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Post by chron on Aug 22, 2022 18:07:14 GMT
It simply isn't good enough. I get where you're coming from (while disagreeing with you about its standout track). Voyage has been expertly crafted with good intentions, but I cannot warm to it, and it doesn't - yet - seem like an 'proper' ABBA album. It feels hollow at the centre. For me, Voyage extends without adding. It's like meeting someone from your past who has suffered some sort of drastic, life-altering event - at first they seem broadly unchanged, but as you spend more time with them all sorts of little discrepancies and disconnects between who they were and who they are now seem to surface (this is an overstatement, but there's a definite feel of something of that sort about the album). At any rate, Voyage fails to supplant The Visitors as the final album marking-post of their journey, and Like An Angel Passing Through My Room remains superior to Ode To Freedom as a last farewell (OTF is like the staged goodbye of a group of players, a rather grand, 'municipal' farewell invoking hopes and dreams, while Like An Angel' is the interiorised goodbye of someone quietly slipping away; heightened because quiet).
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Post by chron on Jul 18, 2022 16:29:09 GMT
Nice one, Rich. I know nothing about the Lagoons, beyond the fact that the band effectively comprises two brothers. I found out about them via a guitar manufacturer's website (they appear to be associated with a particular make). Anyway, this bit of easy-on-the-ears-and-mind summery mellowness would seem to fit the bill. Anyone who likes gentle, unforced vocals should get on with this, and the laidback guitar and somnolent sax add nicely to the unhurried feel:
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Post by chron on Jul 17, 2022 3:44:40 GMT
I've never been that keen on Fernando. Probably Take A Chance On Me ought to be in there; Soldiers and The King Has Lost His Crown shouldn't be ahead of it. (I played The King Has Lost His Crown after doing this and it's not as impressive as I remember it. It's not bad; the contrast between the schadenfreude of the lyrics and their laid-back delivery in the verses is nicely done, but the build into the choruses is strident, and the choruses themselves don't live up to the verses.) Doing this has brought home again how quickly after The Album it becomes slim pickings, in terms of personal favourites.
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Post by chron on Jul 16, 2022 19:05:23 GMT
I didn't agonise over the process - no one's going to be holding us to these. I did it quickly, in order to try and throw up natural, felt, 'true' choices rather than balanced, considered, 'curated' choices. I can't shake the feeling that there's a glaring omission, but I haven't yet worked out what it might be.
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Post by chron on Jul 16, 2022 17:38:52 GMT
I can put together a list of thirty. Beyond those listed, I'd just be arranging tracks into an order that wouldn't reflect on anything.
30. Soldiers 29. Dance While The Music Still Goes On 28. Head Over Heels 27. I Still Have Faith In You 26. If It Wasn't For The Nights 25. Gonna Sing You My Love Song 24. Lovelight 23. The King Has Lost His Crown 22. Hey, Hey Helen 21. Like An Angel Passing Through My Room 20. Chiquitita 19. Dum Dum Diddle 18. I Wonder 17. Slipping Through My Fingers 16. When I Kissed The Teacher 15. I'm A Marionette 14. One Man, One Woman 13. Tiger 12. Summer Night City 11. My Love, My Life 10. Eagle 09. That's Me 08. Mamma Mia 07. Move On 06. The Visitors 05. Hole In Your Soul 04. SOS 03. Dancing Queen 02. The Name Of The Game 01. Knowing Me, Knowing You
My top 5-10 never really change. There's obviously a heavy Album/Arrival bias. The one song that gets in from Voyage is I Still Have Faith In You, but I have this feeling I'm making an effort to shoehorn it in. Do I truly prefer it to Take A Chance On Me or Super Trouper? Very possibly not, although it is a fine track, their last great one in all likelihood. I can't see KMKY ever dropping off top spot, it's in a class by itself, never failing to thrill you and fill you with awe—the sound of a great pop band transcending its greatness in a way that even the band itself probably can't quite account for.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2022 16:24:26 GMT
Fair enough, Johnny, my unpacking of it is laborious (not to say excruciating!), but the registering of the inappropriateness of the metaphor happened immediately. It took no over-thinking whatsoever. It was an immediate, glaring misstep. It wounded the song, but it didn't knock it to the canvas.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2022 16:18:52 GMT
