ABBA FUNDAMENTALISM

Say what you will about Björn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha. Just be prepared for the consequences, writes Steve Dow.

In the critically lauded new animated film Persepolis, an Iranian girl oppressed during the Islamic Revolution finds the inspiration of western freedoms through bootleg ABBA tapes.

Which is funny, when you consider hardcore ABBA fans such as myself are fundamentalists who will brook no criticism. We’re the indoctrinated ’70s fans whose childhood soundtrack was Arrival.

Like a sleeper cell waiting to regroup at the prophet’s call, we would discreetly track down ABBA cassette tapes in the bargain bins of service stations in the 1980s.
Finally, our messiah, Muriel Heslop, emerged in 1994. Shut away in her Porpoise Spit bedroom listening to ‘Dancing Queen’, the star of the film Muriel’s Wedding inspired the rebirth of ABBA.

Now we can safely declare a fatwa on anyone who hates 'Fernando'.

In 2008, the Meryl Streep-Pierce Brosnan musical film Mamma Mia! is too much for Neil McCormick, a writer with London’s Telegraph newspaper: “I hated ABBA first time around, and I hate them even more now, when the flattening effect of nostalgia has lent a spurious retro-credibility to their formulaic Euro drivel.”

The full fuselage of the ABBA theocracy was unleashed upon McCormick. “Obviously a darkened soul such as yourself [sic] is unable to grasp the light and message of love that ABBA brought to this world,” fumed one blogger.

“You are just a incompetent,” railed another. “You’re an ignorant!” intoned a third, while another squealed: “Is anyone else heartily sick of the laughs about ABBA’s costumes?”

The ABBA Army’s silver sparkling platform boots were amassing on the horizon.

In Australia, the fan website ABBAMAIL called McCormick an “arsehole” and urged readers to complain to his editor.

McCormick followed up with a blog declaring “war”, sobbing about the “diatribe of abuse and disdain” of ABBA fans, and revealing the story of his little sister, Louise.

At age nine, young Louise would get up every morning, put Arrival on the turntable and – as her big brother says, there is no easy way to explain this – sit in a chair and bounce backwards and forwards.

As I read his blog, the memories flooded back. My primary school; I must have been eight. Two girls – both brunettes – wanted to mime The Best of ABBA. The girls wanted me to be Benny. It would be several years before I’d sprout hairs anywhere, but I was up for it. I even painted a cardboard piano with gusto. Spot the homosexual.

So how do you spot an ABBA acolyte? Well, he’s the one who can give you chapter and verse on how Agnetha dated a mentally unbalanced forklift driver – an obsessive ABBA fan, who’d have thought? – or that Frida was the illegitimate daughter of a Nazi soldier and a Norwegian farm girl.

He will tell you the one true ABBA marriage lasts until this day – that of Benny and Bjorn. Their 1990s musical Kristina fran Duvemala will surely hit Broadway soon. Just as soon as the boys can work in a War on Terror angle.

Steve Dow is a Sydney journalist. www.stevedow.com.au 

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