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I have put the following in Announcements. As I know members access the forum differently and not necessarily in recent threads / posts, and as I know this thread is still a go-to place, I am posting it here too.

Update to Rules

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Just tried to search on eBay for the Arrival box, but couldn’t see anything. On Discogs, there are three for sale starting at £352. Very nice and all that, but no where near worth so much. The Arrival and The Album ones were probably the best. Nice colours and proper heavyweight vinyl. The ones since have been standard weight/thickness.

It’s the prices of the older sets now that keep me sucked into it. I wouldn’t sell my Arrival box but I’m glad I got it when it was released.

Going back to the different renditions of the Polar artwork…

As Hometime said, the large ampersand, font and colours do look good.



The 1990s version of the CD, used for two editions of it, has a rather dodgy ABBA logo and removes the largest photo only to replace it with a brown surround. On the plus side it does at least keep the original font of the album title.



It will depend on tastes (and clearly Adam likes it) but to me the 2001 is all wrong. It does at least restore the largest photo and it’s a much smaller (and correct) ABBA logo, but the colours are wrong and the original font is completely lost. I think, if they had to include the ABBA logo, at least keep the font for the album title.

(And same for the ABBA album. As Hometime pointed out, the 2001 is perhaps an improvement on Waterloo as the original [non-UK] unnecessarily had the ABBA name no larger than those of the members)


(This is actually the rare 2001 vinyl that Adam mentioned).

The Ring Ring video (filmed on the same 1974 day as that for Waterloo) has been remastered in HD, up to 4K.



(This video originally used the 1974 remix, so they’ve obviously changed it. Disappointing that they’re re-writing history).

So that’s five albums you had to buy to get all of the tracks then, Michel? That’s some commitment and hard work!

As you hint at, it’s not really appreciated by “the younger generation” just how difficult it was to get hold of music that wasn’t readily available. If you heard an old track you liked on the radio, you’d have to know what it was called, but even then it was some effort to track down the record it appeared on.

Even with Ring Ring in the bag thanks to the fan club, the three early b-sides were still hard to find until the 1990s. Whilst it’s good that it’s much easier now, I personally think it’s made us appreciate music much less. Don’t like that song after 10 seconds? No problem, didn’t pay for it so onto something else…

You’re right. That was a bit snowflake of me. I’m way too old for that!

This does make me wonder just how widely the album was available in the UK. Obviously it’s an import and therefore not an official UK release, but perhaps it was available in many HMV stores at the time. For some reason we used WHSmith or Boots for record purchases, and were in no danger of seeing it there!

I do remember that ABBA Magazine offer well. Although I was in the fan club, I don’t remember receiving much from them.* We joined in 1979 and maybe didn’t renew our memberships. Thankfully the Magazine publicised the offer. It was just so exciting learning of an ABBA album we never knew existed. So Waterloo wasn’t the first album! Probably took a month or so for it to arrive, and I don’t think we’d ever ordered an album through mail order before, so it was a relief when it arrived undamaged with all these “new” ABBA songs on.

* Edit. Oh. Johnny’s link has “By providing four stamped addressed envelopes to the club each year members were entitled to receive quarterly newsletters containing group updates, messages from the individual group members and the chance to purchase exclusive club merchandise such as scarves, T shirts, silver jewellery, badges, photographs and posters. Members were also privileged to have the opportunity of purchasing 1979 World Tour tickets through the club for two nights at Wembley Arena prior to tickets going on general release.”

Oops. We never sent the stamped addressed envelopes, so that explains why we never received anything else after the welcome packs!

Not sure I’m keen on the sentence “we have a lot of fun planned ahead”, justabba. “Fun” could mean something much less than a serious anthology. We’ll see. The Waterloo half-speed, box and picture discs are a dead-cert for next year now that Ring Ring has been announced, but anything else is speculation for now. It had better not be a damp squib though!

I often wonder what I’d think of ABBA’s albums if I’d first heard them much later. As it was, I heard most of ABBA’s output (aside from a few early b-sides that weren’t released in the UK) between the ages of 6 and 11 (late 1977 to late 1982). With Ring Ring I would have been 8 or 9 (though the four Greatest Hits tracks were two years earlier), and at that age I pretty much liked anything I heard. My brother’s musical tastes were a very strong influence in our household so anything he liked I tended to like too.

I therefore find it hard to criticise Ring Ring. I know most people don’t like I Saw It In The Mirror, but I see the merits even in that. I like Frida and Agnetha‘s vocals. They come in and steal it, and I generally like the tracks where they do that, despite not being the leads (Two For The Price of One is another example, and another song I like).

I like the imagery of Me and Bobby and Bobby’s Brother. That’s a fun track. Perhaps my least favourite is People Need Love, but that might be over-familiarity.

The reason given at the time was because only five performances were in the SVT archives (did they only show five originally?). They clearly couldn’t be bothered to search for other sources. As far as I know the audio for all nine is available to Universal. Four appeared on ABBA Live and two in the 1994 4-CD set, leaving Knowing Me Knowing You, Summer Night City and Thank You For The Music unreleased.

I’d definitely like to see all nine released.

I do wonder if something like this (an anthology) might be in the pipeline. If they were just going to mark the anniversary with vinyl re-releases, they could have left last year’s album picture discs (and even 2020’s coloured vinyl album box) until next year. The fact that both of those options have already been used up makes me think there must be something special planned?

I think I may once have seen the albums on vinyl using the 2001 artwork, though I’m not sure that was even in the UK. It was a brief issue, at a time when interest in vinyl was at its lowest point. All issues since have used the original artwork for all albums (albeit mostly dodgy scans).

I don’t think they’ll ever reissue the CDs (other than in boxed sets, like last year’s), but if they did I’d like to see the original artwork. For Ring Ring they could get round it by adding a hype sticker with the ABBA logo, and perhaps remove the individual names from Waterloo. And restore the correct fonts for the tracklistings. All pie in the sky though as the emphasis is firmly back on vinyl.

Does it? Not sure I could agree with you there. The 2001 artwork has never been used for vinyl issues as far as I know, so I wouldn’t want them to start with this.

I’ve always liked the font they used for the titles of the original artwork. Plus they weren’t known as ABBA then so to place the 1976 ABBA logo onto a 1973 album has always jarred with me (and similar with Waterloo and ABBA).

The 2001 artwork was a vast improvement on the previous CD artwork, but that wasn’t too difficult. It worked at the time, but I find the standardisation of titles and tracklistings a bit boring now. Too much “one size fits all”. I get that younger fans that have only known the modern artwork might prefer it, but it’s nice to see the original font used for this. Especially the picture disc covers and coloured vinyl box.

Apparently Ian Cole says The Visitors half-speed etc will be with us by the end of the year. Not sure how he knows that or how accurate it is.

I just searched on Amazon but couldn’t see anything.

They really should have done The Visitors last year. That albums picture disc issue could have waited until 2024. 2026 does now seem the earliest. I’d like to think they might follow it up with Voyage.

Whilst I’m pretty certain I’ll get the Ring Ring releases (though I never bother with the half-speed albums, just the singles), I am questioning just how much more clutter I need round the house! I stopped buying DVDs a few years ago and similarly stopped CDs after Voyage. Haven’t bought a book for years. I don’t regret overdosing on Voyage vinyl (all 10 variants) but not sure I need much more physical media!