There's a weird revision that has gone around since the nineties that music videos were hen's teeth before MTV. This affects other historical accounts. A tv docco about ABBA made in the early noughties had Bjorn Ulvaeus claim that they had in effect invented MTV because they made videos for each single they released. I remember watching Countdown in the mid seventies which featured almost wall to wall videos. (The stinky Bandstand had local acts covering international hits, probably from union demands leftover from the sixties but the spectacle of it was an embarrassment.) There were, of course, the live miming acts on Countdown but there was never a show that wasn't mostly clips. Countdown wasn't 24/7 like MTV and MTV might have stirred US record companies to release music videos as a matter of course but this idea that it was unthinkable before MTV is a recent one.
I start here because one of the most powerful videos I saw when I was starting to get into pop music (I came to it late from a childhood of classical music) was Abba's SOS. There was an exciting element to seeing clips from overseas. The video quality often looked a little gluey but that gave it an old-movie-on-portable-tv compression to it. It felt like stolen moments from other people's lives across the world, the photos of the fashion magazines my sisters and mother read come to life, they bore a real glamour.
I registered ABBA as the creators of I Do I Do I Do I Do, a song which, despite its pleasing massed saxophone hook sounded like something you'd hear at a country hall wedding reception when all the up-too-late kids pretended to dance but mostly fought in a cranky clairvoyant channelling of how they'd act at eighty-seven. There was a video to it but it was flat and glitzy. It didn't have the punch of Sweet's Fox on the Run performancer or the warm as a spring night Come Up and See Me by Steve Harley and Cockney rebel. It didn't even have the laughable (even then) hippy sleaze of Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band which I liked (despite the embarrassing lyric) for the harmonies.
One afternoon toward the end of grade eight, in the margin between exams and the official breakup when attendance scrutiny was lax I went home, glowing with the lightness of a year achieved, and set myself up in front of the upstairs tv with an iced coffee and watched one of the odd midmorning repeats of Countdown. It must have been one I'd missed as I didn't recognise some of the songs. And then, among the goopy Sherbert clips (they always seemed fat to me) or spiky Skyhooks numbers there came this.
It begins like the picture above, with Agnetha (my Nanna corrected my mispronunciation of the name from Ag-neetha to Annyetta) on a sunny but cold Swedish morning looking troubled. A brief but very serious downward figure on the piano preceded this. It was phased but I didn't know that then so it just sounded disturbing. Agnetha's high clear voice was stretched with pain, asking where her happiness has gone. Whatever was intended, this all added up to one of those mystery movies you'd see on rainy afternoons where the searcher never found the missing girl. Well, here was the missing girl singing from the ether itself, her face almost completely filling the screen, Scandinavianly beautiful but in torment. The strange viscous piano swelling around her voice like a tide of ectoplasm. Then - BAM - slamming into the picture with a big chorus in the relative major and "oh it's ABBA" again. But then, oh no it's back, a big dark bass in the synthesiers growls up a minor key run over a distant vocal refrain: "When you're gone how can I even try to go on?" I'm shivering as I type this. Second verse is more of the first. No need for development, the atmosphere will do. Sometimes we like living in the sadness. BAM with the chorus and holy smokes with the growling tail lashing. No third verse. Instead a thumping ground of low D octave with a severe clipped version of the vocal melody. It's like a funeral march. Then we're whisked back up to the chorus by the carinvalesque million note piano and moog arpeggio to the BAM chorus and then the big growling monster beneath the distant cry of pain: "When you're gone how can I even try to go on?" Twice as long as it has before, grinding with black emptying despair. And THEN this fades into the same descending solo piano that starts the song, minor key, fatal, final. One last whimper-not-bang D minor chord hangs twirling in the darkness.
And this was ABBA! ABBA, the cute double couple act with the lot, neuralogically tested in lab conditions hooky pop songs, magazine looks, music videos, the nous to sing in English, and the unbreakable sub-Arctic core of mighty Nordic hygiene that can disinfect all that it touches, bringing you a song that fed on the pain of its listeners and returned with the strength of that lightless accumulation with every replay. As I say, I never needed to own a copy of this song as its visit to the Earth was a successful mission. Nothing else they did ever achieved this greatness (although Knowing Me Knowing You made a solid approach) and it marks the point at which my admiration for them began to decline as the chirpier numbers started flooding the airwaves to saturation.
I tried to make it through the rest of that Countdown but was too restless. Whatever the weather really was I remember it as being thickly overcast with black rainy stains in the clouds. I rode my bike around Aitkenvale. Went down to the bank of the Ross, green and overgrown, and looked at the water. Came back home and noodled around D minor on the piano. Waited until I heard the song again.
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