![]() Still, as a lover of Abba more generally (and who isn’t?), it’s their ambiguities that always intrigue me most. You still won’t find it on my playlist though. The line is not ‘fucking in the moonlight’, but ‘walking in the moonlight’ (though you can see how I jumped to the wrong conclusion when it’s followed by ‘love-making in the park’). Of course, when I grew up, and the internet happened, and lyrics became searchable, I finally laid to rest the mystery of ‘Summer Night City’. Ah, I used to think, thank God ‘I Wonder’s round the corner. ![]() So my solution was to talk – to chatter incessantly – through the entire track. Only you can’t when the tape is playing, and asking it to be fast forwarded is just giving it even more attention than it deserves. Well, that’s the last thing you want to have to encounter with your parents present, even if you’re sitting in the back of the car. No, it was the fact that Abba were singing about… coitus. It wasn’t the music that was the issue with me as a child anyway. I don’t think many people would consider it a peak – though it went Top 5 in the UK, even Bjorn has admitted it’s ‘really lousy’ – but while its clog-heavy disco thud is a bit annoying, I’m not sure I could find anyone who actually blanches on hearing that first, clashing chord. Even now, I have an irrational hatred of ‘ Summer Night City’. I knew that the next track was about to leave a trail of mess all over the speakers. And every time we got to the final strains of ‘Chiquitita’ (a sort of bierkeller, clash-glasses, slap-knees schlager fadeout) I used to get a pit in my stomach. The most played album of all was Greatest Hits Volume 2, which contained so many of those gleaming popjets d’art that define their incredible sound: ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Knowing me knowing you’, ‘Gimme gimme gimme’. Far from the sunny, happy foursome that grinned from my Dad’s album covers, I actually thought they were a bit rude when I was a kid. It makes the ambiguity final line (“ And rattling on the roof I must have heard the sound of rain / The day before you came“) a bit more chilling.I’ll tell you a story about Abba. It might sound far-fetched but Frida and Benny’s celestial harmonies of the verse and the harmony (or is it shrieking?) of the middle eight certainly add kudos to this theory. The most intriguing theory is that the protagonist is a ghost, who is eerily detailing the minutiae of her daily life before her murderer –the “you” of the title- ended her life. ![]() ![]() Marilyn French was a radical feminist author who was infamously misquoted as saying: “all men are rapists.” There’s also the reference to her bedtime reading matter (“ The latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style,”). There’s the disorientating ambiguity of Agnetha’s words (“ I’m certain…”, “ I must have…”,” I’m sure,”) which suggest a zombie sleep walking through their life (“ It’s funny, but I had no sense of living without aim/ The day before you came“) and hints at depression (“ I need a lot of sleep“). There was the working title of the song (‘The Suffering Bird’), hinting at a prison like fragility. But a deeper probe suggests something a bit darker at the core. On the surface the lyrics seem to reflect the timeline of a woman who is reminiscing on her mundane routine before she met her world changing lover. ![]()
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