ABBA's earlier songs

What classes as an 'earlier song'? I'll assume you mean the first two albums.

Ring Ring is full of songs of... mixed quality, lol. Ring Ring is great, and Disillusion is good too, and there are several 'decent' songs on there like HIYB, Love Isn't Easy and ATAT.

Waterloo there are a lot more songs I really like. As well as the title track of course, there's Honey Honey, Hasta Mañana, GSYML and DWTMSGO. I even quite like King Kong Song despite it not being that good objectively lol.

I love My Mama Said. Yes, it has a funky feel. Jazzy funk with brilliant baseline. I quite like the lyrics. It's my favourite early ABBA song. When we did polls for our favourite ABBA songs it was just outside my Top 10.

I am not a huge fan of most of the early songs. Of the Eurovision songs I prefer Ring Ring to Waterloo.

On the Ring Ring album I like Nina Pretty Ballerina and Another Town, Another Train. On Waterloo, Hasta Manana and Honey Honey.

I think that I've Been Waiting For You was a squandered opportunity - especially in the UK/Ireland and European territories. I think it would have have been a big hit, had it been an A-side at the time. As for hearing it and Gonna Sing You My Lovesong performed with their mature voices... what a fab idea! I think GSYML in particular could be recast as a smokey torch song. Basically, we need the ABBAtars to steal Kylie's "anti-tour" idea and do a set of shows with deeper cuts like these, maybe reimagined. 

Well, we'll never know. I can understand how record companies went with So Long. It was Glam Rock and 1974 was peak Glam Rock.

I do think the record labels got it wrong with Ring Ring (I prefer this to Honey Honey, actually). But we have solid evidence of Honey Honey being a Top 10 UK hit - by a terrible act at the time of Ring Ring's release.

Honey Honey by ABBA only really did well in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A UK/Ireland release could have given it two extra countries where it was Top 10.

I tend to think the opposite - that if Honey Honey had been released in the UK as follow-up to Waterloo, it would have bombed. ABBA, as a non-Anglosphere act, were allowed their one novelty Eurovision hit and kindly expected to return to Sweden and never bother our shores again. Honey Honey, as a two-word title with the same word repeated, was hardly a million miles from Ring Ring so I don’t think the song itself would have made the slightest bit of difference. Sweet Dreams (or anyone except ABBA, as long as they were British or from the Anglosphere) could have had a hit with it.

Same probably goes for I’ve Been Waiting For You or any others around that time. Quite how and why SOS managed to turn things around is perhaps because it was their first break-up song to be a single. Ooh, get ABBA, they can do serious. Plus after more than a year in the wilderness, they had proved that they had staying power. They weren’t going to give up as perhaps the UK media expected them to.

I honestly think though that be it Ring Ring, Honey Honey or any other song at that time, the result would have been the same. The song wasn’t the problem, but who was singing it (and more importantly where they were from).

SOS was a break-up song but hardly similar to a heavy break up song like The Winner Takes it All or even Knowing Me Knowing You. It was uptempo and poppy in the main. A more serious song from that time - I'm Still Waiting For You wasn't released in many countries. Perhaps because it was too mature and lacking upbeat melody for ABBA's record companies


ABBA did persist. After 3 flop singles in the UK they were reduced to appearing on Seaside Special in the UK. That seemed to have done the trick.

It's been pointed out that ABBA's lack of success after Waterloo is mainly from a British perspective. There's a lot of truth in that. But remember in several countries SOS was their first #1 since Waterloo and first at all in Australia and NZ.


SOS has a quality that Ring Ring, Honey, Honey, I've Been Waiting for You simply don't have. As good as those songs are.