The opening line is the giveaway. I don’t wanna talk

The speed with which ABBA released ‘The Winner Takes It All’ was telling – just seven weeks between conception and release – suggesting that everything to do with the song had been part of a single sustained act of catharsis. And nowhere was that more apparent than in the lyrics themselves.

The opening line is the giveaway. I don’t wanna talk

When a song begins with those four words, you know the protagonist is going to do quite a lot of talking. About things we’ve gone through And now we know what she’s going to talk about. Even at the age of eleven, listening to the song for the first time in the car with my dad, I can dimly recall a sense that things were about to get messy.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 3,698

A park full of ex-punks spontaneously started dancing to the ABBA song

In 1997, when the Sex Pistols marked the twentieth anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks with a reunion show in Finsbury Park, they decided to walk on stage to ‘Dancing Queen’, the idea being that the song would come to an abrupt halt when the Pistols appeared, as if to remind people about the bland MOR dreck they blew away on their arrival. The problem was that, twenty years on, all the battle lines had long been erased. A park full of ex-punks spontaneously started dancing to the ABBA song.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 2,227