It's possible to over-think things. And under-think things, which, if you call yourself a lyricist, writing resonant songs for the ages, is the bigger pitfall to avoid.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2022 15:48:09 GMT
Increasingly so, for some reason! I think that line has something to do with fighters in a ring needing each other because, otherwise, it's not a spectacle - it's just one unoccupied person. I have to say that I hadn't given the lyric too much attention before now. (Okay, I'm hard work as well!) But to get to that sort of undertow symbolism you have to wade through the primary associations that come with using a fighting metaphor, the uppercuts or the roundhouse kicks or the backbreaker drops. The punching/kicking/wrestling is vividly primary; the match as spectacle is secondary; the mutual dependence aspect is tertiary. Ring fighting is just the wrong sort of parallel to draw all ways up, for me.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2022 13:00:44 GMT
I'm not suggesting they're being apologists for domestic violence! I'm just saying it's an ill-thought out, insensitive way of summarising the ups-and-downs nature of long-term relationships. 'Fighter' is too loaded when used in a domestic context (especially when a ring is referenced, narrowing the meaning - rings are entrapping spaces). The fact that Joe has had to go 'round the Wrekin in order to avoid the prime reading and try and 'repurpose' the phrase shows this. I think it's plainly a case of Bjorn having been too heavy-handed with the parallels. This place can be hard work! The ultra fans barely allow anything that doesn't show the group in a less than blinding light; everything gets killed by kindness. This can end up doing a disservice to their best work, I think. The best is the best in part because it's rare and hard-won (or mysteriously easily-won), and precious.
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Post by chron on Mar 28, 2022 2:16:36 GMT
It's fighters not boxers in a ring and not necessarily about two people boxing the hell out of each other. I took it to mean the ring of life (if you will) and fighting/overcoming the obstacles of life- together. I stand corrected (it's a slip stemming from having punned the line that way a few times!), but that doesn't alter the point I'm making. When they're in a ring, fighters don't relate as a team in any constructive sense; they're adversaries out to inflict damage, and that's what's being evoked - 'fighters' and 'ring' used in such swift and specific conjunction stretches any other reading beyond credibility. It's just a duff metaphor.
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Post by chron on Mar 27, 2022 20:09:30 GMT
I knew I’d be alone in my interpretation. [...] Probably the wider point I was making is that there are bad things going on today that are as bad or worse than what’s gone before. I'm not going to dismiss your interpretation out of hand; the next time I listen to the track I'll try and bear your reading in mind. While we're touching on the subject you bring up, there does happen to be a problematic line on the album that I find bothersome: "And we need one another/like boxers in a ring" from I Still Have Faith In You - an utter clunker of a metaphor, given the degree to which domestic violence remains a problem. It says something about how accomplished the track is in other respects that it remains, despite that lapse, the best track on Voyage by a distance.
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Post by chron on Mar 27, 2022 19:21:32 GMT
I'd like their sign-off effort to leave me feeling the sort of chill you get when you're outside in weather colder than you anticipated and you're not wearing enough layers: a lovely, wintry bleakness.
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Post by chron on Mar 27, 2022 19:18:11 GMT
How could they get more kitsch than Little Things, I Can Be That Woman and When You Danced With Me?!! I doubt it's very likely at all, but if they did reconvene in the studio for one last time, I'd want the something darker and more downbeat. I'd like to see them taking it into the gloomy territory they hinted at on parts of The Visitors and on things like the verses of Under Attack. I think their handle on melancholy will be one of the qualities that will endure the most, and I'd love them to sign off with some stuff that almost revels in the uncertainty and emotional messiness and impermanence of life.
