Show Notes
Armando Venditti has sat in the Musical Musings chair for Saga, Rush, Pink Floyd and The Tea Party, so when the host of The Music Den announced that his next subject was ABBA, a few eyebrows went up. They shouldn't have. Prog and classic rock fans have quietly admired Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson for decades — the layered arrangements, the Moog, the stage musical they wrote in the middle of a world tour — and Armando's ten ABBA essentials are a musician's list. It's too big for one hour, so we're splitting it in two, and this week's half, numbers ten to six, is the ABBA most people never bought on a single. We begin at the very beginning, with the first song recorded for the Waterloo album in September 1973, a Phil Spector tribute with a Texan session player on piano and all four members singing lead together in the chorus. Then comes an Agnetha ballad from Arrival that began life under a completely different title and borrowed its ghostly backing vocals from 10cc, and a three-minute singalong that ABBA recorded live on stage at Wembley and then used to close a studio album.
The back half of this week's countdown goes somewhere stranger. Number seven comes from The Girl with the Golden Hair, the mini-musical ABBA performed on their 1977 tour, in a live recording from the Sydney Showground that first came out on the back of a 1977 single — an early glimpse of the songwriters who would go on to write Chess. And number six is the opening track of Voulez-Vous: baroque strings, Philadelphia funk and a song about coming home, made just as the band's first marriage was falling apart, which was a number one hit in exactly one country. Listen to the words across the five and you'll notice a pattern, which Armando and I get into by the end of the hour. There's also a little anniversary in the air — Arrival turns fifty this Sunday, 11 October — and it matters for next week, when Part 2 brings us the top five. Those are all songs you know.
Broadcast 5th October 2026
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Last week Armando Venditti of The Music Den took us through the first half of his ten essential ABBA tracks, and it was the ABBA most people never owned on a single: B-sides, a live encore, an Agnetha ballad and a hit that only Mexico noticed. This week he finishes the job with the top five, and there’s nowhere left to hide, because every one of them was a hit. What makes it interesting is the order. The song most people would put at number one sits at number five. Dancing Queen was ABBA’s only American chart-topper and a number one here and in Britain, and it was recorded more than a year before anyone heard it, under the working title Boogaloo. Above it is Super Trouper, written in a rush as the last song for the album, about a singer on stage holding on to one face in a crowd of twenty thousand. Then comes Björn’s big moment at the microphone, Does Your Mother Know, which began life as a rock’n’roll track with two heavy-metal guitar solos before ABBA polished it into a dance-floor stomper. A rock-and-prog man like Armando was always going to have something to say about that.
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