Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials Pt 1

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 (   / @themusicden4696  ) 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 Songs in this episode: 0:02 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 1:06 ABBA – Dance (While The Music Still Goes On) 2:31 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 3:35 ABBA – My Love, My Life 4:59 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 6:03 ABBA – The Way Old Friends Do 7:23 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 8:27 ABBA – I Wonder (Departure) 9:51 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 10:55 ABBA – As Good As New 12:19 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: ABBA Essentials 13:23 Peaches & Herb – Shake Your Groove Thing