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Post by chron on Mar 20, 2022 12:03:43 GMT
I too, watched The Official Lyric Video of Chiquitita; they made more of an effort Visually than the previous ones, released for the Songs off Voyage' so that's a plus. A good point, undertheappletree. Why couldn't have the videos to the songs from " Voyage " been handled like " Chiquitita " ? They had more substantial materials to work with on this Chiquitita one, having the properly done, ABBA-at-their-peak promo, as well as Rune Soederqvist's terrific graphics, to draw on and reconfigure. For the Voyage vids, they're obviously not keen to show the group as they're aged now, they can't keep mining and recycling past imagery, and the album artwork is, at base, pretty dull. Soederqvist's absence is big factor for me. Had he been still around, I think he'd have been involved on some level in the development of Voyage's 'look', and I think he'd have come up with something better than the bland planetary stuff they ended up with. What works especially well with the Chiquitita vid is the use of his distinctive Polar 'mountain' graphic, which functions as an anchoring element behind the floating words and faces, and bolsters the effects of the chilly blue and white colour scheme. It all ties together really nicely. (That said, it's another example of them excessively keying promos to album graphics. All of the Voyage ones I've seen are 'trapped' in the black/brown/orange colour scheme, the crescent planets and the starlight bursts. I wish they could break away from this sort of album corporate branding for their vids. It's a bit needless and limiting.
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Post by chron on Mar 16, 2022 20:32:46 GMT
Eddie, only just spotted your reference to 'acting' in the post above mine, which makes my last line look like a jibe. It wasn't meant that way; that Bresson quote has long been floating around in my head. I dug out Notes On The Cinematographer to get it right (I've also included a few other quotes from the book. I've always found Bresson's idea that an artist gets the onlooker to feel emotion precisely by repressing any kind of outpouring of emotion from the art itself/performer themselves a compelling idea):
BEING (models*) instead of SEEMING (actors).
Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins.
Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.
What has passed through one art and is still marked by it can no longer enter another.
Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.
Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.
*Bresson used to use people untrained as actors in his films; these non-actors he called 'models', to clearly mark them out as being different from professionals
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Post by chron on Mar 16, 2022 18:34:45 GMT
A song I would not like to see in the show....The Winner Takes it All. Agnetha's plaintive voice just comes a long as a whinge. It should have a more stripped back music backround. But no, it has incessant drumming sound throughout. I loved the early Agnetha led ballad songs - SOS, Hasta Manana, My Love, My Life. The tunes were catchy and the vocals more vulnerable than self-pitying. I feel towards the end ABBA relied too much on this formula. I am not a fan of Slipping Through My Fingers or The Day Before You Came. One of Us though is better - musically more catchy like those earlier ballads. I don't know about them being formulaic, but I certainly think Agnetha has problems identifying with the lyrics of many of the later songs, and struggles to give them 'the reading' that B&B are (for some mysterious reason) encouraging her to. The earlier lyrics were obviously simpler, but also more universal and less 'literary' (which doesn't make them less complex, rather the opposite), less weighed down by description and metaphor and the need to 'characterise', and I think Agnetha found them easy to connect with and give natural, unforced expression to. She doesn't come close on The Winner Takes It All to conveying the sort of thoroughly believable plaintiveness or yearning that she achieves on SOS or My Love, My Life (because it isn't being conveyed there so much as being embodied). I feel the same way you do about the later songs you list, with the exception of Slipping Through My Fingers, which I think again allows her to identify in a way that's direct and unfiltered - the words are more developed than earlier ones, but they're not so mannered as to create distancing. To adapt an old Robert Bresson line from memory: 'SOS Agnetha' is a person being, 'The Winner Takes It All Agnetha' is an actor seeming.
