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THEY danced, they jived, they had the time of their lives. The stellar cast of Mamma Mia! appear to have a rollicking good time on-screen as they sing and dance their way through a catalogue of Abba numbers. As the phenomenally successful musical bursts on to the silver screen, it will reignite Abbamania. But what is it about this slightly naff Swedish group that makes their music so universally compelling?
With the exception of the Beatles, Abba are the best-selling band of all time, having shifted some 350 million records. The band were catapulted to international fame when they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, back in the days when it had credibility. In their later career, they were dubbed "Sweden's greatest export, bigger than Volvo".
Christopher Wiley, lecturer in popular music and culture at City University in London, has spent years contemplating their appeal. "It's the catchiness of the songs and the eclecticism. They had the seventies commercial pop but they also had Anglian music in Fernando; I Dreamed a Dream is sort of Grecian; Andante Andante is Italian, so they've got various styles. There was also the visual appeal; they had all sorts of gimmicks, such as dressing the conductor up as Napoleon during Waterloo, and then . . . those costumes."
The fact that the band members were easy on the eye, particularly the glamorous Agnetha, was also an advantage, but essentially it was all about the music. "Vocally, the girls are very well trained, " confirms Wiley. "The songs are demanding and if you listen to interviews of people who worked on the Abbamania album, they all said it's difficult music because the harmonies are hard to learn. It's quite classical in the way it's written out and the kind of harmonies are not influenced by 1960s British music, but more indebted to the way that chords progressed in nineteenthcentury classical music."
Talent aside, Wiley believes much of their success was down to some very shrewd decisionmaking in the early days. "What is...