Watch That Scene

To appreciate the thin, beautiful thread connecting Elvis Costello and ABBA, you first must embrace a simple fact: ABBA are a great band. 

Prior to last fall, I would have said ABBA “were” a great band. But their 2021 album Voyage has songs that stand easily alongside even their most legendary hit singles of the late seventies. 

It’s easy to dismiss ABBA in the same sweep with which all disco music is cast aside. I have never bought into the wholesale discarding of the genre; first and foremost, I think there is an unavoidable racist and sexist undertone to being in the “Disco sucks” camp. 

But there is real beauty, real transcendence in disco music, including the vein that ABBA mined for their greatest moments. That’s what EC heard in their songs as he and the Attractions cast their thoughts far afield to uncover fresh approaches to the tracks Costello was recording in the late summer of 1978. On Twitter, EC revealed that the band were such big fans of ABBA that they were buying the Swedish-language versions of their albums in Sweden on tour. 

Ultimately, that ABBA influence emerged primarily as a guidepost to the keyboard parts on the hit single from Armed Forces, “Oliver’s Army.” Costello gives the band a brief shoutout in his biography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink: 

“...Steve Nieve borrowed the grand piano style of ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ to rescue ‘Oliver’s Army’ from an uncertain fate.” 

But what does the ABBA inspiration bring to “Oliver’s Army” as a song? 

First, you dismiss “Dancing Queen” as populist pablum at your own risk. It’s lush and intricate from top to bottom, with a sound like a tuft of cotton candy floating atop a perfectly bunched collection of cumulus clouds. The lyrics reveal a sadness at the song’s heart, a portrait of a girl who seems to own the dance floor but also searches fruitlessly for something deeper than just a few choice moves to a bopping tune. 

Key to that underlying melancholy is the signature piano phrase that arrives after the first two lines of the chorus, and in the song’s opening bars. Just three pairs of quick riffs, descending. But that figure contains multitudes. It’s the dip of the young lady’s head as she averts her eyes, allowing her sad distraction to get the better of her as she dances. It’s the way she may linger on the floor a few seconds too long at the conclusion of a song, or even rush off the dance floor unexpectedly as the music crescendos. 

That piano figure, as small and delicate as it is, suggests so much; it fills in the gaps of this portrait the song paints. It pulls the song back just a few inches from unfiltered pop bliss, almost like the way Ringo’s drums hesitate at the end of the chorus of “She Loves You,” a riff that tells you more than the song seems to want you to know. 

On “Dancing Queen,” Benny Anderson’s piano slips between the beats and the offbeats; Steve Nieve’s riff on “Oliver’s Army” is a bit more locked into the song’s rhythm. It’s not quite as powerful an emotional effect as the ABBA riff. But it does take a song that is as bleak and vicious a lyric as Costello has ever written and provide a palatable pop sheen that creates dissonance. 

There is a gulf between the way “Oliver’s Army” makes you feel, and the story the words tell. You bop your head and tap your feet as you sing along to a tale of unchecked nationalism and unrelenting prejudice. Nieve’s piano performance is a big part of that dissonance. Like the Anderson riff, it’s a clever bit of misdirection; for ABBA, it points to the truth at the heart of “Dancing Queen,” and for EC and his Attractions, it points away from the truth toward a more entertaining lie. 

As a footnote to EC’s early ABBA appreciation, he would overtly quote “Dancing Queen” lyrically more than thirty-five years after the quartet’s song hit #1 in the UK. On the title cut for his 2002 album When I Was Cruel, he closes the tune with a verse that cuts quick to the heart of the song’s themes of cruelty observed and cruelty expressed: 

Next time: Elvis and a few of his contemporaries each tackle ABBA’s gut-wrenching song about divorce