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Post by chron on Feb 26, 2022 23:33:04 GMT
I like the way they've rendered the texture of his sports jacket and aged him to made him look more like the real Bjorn looks today. This spectacular might have a greater degree of verisimilitude than we've been led to believe it would up to now. (Nice pic of Nigel Tufnel he's looking at, too.)
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Post by chron on Feb 26, 2022 17:25:49 GMT
I agree that we'd better move on and leave the topic behind as it's too sensitive for all parties involved and the subject should not come between us and create a strife. I agree with you, especially given that it's early days, a clear picture isn't available, and initial emotions are wont to run high. That said, this current crisis is so much more—what's a word that won't come across as loaded, insensitive or trivialising in some way? Insert your own here—than many other subjects, especially ones such as record sales figures and chart positions. You can subjectively interpret such facts and figures of course, and tease out angles that relate to the broader ABBA picture, but I find it hard to. I think this thread should perhaps be split into two, with one catering for the commercial performance aspects, and the other focusing on the album in terms of it being ABBA's latest creative statement.
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Post by chron on Feb 25, 2022 18:10:22 GMT
The dark beauty of The Visitors is that it continues to have the ability to be relevant to events in that region on a constant basis. From the plight of the dissidents that Bjorn described, to the horrific persecution of LGBTQ people in recent years, to Crimea, to the murderous assault on Ukraine now. Content and means being 'tailor-able' in this way is one of the sure signs of a great song (my go-to reading has always put a Berlin Wall/Stasi spin on it—watch towers, flood lights trained on the 'death strip', informers, people being rumbled just as they’re steeling themselves to make a bolt for the West and all that). It's vivid enough to create a palpable feeling of threat, universal enough to be adaptable to current and freshly developing scenarios again and again: the political made personal. (It can equally validly be read as a song about someone living with schizophrenia or an illness of a comparable sort, which then turns 'the visitors' into health service workers, sent to carry out an assessment or a sectioning.) A brilliant song whichever way you slice it (its sole weakness is the use of the word 'irritation'; surely it should be fear or anger that's building, depending on which side of the door it's happening - 'paranoia' has the syllables to scan, if it's being felt by the 'visitee'. Irritation is a reaction more usually associated with the day-to-day annoyances of life), and far superior to Ode To Freedom, which is both windy and a bit pompous in comparison (arguably giving lie to the speaker's assertion that were they to write an ode to freedom, they'd be able to do so using direct and unpretentious means!). And with that, it's back to the Voyage studio..
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Post by chron on Feb 25, 2022 6:35:06 GMT
The track that immediately came to my mind in the wake of the attack on Ukraine was The Visitors: creeping tension at the start and an unsettling, hard-to-pin-down vibe at the end, as Frida['s character], long knowing she'd eventually have to directly confront whatever is out there (or maybe decide to do something to permanently avoid a confrontation), repeatedly intones with an odd equanimity that works in counterpoint to the roiling angst of the backing vox, "I have been waiting for these visitors".
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Post by chron on Feb 22, 2022 21:24:54 GMT
I've read somewhere that by the time of completing The Album Stig's input was limited to inventing the titles. And he had no hand in writing lyrics since Voulez-Vous onwards. Yep, dug out Bright Lights, Dark Shadows earlier and a passage in that supports this. The Album was the last release to carry songs containing lyrical input from Stig.
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Post by chron on Feb 22, 2022 19:33:14 GMT
As for Wikipedia - they are full of s##t!. NDAI should be listed as a Promotional Single. They have ISHFIY and DSMD as a double A side. I could write an essay on their mistakes and inconsistencies! Go in and make an edit if something specific aggrieves you. That's the beauty of Wiki; you have the freedom to make amendments (and if they're constructive and can be justified, they're usually left to stand).
