high camp. 

I'm also very taken with the title track. While Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express' captured a mood of continental co-operation and mild European optimism of the mid-70s, 'Arrival' suggests a potential anthem for the European Economic Community. Never particularly expected to go to an ABBA record for a great instrumental, but here we go.

Definite keeper here.