In case the gold discs weren’t enough to remind Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of their productive Seventies, the Abba guys now have the ultimate pop accolade to add to their riches — a begging letter from Madonna requesting permission to use a bit of Gimme Gimme Gimme for her new single Hung Up. If, as seems likely, Hung Up enters the chart at No 1, then it is no bad thing for the guys that its release coincides with the appearance of a box containing everything Abba recorded.

Whether or not we need a box full of Abba, replete with two accompanying DVDs, is another matter. Lest we forget, three years and three albums elapsed before the golden era ushered in by S.O.S. and Dancing Queen. That takes in a lot of songs about boomerangs (Bang-a-Boomerang), giant apes (King Kong Song) and — in one startling instance — folk medleys.

Among those formative albums, however, lurk portents of what was to come. The sinuous pop of My Mama Said (from the album Waterloo) accidentally invents Goldfrapp 25 years too early. The Spectoresque overload of harmonies on Dance (While the Music Still Goes On) transforms a passable song into a great one and nailed the classic Abba sound for the first time.

That said, Abba didn’t make a truly great album until Voulez Vous in 1978. Listening to it now, though, it’s hard to fathom why shoulda-been hits such as Lovers (Live a Little Longer) and Kisses of Fire were passed over in favour of Björn’s underage sex parable Does your Mother Know.

In fact, anything with Björn singing on it tends to be rubbish. What he was thinking of in 1981 when he wrote Two for the Price of One — about a man who answers a small ad offering, um, two women instead of one — is anyone’s guess. By then, of course, Abba had given up any pretence that their private lives weren’t in utter disarray. The emotional turmoil that My Love My Life and Knowing Me, Knowing You hinted at was now a direct source of fuel on their final brace of albums, Super Trouper and The Visitors.

If The Winner Takes it All sounds like the stream-of-conscious gibbering of a man who has drunk far too much red wine, it’s because, according to the candid Björn, that’s exactly what it is. And in getting his ex-wife to sing lines like “Tell me does she kiss/Like I used to kiss you,” he also reveals himself to be some weird pop sadist.

In mitigation, tracks such as the dystopian Soldiers suggested he was going mad. Meanwhile, with a chorus that sounds like an army of Nazi oompa-loompas banging tin drums in a sulphurous sunset, the hypnotic Nordic folk of The Piper might be the strangest thing Abba ever recorded.

Then again, you could also say that about The Visitors. Pitched somewhere between Joy Division and Giorgio Moroder, the title track of Abba’s final album described the plight of a Russian dissident losing his mind while waiting for the knock at the door.

Tacked on to this final CD, Abba’s stark, superb swansong The Day Before You Came completes their bizarre eight-year journey from sequined Euro-glory to Bergmanesque shadow world. There was only one possible way to go from here: start hanging out with Tim Rice and write a musical in which the tactical high tension of a Cold War-era chess tournament could be used as a metaphor for failing relationships. Heaven knows where they got that idea from.

Polydor

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