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Post by chron on Feb 21, 2022 20:11:30 GMT
You can't keep fishing the meat out of your replies for fear of upsetting a single hypersensitive member. No one has ever posted anything that could be construed as an outright personal dig at Edmund that I can recall, but I have seen him receive lots of support and encouragement - Alan, Tony and Joe have all been especially good in this regard. I really wish him well, but I think it's right for him to think hard about whether online forums are for him; he's had two or three tries of this one, one of the most decent and well-meaning forums you'll find, and has had to leave each time after being provoked by things that haven't seemed to register a flicker on anyone else's seismometer.
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Post by chron on Feb 21, 2022 16:48:11 GMT
Hasn't Stig provided only the titles? I think it was that way at least in the case of Knowing Me, Knowing You, Move On and The Name Of The Game. I'd imagine that even if Stig's concrete input was limited to that, Bjorn would've still used him as a sounding board for ideas and lyrics from time to time. I'll have to check in one or other of CMP's books.
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Post by chron on Feb 21, 2022 3:19:07 GMT
I'd love if an interviewer would ask Bjorn about the evolution of his lyrics. Up to 1980, they were very poppy and (mostly) without some of the intricate and ornate detail that cropped in later releases. Sometimes that level of detail pays off: The Visitors, The Day Before You Came, for example. I started to notice the changes with Gemini. Take Too Much Love Is Wasted for instance. It's really scene-driven and the detail makes the pop flow of the song very sluggish. Then, on the next album, there's the ridiculous Ghost Town, a totally bananas, detail-heavy scene where the car engine won't "ignite." With Josefin Nilsson, we have art snobs and dressing gowns and pigeons and esoteric situations where "whales have ceased to sing." So far removed from pop, that they could be an experiment by a dramatist or a screenwriter. Great post. I've been thinking about the evolution of Bjorn's lyric-writing style on and off for a while. When he got it right, in the 'golden period', the songs were often acmes of less-is-more effectiveness. Knowing Me, Knowing You hasn't got the finicky detail that Don't Shut Me Down has, yet covers much more emotional ground, is full and deep and emotion-provoking because it leaves the listener to fill out a lot of the scene. I can 'see' the house and rooms in KMKY more clearly because Bjorn's not trying to paint of his version of it in my head, he's leaving me to flesh it out with the memory of a house I've known myself, which creates a personal connection. With Don't Shut Me Down on the other hand, I apparently need to know that the bench Agnetha's character is sitting on is wooden (which interferes with the image of the metal bench that I have in my mind's eye from the memory of a park I used to live near). Bjorn seems to have practised a sort of version of Hemingway's 'iceberg' approach to writing on some of his best mid-period songs ("You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood"). KMKY's lyrics are economical but concentrated, nothing is included that hinders momentum; emotion and empathy resonate strongly precisely because the singer's regret and what-have-you is outlined and not filled in. Compare that with Don't Stand Me Down: faff about lighting, background figures, uncomfortable furniture, several seconds and a whole line wasted on a shrug-worthy observation ("I believe it would be fair to say you look bewildered"). It's fussier writing; possibly Bjorn regards it as more 'writerly' writing, but for me it's showy and less effective. Maybe I've being doing Stig a disservice down the years; his name is in the writing credits of quite a few of what I think are ABBA's best songs (KMKY, Dancing Queen, My Love, My Life, That's Me, The Name Of The Game, Move On). Maybe the wily old popster helped constrain Bjorn's authorial ambitions a bit for the better during that glory time when he was chipping in with ideas for songs and lyrics.
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Post by chron on Feb 20, 2022 22:27:50 GMT
Sorry to see Edmund leave us again. He had been doing so brilliantly since his return. It was brave of him to take on the megarate because it carried the risk of some of his favourite songs being critcised. I don't agree with him that people have been cruel. But perception is everything: if he feels it, he feels it. Feeling a bit responsible for Eddie's latest departure in the wake of the latest megarate results, I was wondering if things had got a bit needle-y this time around, which made me go and look again at some of the comments from the old one. Well, the exchanges from there quoted below seem to show that people felt more relaxed about what they could say and the way in which it could be said, were not worried about offending someone. The following is taken from near the start of the rundown, as people began to relish or fear the prospect of what was going to end up being propped up by I Saw It In The Mirror at the bottom of the pile: Nothing over-the-top there, just some engaging, 'tasty' exchanges. A forum loses a lot if back-and-forth like this has to be watered down.
