ABBA/Voulez-Vous

On their sixth record, ABBA graduates to a more adult sound

There comes a point in the career of a great band, if they are fortunate to survive long enough, when the magic simply won't come. The stars don't align, the tour grind crushes souls, the drugs take over--there are a million reasons. Whether it's Jethro Tull at the Chateau d'Herouville, finding it impossible to record the followup to Thick As a Brick, Bowie in Berlin burnt out on drugs, the occult, and paranoia or U2 in the same city struggling to find the right sound for the album that became Achtung Baby, it is a common part of the artistic journey.

How the band comes to terms with this creative drought helps determine whether they become an iconic group or merely another wayside attraction on the road to kingdom come. Some groups, of course, don't survive the sessions, but most find a way to soldier on.

I think what defines these moments of temporary failure on the part of legendary songwriters, musicians, and performers, is that a moment has arrived when they are required to move the band to another level. This can happen when the group is at its apotheosis, but it can also be brought on at any time by events such as personnel changes, the death of a band member, writer's block, drugs, burnout, personal relationships, or any combination of these. Bands, being made up of individuals, tend not to move in lockstep in their individual lives, but the band does has a life, a biography, of its own.

And so we come to Sweden's most famous popmeisters, ABBA as they convene at their newly opened Polar Music Studio in Stockholm to begin recording their sixth album. This record will follow 1977's Abba The Album, a record that started to hint at the band that ABBA could become, far from the Eurovision novelty stamp of 'Waterloo.' But it was dragged down somewhat by the second side's devotion to Benny & Björn's mini-Broadway musical thing that, in retrospect, was a resume builder for the day they envisioned knocking on the doors of rich benefactors interested in investing in a new Broadway show. Plus, 'Thank You For the Music' is the kind of thing a band releases at the end, or even after, with a blurry video. Indeed, it has often served as a fond farewell kind of track in every quickie ABBA documentary I've seen over the past decade.

But The Album also included a few bona fide breakthrough tracks. "Take a Chance on Me" presaged the 80s synth pop sound with amazing background vocals and a soaring melody. "Name of the Game" had a moody, minor key verse underlined by a restless synth bass line that exploded into a sunburst of major chords on the chorus. "Eagle," the album's anthemic opener, has an expansiveness of sound and power that suggests arena rock at its most potent.

For the album that would become Voulez-Vous, the scene shifted to an explicitly urban environment, Stockholm, the 'Summer Night City' of the band's ill-fated song, released as a single only to be left off the finished album. The photo session for the album’s cover was shot at Stockholm's Alexandra disco, one of the city's hottest night spots at the time. The time had come for ABBA to completely retire the homegrown Up With People image that resulted from the influence of sixties Swedish folk rock on Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus in their pre-ABBA careers.

“Summer Night City’s” lyrics are more sexually suggestive than any previous ABBA song, and the track's minor key, vaguely pentatonic melodies create both excitement and a slightly menacing vibe. The band reportedly spent a week or more mixing the track, more than any previous ABBA track, but they never reached a point of satisfaction with it. For one thing the recording was subjected to high levels of compression, a production technique used to highlight certain sounds or punch something up to increase its presence in the listener's attention. The problem is, if it is overly applied to a track without a specific sonic strategy in mind, the entire track can become as tight and airless as an asthmatic lung.

They were more or less forced to release it as a single in September of '78, though, when work on Voulez-Vous continued to proceed at a glacial pace, with the result that there would be no new ABBA record by the end of that year. Between the production and the song itself, the track ended up sounding nothing like an ABBA record, which was apparently disconcerting both to the band and its audience. In the UK it stalled at number five on the singles chart, breaking a string of #1 showings in the country. It was not even released in the US.

But not sounding like an ABBA record was, I would argue, an excellent idea at the time, and I think that it was a mistake to remove it from the album's track list. In the interest of the album's aesthetic cohesion, I would have replaced "Chiquitita" with "Summer Night City." After all, "Chiquitita" could always have been the orphaned record released as a non-album sequel single.

In January of 1979, Björn and Benny decamped to the Bahamas, where they spent time listening to American pop music and working on writing new songs. They came up with two: "Kisses of Fire," which became the album closer, and "Voulez-Vous," which became the title track. The point of reference here is definitely The Bee Gees, who had taken a dance pop direction with Main Course, following it up with Spirits of Children and their work on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. By 1979 the Gibb brothers were releasing Spirits Having Flown, the final album in the Wagnerian disco/R&B cycle, and ABBA was clearly trying to create music in the same mold without losing their group sound.

Inspired by their writing in the Bahamas, Andersson and Ulvaeus booked studio time at Miami's Criteria Studios where The Bee Gees had recorded many of their disco era tracks. They bring in the rhythm and horn section band Foxy as well as guitarist George Terry. The result has an open, subtle swing to it that none of the other dance-oriented tracks on Voulez-Vous have.

The trip accomplished two things. First, it broke the spell of working in an insular environment with only Swedish musicians, giving Benny and Björn confidence that they could produce a track that was as memorable as the sounds that inspired it. Second, it gave them first hand information about what was going on musically in the rest of the world, particularly in the United States. In the Bahamas they were able to listen to some American radio broadcasts and hear firsthand the music that was most popular at the moment. It's important to remember that there was no internet, and that although there were choices in radio and television, Europe was not the wide open market that America was at the time. There was nowhere at home where they could easily hear the most current American music and certainly not the diversity of musical programming that existed in the U.S.

This was information they gleaned from traveling, and not only touring, but other events, such as charity performances, where they came into direct contact with other artists. One such event was the UNICEF concert to raise money for its world hunger programs on January 9, 1979. The group had planned to perform the song "If It Wasn't For the Nights" which they planned as their next single in promotion of the Voulez-Vous album. But they came to feel that the best song they had was "Chiquitita," and so they changed their minds and decided to perform it instead. While the song was an ABBA ballad classic, it was heavily permeated with a Europop style that was not reflective of the sounds that were popular around the world. The Bee Gees, for example, performed their newly released single "Too Much Heaven" which had the right sound and attitude for the event, but which glimmered with the studio sheen of a brave new pop world as the eighties beckoned.

"Chiquitita" was their best song of the new crop, they believed, but it was also a sound mired in pop's past. I think that it hurt Benny and Björn that after the sting of "Summer Night City" they were forced to take a step back. Their instincts proved solid, because it was one of five hit singles in the U.K., while in the States "Chiquitita" was one of only two singles to chart (the other was the Bjorn lead vocal glam rock number "Does Your Mother Know").

ABBA returned to Polar Music Studios no longer paralyzed by fear nor lacking ideas. The sessions were concluded with many of the dance tracks such as "Lovers (Live a Little Longer)" and "Kisses of Fire." The track listing was set with ten songs, not including the disowned "Summer Night City" nor the powerful "Lovelight," released as the B-side to "Chiquitita."

Lurking in the background of Voulez-Vous is the decision of Agnetha and Björn to divorce. Though both have said that the decision made it easier to go forward with recording sessions because tension had been relieved by the announcement, it shows up from time to time in the lyrical content of the songs, particularly 'Angeleyes,' 'The King Has Lost His Crown,'and 'If It Wasn't For the Nights.'

ABBA's subsequent albums, Super Trooper, The Visitors, and the reunion CD Voyage, are all the work of a mature group who was born during the writing and recording of Voulez-Vous. There would no longer be the watermelon sugar pop highs of songs like "Dancing Queen" and "Take a Chance on Me," but there were plenty of sonic rewards for those who continued to listen.

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