At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender. And half a century ago, the world would also surrender to the opening salvo from an album by what would become the very textbook definition of a supergroup. Yet the first major step on what would become a road to global stardom and a lasting place in the pantheon of both popular music and culture alike would just happen to occur in the unlikeliest of settings.
It was at the Brighton Dome on the evening of Saturday 6th April 1974 that a quartet of Swedes would not only take the stage, but also take the world by storm. While they had been together for a few years in their pupal form of Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid, having only taken on the now-familiar palindromic acronym based upon their initials a year earlier, this performance at the Eurovision Song Contest would end up being the point Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad would begin imprinting the name ABBA indelibly on the public consciousness, along with their own brand of music.
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Whereas nearly 160 years previous it had spelled the end for the Emperor of France, here ‘Waterloo’ would actually mark the start of the kind of global invasion and conquest of which the Corsican-born ruler could have only dreamt. Yet this was not merely to be the humblest of beginnings, but also one of the most offbeat, given that their platform (besides the ones they were wearing) would see the orchestra be conducted by someone dressed up as Little Boney himself, with the host being a knickerless TV Times agony aunt, and the halftime entertainment during the interval provided by The Wombles (plus Agnetha ending up wearing a Wombles badge during ABBA’s performance).
A decade later, Benny and Björn would go on to co-compose a track for the musical Chess called ‘One Night In Bangkok’, but it might never have happened if not for that one night in Brighton. In fact, things could have all been very different as this was not their first shot at Eurovision: had events taken an alternative route, ABBA could have represented Sweden in the previous year’s Song Contest, with the group putting forward ‘Ring, Ring’ as a contender for their nation’s entry. As it turned out, the track would end up only placing third in the country’s Melodifestivalen, and we can only speculate as to whether or not ABBA would have made the same impact if their Eurovision debut had been in 1973 instead.
Hindsight, they say, is 20/20 (or, perhaps in our case, 2024), so with the benefit of the last 50 years, it seems inevitable to us now ABBA would always go on to reach the stratospheric heights which would see ABBA Gold become the first album to make it to 1,000 weeks on the Official Albums Chart, or their return in virtual ‘ABBAtar’ form for a groundbreaking, wildly popular concert experience, ABBA Voyage. Of course, not to mention their songs forming the basis of a musical, which would turn into a movie adaptation and sequel. This quartet always seemed destined to be the vanguard of what has become known as ‘Scandipop’, with Sweden reported as being the second-highest exporter of music in the world, after the US. My, my.
The history book on the shelf, however, reminds us that the current position of ABBA as such evergreen pop behemoths was not always so certain. There were the wilderness years after the breakup, when ABBA seemed to be viewed as the epitome of everything that was cheesy and kitschy, and so they temporarily fell from favour. But the flame never truly died, and it was rekindled by the likes of Muriel’s Wedding, and tribute act Björn Again. From that point onwards, their resurgence felt like a promise to love them forevermore by the public. One of the odder possible diversions which never came to pass was Benny and Björn being linked to a musical version of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.
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ABBA’s Eurovision victory came just over a month after the release of Waterloo, which was their second studio album, but the first to get an international release. Coming at what was such a pivotal point in their career trajectory, you might well expect Waterloo to be chock full of stone-cold certified bangers, rather like its namesake title track (of course, have you even experienced ‘Waterloo’ until you’ve heard it in the original Swedish?). Yes, the breakthrough song has rightly taken a lot of the limelight when it comes to this album, as you might expect from a track which was voted in 2005 as the best song in the history of Eurovision.
But what of its compatriots? Well, the fact that ‘Waterloo’ is the only track from the album to make it onto the original edition of ABBA Gold may be a good indicator. Waterloo is actually rather a fascinating snapshot of the group at what was still quite a formative period for them, as they have yet to conclusively nail down the ABBA sound and style, and are still trying out different genres. The ABBA we get here is not yet the finished article, and being a work in progress, and in Waterloo we have a study in experimentation, with some of the results being more successful than others. You can get a real sense of ABBA testing the waters, flexing their musical muscles, and seeing what fits best.
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As a result, Waterloo is very much a curate’s egg, going from the cod pseudo-calypso that is ‘Sitting In The Palmtree’, to the oddly-titled ‘King Kong Song’ (which originally went by the equally bizarre name of ‘Mr. Sex’). ‘Hasta Mañana’ feels not only like a pastiche of ABBA, but also comes across like a rather generic ‘Europop’ effort, which makes sense when you learn it was this – rather than ‘Waterloo’ – which had been considered at one stage as their Eurovision entry. In a current entertainment landscape fixated with multiverses, it makes for an interesting intellectual exercise to imagine a reality in which the world fails to be set alight by ‘Hasta Mañana’, and after a respectable placing, ABBA ends up going on to being a moderate success at home, without ever troubling either the global pop scene, or the annals of posterity.
The quirkiness continues with ‘What About Livingstone?’, a track The Guardian described as having “weird lyrics”, and neatly summed up by saying it “admonished Swedish youth for their disinterest in great explorers”. Much of the remaining material on the album is decent and solid enough, like in the instance of ‘Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)’, which does bring to mind The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ at points, or the glam rock-tastic ‘Watch Out’, which feels like ABBA put in a blender with the soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar and The Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’. The only major standouts are ‘Honey, Honey’ and ‘Ring, Ring’, with the latter sneaking onto the UK and US releases of Waterloo, and being notable for having lyrics penned by Neil Sedaka.
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Although it would take until their next album – 1975’s self-titled ABBA – to really consolidate and crystallise more of the style which which we think of when we hear their name, Waterloo is worth revisiting for a look at all of the ‘what if’s and the roads not taken, while thanking ABBA for the music of the immortal classic that is ‘Waterloo’, a song you simply couldn’t escape if you wanted to, especially in the year which marks its golden anniversary.
Waterloo was released on 4th March 1974