Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed

I assume that somewhere on the guided ‘Piers and Queers’ walking tour of Brighton, the participants are enjoined to regard, in awe, the Dome — the venue at which Abba, on 6 April 1974, won the Eurovision Song Contest, thus both launching themselves as a wildly successful band and establishing the town (as it was then) as a mecca (probably the wrong choice of word there) for the UK’s swiftly growing gay community. Hitherto it had been a rather frowsy, Tory-voting seaside resort, best known for dirty weekends and petty villains. The Swedes won with ‘Waterloo’, of course, which may have provided our nation with some much-needed succour. A remembrance of good things past. We were the sick man of Europe, with a minority government, an inflation rate of 16 per cent, seemingly everybody on strike and with recent baleful memories of eating our tea by candlelight. Abba, meanwhile, were a shock to the Eurovision system, which was wholly unused to a perky, competent boogie containing an elongated historical metaphor, and the song is often regarded as the best-ever winner of that incalculably inane competition. People often complain that there are no good songs on Eurovision these days, which is to forget the point that there never, ever were. In truth, the music was probably even worse in the 1960s and 1970s: you would have to search long and hard to find a song as witless and vapid as ‘All Kinds of Everything’, which won the thing for Dana in 1970, for example. No British artist who cared about his cred would go anywhere near the thing, so it was left to the naffest of the naff — the Saturday night conservative MOR crowd of Cliff, Olivia Neutron Bomb and Lulu (remember ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’? Gawd help us). And because the contest was, as I’ve mentioned, staggeringly inane, we usually did okay.