100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #22 ABBA – Dancing Queen

Released: 1977

When first conceived in the 1950’s as a way to help teenagers identify with their supposed new found freedom to consume, pop was never meant to be like this. Sterile, yes, shallow yes, but in no way was it seen as giving a platform to bands that would become brands; the Beatles went on to prove that idea wrong, but punk rock was meant to have slaughtered all our notions of idolatory.

Equally its guaranteed that even when a paragraph starts with “And X needs no introduction” for at least some people they actually do. But at least in the case of ABBA, the Swedish boy-girl-boy-girl supergroup who simply owned pop music for a decade, it’s comfortingly accurate. The story of how Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson hooked up professionally and personally with Frida Lyngsta and Agnetha Fältskog is one whose truth largely depends on who’s telling it, but the end result is the same, that ABBA Gold, their compilation of greatest, greatest hits, remains one of the biggest selling records of all time. Unafraid to be both kitsch and sophisticated, the foursome’s 1970’s catalogue still ranks as either a high or low watermark for mainstream entertainment according to your perspective.

It’s not easy to write something fresh about them, so to borrow with pride from Rolling Stone’s excellent run down of their best songs, Dancing Queen is not only their most memorable and widest recognised track, but their best. Maybe this is because it’s shorthand for so many different human emotions, from self discovery, to hope, to the simple joy of being noticed. Whatever it’s appeal was and still is, it saw the foursome adding disco to the list of genres they were able to absorb and shape into their unique template, proving again that a once in a generation an act can bend an entire strand of popular culture to their will. The chemical formula for this process remains thankfully a mystery for nearly everyone else on the planet.