I’m ashamed that I used to think ABBA wasn’t cool 

One of the joys of listening to archive BBC interviews with pop stars is the chance to hear long-discarded hipster jargon served up in its original setting. Near the beginning of Radio 2’s ABBA at the BBC, marking 50 years since the group won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, a prime example was unearthed from the immediate aftermath of their success. ‘If you were one of the 500 million Eurovision viewers, you may be wondering which was more important in getting the song through to number one,’ said the host. ‘Was it the music or the way-out gear?’

I think we can safely conclude that it was the music, although the sight of Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog in spangled velvet can’t have hurt. As another interviewer reminds us, the name ABBA – composed from the initials of the two female singers, plus the main songwriters Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson – also belonged to a Swedish fish canning company, which was good-natured about sharing it. ‘They said “as long as you behave yourselves”,’ either Bjorn or Benny recalls. One of the trickier aspects of the show’s format – a mash-up of BBC interviews over the years studded with hit songs – is that often you aren’t entirely sure which member of ABBA is speaking, unless you’re lucky enough to catch a stray name as it zips by in conversation.

Still, what arises from the compilation is a sense of their deeply civilised nature: despite their well-documented emotional turmoil in the early 1980s, ABBA as a collective seem charming, intelligent, diplomatic and self-deprecating. It almost made me ashamed to hear Benny or Bjorn remark stoically, ‘There was a time, maybe in the beginning of the 1980s, when it wasn’t so cool to be saying you liked ABBA’ because I remember that period very well.