Erasure, ABBA-Esque: How Erasure saved ABBA from obscurity

Erasure
ABBA-Esque EP

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number One on June 7, 1992

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I was in the car with my teenage daughter recently when the radio started playing the new Lizzo song.

This song, like many other recent hits, borrows heavily from 70s disco music. Doja Cat’s excellent ‘Say So’ is another example—it was recorded in 2019 but sounds like it could have filled the dancefloor at Studio 54.

When I heard this song, I started talking about music history, much to my teenage daughter’s dismay. I told her how ironic it was that disco music had survived the 21st century, outliving so many other genres. When I was a kid, in the 1980s, disco was deeply uncool.

“In fact”, I said, “everything from the 70s was considered uncool. We used to laugh at old pictures of people in flares and platforms shoes.”

“Wait,” said my daughter, “you’re telling me that people used to be judgey about fashion… in the eighties?”

What can I say? We thought our clothes were normal.

But it’s true, and I think this is something that’s been forgotten. One of the defining aspects of life in the 80s was a sense of deep, cringing shame about the fashion crimes committed in what we called The Decade Fashion Forgot.

The 70s seemed like one big mistake and people had an allergic reaction to anything that reminded them of that era. This is why tight trousers were so popular in the 80s. We were scared that loose trouser legs might result in accidental flaring.

Some 70s music survived into the new decade, although many artists went through a post-Live Aid transformation.

But there was one band that seemed beyond rehabilitation. A band so quintessentially 70s that they made you want to eat fondue and decorate your house in brown and orange. A band that no self-respecting 80s kid would ever listen to.

That band was ABBA.

Let’s run through the ABBA story real quick.

Swedish songwriters Benny and Bjorn had been trying to make it on the local scene for a couple of years in the early 70s, without much success. They got to know—and then fell in love with—two talented singers: Agnetha and Anni-Frid.

Benny married Anni-Frid, Bjorn married Agnetha, and the four of them became ABBA.

Their international breakthrough came in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which they won with ‘Waterloo’. The song was a global hit but, like most Eurovision winners, ABBA struggled to establish themselves as serious artists. The post-Eurovision ABBA era was a fallow one, their follow-up singles vanishing without a trace.

In 1976, things started to turn around. ‘I Do, I Do, I Do’ was a minor hit, but big enough to get a little momentum going. The next single, ‘SOS’, went Top 10, and the one after that, ‘Mama Mia’, went all the way to the top.

ABBA became a cultural juggernaut, scoring sixteen consecutive Top 10 singles in the UK. In the latter half of the 70s, the Swedish foursome became pop music dominant force.

[VH1 Behind The Music voice] But backstage, things were going completely Fleetwood Mac. Divorce, anger, copyright disputes—we could spend hours going through it, but it’s quicker to just listen to ‘The Winner Takes It All’.

Fast forward to 1982. Pop tastes are moving in a synthpop/New Romantic direction and ABBA are sounding a little stale. There are some less successful solo projects. The band goes on an indefinite hiatus.

Further chaos ensues behind the scenes, with lots of weird copyright and licensing shenanigans. In 1982, the band released their definitive best-of collection, called The Singles: The First Ten Years. By 1988, this collection has been deleted.

By the end of the 80s, it had become difficult to obtain ABBA’s music. There are really only two places you can hear ABBA now: oldies radio and your mum’s LP collection.

This does not help ABBA’s reputation as “some old band from the least cool decade”. ABBA become the punchline to every joke about shitty music.

(Were things really this bad? It’s hard to believe—this is ABBA, after all. But I double-checked with my older brother, and he confirmed that this is correct. Apparently, a kid in his school once admitted that he liked ABBA and nobody ever spoke to him again.)

So, we’ve established what was uncool in the 80s. But what was cool?

Forward-looking music. We liked synths and electronics and artificial beats. We liked New Order and Pet Shop Boys and house music. And we liked Erasure.

Erasure had a fine pedigree when they arrived, with genius Vince Clarke having already enjoyed success, first with Depeche Mode and then with Yazoo.

Erasure had been on a roll since the late 80s, with almost a dozen top 10 hits, including pop classics like ‘A Little Respect’ and ‘Blue Savannah’. In 1991, they had a hit album (the excellent Chorus) and were enjoying a ton of goodwill.

So this is the scene when Erasure recorded the ABBA-Esque EP. It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but at this precise moment in history, Erasure were bigger than ABBA.

In an interview with Classic Pop magazine last year, Andy Bell was asked how much the ABBA-Esque EP helped to revive ABBA’s fortunes. He said:

I think quite a lot, actually. We kind of propelled them back into the club limelight with the dance tracks. And I don’t think there had been a video EP before and the songs got exposure like that – in video bars in America and places like that. Not that we gave them credence or anything, but it really was a reminder to people of how brilliant that band was.

And this is a very accurate analysis. The reason ABBA-Esque works so well is that it treats the songs with the utmost reverence. Sure, there are lots of flashy techno beats, and there’s a rap in the middle of ‘Take A Chance On Me’. But Clarke and Bell understood that these songs didn’t really need jazzing up or reinvention. The songs were, essentially, perfect. People just needed to listen to them again. People needed to accept that the 70s were actually kind of good.

This represents a pivotal moment in our cultural history, one that’s much bigger than just ABBA.

Since the 50s, youth culture has always been barrelling forward, always searching for the new and the novel. Some rock bands tried to develop a sense of classicism in the 70s, and the reaction was so visceral that it inspired punk.

But the 90s were when mainstream pop culture began to really embrace what came before. As we progress through the decade, we’ll see that retro nostalgia becomes an increasingly important force. Britpop, for example, was really just a 60s revivalist movement. And mid-90s fashion was heavily influenced by a 70s revival.

Anyway. That’s something to talk about in another newsletter. Let’s get back to ABBA.

In September 1992, ABBA released a new best-of compilation called Gold, which went on to become one of the best-selling records of all time. ABBA-mania was back and it has never gone away.

They helped pioneer the jukebox musical with the phenomenally successful Mamma Mia! And now they’re pioneering the emerging science of digital tribute acts with their groundbreaking ABBA Voyage project. As songwriters, they’re generally considered on a par with other pop geniuses like The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

Would all of this have happened without Erasure? Absolutely. But after the long ABBA winter of the 1980s, this EP was like seeing the first green shoots of spring.

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