© RockandRollEggs
ABBA, Summer Night City, 1978
POW! That’s how it begins. One loud slap of orchestral rock power.
If we’re making Beatles comparisons – and ABBA are often regarded as the ’70s Beatles – then it must be the euphoric desperation of Help! If we’re making contemporary comparisons, it’s The Bee Gees and their disco epiphany.
Summer Night City, which marked ABBA’s belated entrée into disco, was a dancefloor inferno that pressed hard on the pulse-pounding button. The song had all the melodrama of The Bee Gees’ Tragedy, both sonically and emotionally – and some of the Gibb brothers’ angst crept into its making too.
Songwriters Björn Ulvaeus (guitar) and Benny Andersson (keyboards) resented the hours spent trying to meld the song’s multiple parts into a coherent whole worthy of ABBA’s run of UK successes, six No. 1s and a No. 3 since autumn 1975. Some 50 different mixes were created before the pair and regular engineer Michael B Tretow finally agreed on one. Even then, the 43-second ballad-style intro was lopped off at the last minute – this restored, full-length version later appearing on 1994’s Thank You For The Music box set. Summer Night City was even omitted from the tie-in album, Voulez-Vous. “It wasn’t ABBA,” the group’s shy soprano Agnetha Fältskog later complained.
ABBA’s downer verdicts on the song also might have been a reaction to the single’s limited success, stalling at 5 in the UK, and not even deemed worthy of a US release. I’ve seen it mentioned that Summer Night City is the 15th most popular ABBA single – way down the pecking order.
Yet while ABBA grappled with the very fabric of their artistry through the difficult creation of Summer Night City – ostensibly a homage to the group’s home city of Stockholm – the song itself became, paradoxically, a rhapsody of reckless abandon.
In the smoke-filled midnight of the disco, amid the swirl of glitter, sweat and silhouettes, Summer Night City – a song you can never hear loud enough – is the group’s exhilarating, disorientating long night out. Agnetha and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, those psalmic connoisseurs of longing and loss, are at last “loose and fancy free”, released with the apparent blessing of husbands Björn and Benny.
The pair’s siren voices, alternately seductive and sharp as broken glass, cut through the electronic haze with a joyful liberation that dances thrillingly close to chaos. “I know what’s waiting there for me,” they chorus in near possessed expectation; “soul dancing in the dark” and the “strange attraction” of giant dynamos. By dawn, it’s all over, “It’s a dream, it’s out of reach / Scattered driftwood on a beach…”
It all seemed so out of step with ABBA’s usual well-mannered style. No wonder, then, that the group later rejected the song, for its flickering dissonance – check out the video – glimpses into the cracks of their seemingly perfect facade, foreshadowing the emotional turbulence that would ultimately lead to ABBA’s dissolution in December 1982. With that in mind, Summer Night City marks that delicate moment when joy and melancholy became two sides of the same dazzling ABBA coin.
On a personal note, Summer Night City charted just as I arrived at the Polytechnic Of Wales in September 1978, embarking immediately on a whirlwind of blotto undergraduate activities. Pontypridd was a far cry from Bournemouth with its Pleasure Gardens and famed ‘seven miles of golden coastline’.
Unsurprisingly, ABBA soon restored order with the genteel embrace of Chiquitita, released in January 1979. Every Thursday, I’d venture down to the local pub in the mining village of Cilfynydd to watch Top Of The Pops. And every week the same elderly lady would burst into the song – whether Chiquitita was on the show or not. Inevitably, others would join in.
It was a happier memory than the night four or five of us English punk types walked past the local working men’s club at closing time. A bottle was hurled, splattering its gaseous contents all over the backs of our legs and we ran for our lives after what seemed like an entire rugby club of pissed-up males, flares flapping at their ankles, took up the scent. The scene couldn’t have been further from the hedonistic pleasures of Summer Night City.
Dulcis In Fundo...
In 1999, I asked The Fall’s Mark E. Smith if he had a favourite ABBA single. It was Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
“My favourite, the real evil, pagan-crypto-Nazi one. Genuinely frightening, wasn’t it? They got really depraved after Fernando. I can’t stand Swedes, me. They’re pagans, aren’t they. Liberal Nazis. I find it very weird this revival, but it fits in with the new regime we’ve got here: all cleanliness, no smoking, no drinking, all that crap. And open sex. All their stuff was based on The Beach Boys, the way they used to write, like, eight parts for each song. When we started out playing workingmen’s clubs, every fucking group was playing ABBA. The Second Dark Age, we used to call it.”
Boy Child: The Best Of 1967/1970, Scott Walker, 1990
My Scott Walker epiphany took place on a coach journey from Cordoba to Granada one bumpy evening in October 2000. I was tired, still hung over from the previous night’s shenanigans and my vision of the Andalucian countryside blurred with the geometric shapes of Cordoba’s magnificent Mezquita seen earlier that day.
I’d brought along just one CD for the trip - Scott Walker’s Boy Child, a collection of self-penned songs lifted from that extraordinary string of solo albums he’d released between 1967 and 1970. We’d had Scott 2 at home, and a copy of the Walker Brothers comp The Immortal…, both from 1968, nestling between mum’s set of Tom Jones LPs and a few stray Beatles, Stones and Marty Robbins albums. I regularly dug out the Stones titles, though don’t ever recall playing the Walkers or solo Scott.
I’d loved The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More, a No. 1 hit in 1966, with a passion. At the swing park months later, I remembered the song and felt sad: “I’ll never hear it again”. It was a fairly common feeling and one of the downsides of being a young pop fan in the ‘60s.
Nevertheless, late that decade, I had no inclination to listen to an album’s worth of ballads by three well-groomed men aimed squarely at mums and aunts.
Fast forward 25 years and a copy of Boy Child arrives in the Record Collector office. The great Marc Almond, who’d covered a couple of Scott Walker’s songs during the ‘80s, wrote the sleevenote. I decided to give it a go. First up, The Plague. WHERE HAD THIS SONG BEEN ALL MY LIFE? I thought I’d heard it all by now, but this was extraordinary - pop’s golden balladeer swishing about in the nether regions of psychedelia, replete with wayward, feedback-enriched guitar and end-of-the-world bluster.
Soon, I was all over the rest of the set, too. For a decade, its mosaic of mini-masterpieces worked its magic - during tube and train journeys across London, to long late nights at home spent celebrating the freedoms of my new life as a freelancer. But it was only while on the road in Andalucia that Scott Walker’s music revealed its inner secrets.
The moment can never be undone. The Boy Child songs will always remain on the higher plane.
