11. AbbaThe Singles: The First Ten Years
The thing is, I didn’t like ABBA. I mean, I didn’t really like pop music; even when I started making pop records I didn’t really like pop music. That’s another story! They had a Eurovision hit called ‘Waterloo,’ I thought it was horrible, so I dismissed them. It’s not cool jazz, it seemed very white music, it’s just very Europop or whatever you would call it. Ten years after they started, this thing comes out. For some reason, because I’ve now become a jobbing record producer, I buy it, for some reason. Headphones are a big part of all this, the Sony Walkman’s out already. I probably bought it on vinyl and put it on a cassette and just played it on headphones.
I mean, I still don’t like ‘Waterloo’ on that collection, but ‘The Day Before You Came,’ that just blew me away. I think that’s an extra track on this compilation that didn’t come from before. I don’t think I even knew that at the time, but I certainly hadn’t heard it before. And it’s really the incredibly skillful communication of passion and emotion that the women are doing when they do their harmony singing. Great pop songwriting.
I don’t play it anymore, it’s not something that’s part of my day-to-day. It symbolizes me appreciating great pop songwriting. It kind of set me up for working with Erasure, I think, in some way. It’s a signpost of me overcoming a prejudice – not even that, but a prejudice being bowled away by actually the sheer genius of the quartet making these pieces. That’s why I put it in here. Obviously, it’s this iconic European pop songwriting, but it’s particularly interesting in my life because I was so prejudiced against them. When I actually heard this compilation I thought, ‘Wow, they’re amazing.’ I was in love with the girls – from a distance. They won my heart, I should say.
