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 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