Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials Pt 2

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.

At number two is Knowing Me, Knowing You, a break-up song so convincing it’s easy to forget ABBA recorded it in 1976, years before either couple in the band split. Benny has counted it among their five best recordings, and it’s one of two tracks this week from Arrival, which turned fifty last Sunday. As for number one, we’ll let Armando reveal it on air. All we’ll say is that it comes from Voulez-Vous, the album critics like to dismiss as ABBA’s disco record. It only made it out in Britain because of a compromise between the band and their label. A television panel that included Johnny Rotten confidently predicted it would flop. And in 2022, more than forty years later, a new generation found it all on their own. Taken together, the five songs turn out to be a Friday night out, from the lights going down on the dance floor to the walk home afterwards, which is fitting, because that’s exactly when we’re on air.

This is the documentary about the 1979 tour that Armando mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzMf6ztbdtg

Broadcast 16 October 2026