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Post by chron on Feb 19, 2022 20:02:13 GMT
The elephant in the room here is that Agnetha’s voice is noticeably weaker than it was. Frida’s, on the other hand, hardly seems to have changed. [...] Agnetha is no longer able to steal the show. When they sing together, you hear Frida far more. In the old days, it was Agnetha. Frida's voice has survived in better shape full stop than Agnetha's, but the Voyage songs that showcase her in any case seem to fit her characteristic vocal styling(s) better than the songs Agnetha's been given fit her. Agnetha seems to have been saddled with the 'mini-drama' songs again (B&B must unaccountably be fond of the way age has affected that waver in her voice). I feel sorry for her, having to negotiate the sort of stodgy lines she'd likely never naturally come out with in Swedish, let alone a second language (pop lyrics aren't normal speech, but they have to have some semblance of real-world credibility about them, and the best are often casual but concentrated, like haikus): "I think it would be fair to say you look bewildered", "The reproach in her eyes is imagined" - we're not far off "Pieces of the fatted calf" territory. As I've said, the question of why she's tended to cop more of the 'story' songs in recent times could maybe do with its own thread.
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Post by chron on Feb 19, 2022 18:53:35 GMT
Indeed, it was me, who actually initiated it and chron , merely reacted to my remark (which I really made to make him react, I just couldn't help it It was a clumsy comeback, but I couldn't think of another way of trying to putting spin on 'at the top'. Clutching at the name of a dusty old fart who once worked a questionable profession like Albert Pierrepoint is a bit embarrassing.
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Post by chron on Feb 19, 2022 17:21:30 GMT
It does get somewhat tiresome when someone bashes certain songs continually and then dirty deletes their comments. I don't bash TWTIA continually (which is to say unbidden) , but naturally, when something like this poll comes up and it nearly wins the thing, some sort of allusion to my dislike might be expected. (No one seems to object to restatements of admiration for certain songs, so why should the negative version of same be treated differently?) In the past, here and on the old forum, I've tried to work out what it is about it that I don't like; the attempts have never been very successful, but at least this shows that I've tried to prevent my negative response from coming across as rude or gratuitous. I'd also take issue with deleting 'dirtily'. The one large-ish reply I got rid of here was removed because it seemed waffly and incoherent and was dragging things off point. I can't recall there being anything in it that might've triggered Edmund to consider leaving; as I've said, I think it's the flip 'gallows' quip (which Michal practically invited; he mentioned TWTIA before I did!) that caused this.
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Post by chron on Feb 19, 2022 16:40:39 GMT
I think it's probably due to one of my comments, sadly enough, most probably the scaffold one. There was another comment I posted but I deleted it (not for reasons of possible offence, although I can't discount that Genius/Edmund read it and saw something in it he didn't like). Most of you accept my inability to get on with The Winner Takes It All; it's become a bit of an in-joke with some (Michal, for example, who practically teed-me up for the response above), which says a lot about their tolerance and generosity, and which warms my heart. I like to think I'm indulged this 'quirk' partly because I've made clear my admiration and enthusiasm for other ABBA material (I'll lead the charge over the top all day, everyday for Hole In Your Soul, for example, and not just here). I'm pro-ABBA, not anti; specifically disliking one of their most renowned tracks doesn't make you anti the group. I hope Edmund might come back again, as he's done before, but as Joe suggests he's going to have to try and grow a thicker skin; the back-and-forth in this forum is restrained and respectful compared to some others. I hope once he's reflected on it, he'll come to feel that the positive experiences he's had on here easily outweigh the odd negative one.
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