I have been in the habit recently of compiling playlists of songs from the years of my murky teen and pre-teen past. In many ways I suspect it is a typical thing for a middle-aged man to do. Attempts to reconnect with an earlier age. Lost possibilities. Evaporated desires. Something like that, perhaps. But then again perhaps just simply as a means of rediscovering and enjoying songs that had passed into the strange outer space of half-remembered echoes; tunes from the radio that reverberated in the airwaves on drives to school and back. Attempts to piece together a sonic jigsaw puzzle of vague imagination and reconstructed memory.
In the week before Easter I embarked on 1976. The NME Charts book was open in front of me (my only rule is that the songs must have appeared in the NME chart - for no other reason than I have had that book since the mid-90s and do love dipping into it) whilst my iTunes and Amazon accounts quivered in anticipation.
There were some truly great records in 1976. Donna Summer’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’; Diana Ross’ ‘Love Hangover’; Bowie’s ‘TVC15’; The Real Thing’s ‘You To Me Are Everything’; Candi Staton’s ‘Young Hearts Run Free’; Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’. And of course there was ABBA. ‘Fernando’. ‘Dancing Queen’. ‘Money, Money, Money’. Such classic singles.
Of course there is a lot of nonsense put about where the 1970s are concerned, particularly with respect to music. After all the distillation of subjects into bite-sized nuggets comprised of lowest-common denominator ingredients has been a defining factor in mass-mediated cultural documentation for decades. Far easier to endlessly regurgitate the accepted facts and canon of ‘greatness’ than to investigate something new. Which in turn results in the spectacle of ten year old shows masquerading as contemporary retrospectives. And just as you think ‘hang on, these guys look remarkably good for going on 50’ Phil Oakey talks about 1971 being thirty years ago and it all clicks into place. Pop eats itself, vomits, eats its own vomit and repeats the process endlessly. That’s just the way it goes.
If you are reading this blog you are doubtless aware that Dave Haslam wrote an excellent evocatively ‘alternative’ history of the decade. First published in 2005 as ‘Not ABBA’, it has since been reprinted under the title of ‘Young Hearts Run Free’; a reference of course to the classic Candi Staton single by which Haslam defines 1976. I am glad that the book has been re-titled, for much as I love the content, I find the original title somewhat disingenuous. Particularly since in recent years I have come to unapologetically love ABBA’s records in a way that I once did as a pre-teen.
I admit that there was a long period in my life when I would not have admitted to loving ABBA records. Such is the nature of growing up after all. One must define oneself as much by what one rejects as what one embraces. And there is nothing so important to growing up as rejecting the things that were important to us as clueless youngsters. As Haslam inferred by the original title of his book, for such a long time ABBA were inextricably tied to the industry of the nostalgic fiction of the 1970s: their records portrayed as ‘cheesy’ or ‘ironic’; hideously neon-lit decorative soundtrack elements of hen nights; the sonic equivalent of dildo deely-boppers. Not good.
Perhaps for many people that is still true of course. If so it is a great shame, for disconnected from such appallingly depressing reference points ABBA’s records still sound like the unashamedly brilliant, unapologetically Pop records they were when originally released. Which perhaps explains why they were so successful in the first place. After all, most people who buy music do not much care for anything beyond the fact that they like the tune and/or they fancy the singer(s). Which is fair enough. And anyway, selling millions of records does not necessarily make a group less worthy of artistic acknowledgement than one who suffers in obscurity. Just ask those journalists who continue to regurgitate cliched platitudes about The Beatles. And The Beatles could not hold a candle to ABBA. Or anyone.
Looking back, I’m interested in why I should have denied the greatness of ABBA for so long. I blame Punk. Or rather, I blame my earnest reading of Punk and believing for so long in the myth of the scorched earth Year Zero attitude. Such folly. Yet as mentioned earlier, such folly is an essential element of youth. But knowing when to let go of some of those youthful ideas is every bit as crucial. After all, you may run the risk of missing out on so much, and that would never do.
The Punk intervention is interesting though, and retrospectively I am intrigued by the way in which mainstream and ‘counter’ culture clashed and blended in those times. Retrospectively too the absorption of Punk ‘rebellion’ into marketable mainstream product seems laughably inevitable. Ultimately could it ever have been otherwise? I mean, does it really seem so strange that a media corporation should take advantage of re-releasing The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ in this new Jubilee year? John Lydon can complain all he wants, but after all, to what extent can any art form that enters the public domain retain even a fragment of its original context some 35 years after its inception?
John Robb touches on this in his excellent piece about ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ over on Louder Than War. One of the things I like most about the article is how Robb peels away the layers of endlessly re-written and re-interpreted readings of The Sex Pistols to get to the raw sores of the original context. In doing so he shines the spotlight not on those regurgitated cultural commentaries, but listens instead to the music with (almost) newly opened ears. As he writes, the experience is something of a revelation, with much of the record managing to still sound at once astonishingly alien and yet vigorously, robustly rooted in the rock’n’roll canon it makes such a effort to escape from.
I was struck by a similar feeling when I snuck ‘Anarchy In The UK’ in as the last track on my 1976 playlist (the original EMI pressing being withdrawn almost immediately after the single appeared in the NME chart in the Christmas week). For even alongside the likes of Be Bop Deluxe and Eddie & The Hot Rods (whose ‘Teenage Depression’ made an appearance on the NME charts just prior to The Pistols) ‘Anarchy In The UK’ sounds distinctly otherworldly. Having studiously avoided listening to The Sex Pistols for many years I admit it thrilled me in a way I had not expected. Shorn of the baggage of endless cultural commentary and ‘significance’ it sounded just as it ought to: an astonishingly exciting Pop single. And as such, was it so very different to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’? For similarly stripped of decades of over-familiarisation and cultural insignificance, ‘Dancing Queen’ too sounds like the sensational Pop single it clearly always was.
Benny, Björn, Frida, Agnetha, Johnny, Paul, Steve, Glen and Sid. God Bless ‘em all.
I think many people do this, but interestingly, I think they're starting to do it younger and younger. There was an article recently (which I can't remember the name of at the moment) describing how some clubs are having nights of early 2000s music and all these twenty-somethings are reliving eight years ago.
Posted by: The Lion in Love | April 23, 2012 at 11:45
That said, I love Abba and I get so much flack for it.
Posted by: The Lion in Love | April 23, 2012 at 11:46
People who give flack for loving ABBA have cloth ears. And sawdust for brains.
Posted by: Alistair | April 23, 2012 at 13:56
Alistair, is there a downloadable mix?
Posted by: William | April 23, 2012 at 14:52
William, there will be three mixes to grab, appearing over the next few days. Fourteen tracks of 1976 Pop Goodness on each :)
Posted by: Alistair | April 23, 2012 at 15:14