ep // ABBA-Esque
There's that line in Sliding Doors where
John Hanna turns to Gwyneth Paltrow on a Tube and suggests that
we are born knowing all the lyrics to The Beatles back catalogue.
I'm sure that would have applied to me had my parents listened to
The Beatles; instead they listened to ABBA. Time was when my father
would give my mother an ABBA LP each Christmas and I seem to recall
their music being played a great deal in our house while I was growing
up.
Consequently I wasn't apprehensive about Erasure
covering four ABBA tracks for an EP in the wake of the success of
Chorus and its singles when I saw Simon Bates 'reveal'
the duo would be doing this in the Daily Mirror. I suspect
my parents were a little worried though. I'd played them the live
version of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell
covering ABBA's 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' (from The Two Ring Circus)
and they hadn't been impressed.
ABBA-esque turned out to be Erasure's only
number one UK single. Its success was slated at the time by Swedish
popstar Haddaway, whose 'I Miss You' was kept from the top spot
by ABBA-esque. His argument centred around ABBA-esque
being a novelty EP of cover versions. A few weeks later, Björn
Again, a successful ABBA tribute act, released Erasure-esque,
an EP of Erasure covers performed in an ABBA style. We'll never
know if Erasure kicked off the ABBA revival that started in earnest
in 1992, but it would be nice to think that they did.
Mostly because of its video, where Vince and Andy
recreated the promo for ABBA's 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' (both camping
it up in drag), it's easy to see ABBA-esque as all being
about 'Take A Chance On Me'. It's a fun track, certainly, the sound
of a duo content to make an easy - and ultimately very successful
- pop track. Sometimes I wish they hadn't decided to embellish the
track with MC Kinky's ragga-style rap in the middle, but this was
1992 and bands did that back then. Vince was very obviously in his
analogue period at the time of Chorus and ABBA-esque,
and 'Take A Chance On Me' is stocked full of odd sounds - not odd
sounds for electronic music generally, but odd sounds to hear on
a pop record in 1992. The rhythm is constantly shifting, dense with
restless bubbling layers. But fundamentally it's a great track to
joyously sing along to.
I've always thought that ABBA-esque would
have stayed at number one longer if Radio 1 had played 'Take A Chance
On Me'; instead they always played the first track on the EP, 'Lay
All Your Love On Me' whereas ITV's Chart Show always played
the video for 'Take A Chance On Me'. It's not to say that the latter
is a better track, it's just that it's somewhat more instant. 'Lay
All Your Love On Me' has more quirky sounds, with a percussion track
that sounds like it was borrowed from Depeche Mode's
'Nodisco' from eleven years earlier; that makes this take on an
ABBA classic somewhat circular in the career of Vince Clarke, routing
his synth palette right back to his first release, and it has a
dark edge as a result. Utterly logically, the video has Andy wearing
a gold lamé suit and riding a motorbike through a forest
to awake a fairytale princess from her sleep.
'S.O.S.', from memory, had its video shown on the
Chart Show just once. It depicts a tortured Andy whirling
round an apartment evidently mourning the departure of a loved one.
It is my favourite ABBA-esque track alongside 'Voulez Vous', principally
because it didn't get so much exposure, and also because I wasn't
familiar with it at all from my parents' record collection. It's
an understated, fragile ballad, where Vince's accompaniment should
be slower but isn't, pulsing away with a dominating bass line to
complement Andy's anguished vocal.
'Voulez Vous' is perfectly manic, instantly familiar
from the original but here sprayed with a darker, slightly malevolent
atmosphere; the sound of machines taking over the discotheque, Vince's
synths have rarely sounded so dangerous, especially during the extended
instrumental section where they sound like they're about to go completely
out of control. I love it. The video had Vince and Andy spinning
around on a movie camera podium as if they were on a roller-coaster,
which seemed sort of apt given the wild way the synths seem to take
over.
ABBA-esque was produced by Dave Bascombe,
who had mixed the previous year's Chorus album.
A few weeks after ABBA-esque left the UK
top-spot, an official release of the ERAS4 club promo appeared
on 12" and CD, bearing the more common L12" and LCD catalogue
codes. If memory serves, the limited remixes were released officially
to prevent the ERAS4 12" promo changing hands for
ridiculous sums of money, and they definitely appeared sometime
after the main EP was released, though I couldn't confirm that when
I looked on the web to write this.
Remixes come from label-mates Fortran 5,
DMC producer Philip Kelsey (who also remixed Erasure's 'Breath Of
Life' and 'Who Needs Love (Like That)' for it's Pop! re-release)
and also Throbbing Gristle backbone Chris
Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti (Chris
& Cosey).
Speaking of Throbbing Gristle, Fortran 5 drop in
vocal snatches of Genesis P. Orridge lewdly intoning
the phrase 'soiled panties / white panties' (from 'Persuasion')
on their pulsing mix of 'Lay All Your Love On Me', replete with
beautiful acid burbling. GPO and Andy Bell 'duetting' might sound
like a far-fetched notion, but it works pretty well on this quirky
acid house reworking. Lots of analogue percussion sounds (possibly
from the original; I can't tell) and a malevolent pitch-shifted
string sample further embellish David Baker and
Simon Leonard's take on the lead track from ABBA-esque.
(As an aside, Fortran 5 sampled Australian ABBA fans talking about
their love of the Swedish band from a documentary for the opening
track on their 1993 album Bad Head Park.)
Fortran 5 also provide the Brain Stem Death Test
mix of 'Voulez Vous', which uses most of the original's chorus and
some of the synths, but hitches them to a sped-up hip-hop break,
lots of electric guitar snatches (including the bleak opening passage
to Sonic Youth's 'Green Light' from Evol).
A sample of Sonic Youth's sublime 'Shadow Of A Doubt', also from
Evol, also appears in the background. (Clearly either Baker
/ Leonard were fans of this album, or it was the only Sonic Youth
album they owned.) I hated guitars at the time, but loved this frenetic
rework, and still do.
Kelsey's thirteen-minute re-imagining of 'Take A
Chance On Me' never seems to get boring, despite its long-form running
time. 1992 was a time when the idea of 'trance' music was still
reasonably amorphous, before acts like BT and others popularised
this sub-genre of dance via the Perfecto Fluoro label, and accordingly
Kelsey's mix (which, while not especially formulaic, has the same
characteristics as the other mixes of his that I've heard) is deep
and absorbing. The immersive quality comes through the way the track
takes a good while to build, breakdown and then build again. Little
snatches of original aspects of the Erasure version creep in (as
does, alas, all of MC Kinky's rap), but mostly this is an urgent,
throbbing dense beast of a dance music revision.
Chris & Cosey's version of 'S.O.S.' is absolutely
superb; of all the mixes on the release, it is the one that most
closely resembles the original track. It's still undeniably a 'pop'
track, but under their control Vince's synths take on a yet deeper
hue, and the whole piece has an echoing, charming quality. Though
not quite an instrumental dub of the Erasure original, it nevertheless
has that sort of quality, revealing lots of previously hidden angles
in the regular release. When Andy's vocal kicks in – retained,
faithfully, in all its fragile beauty – it is processed to
sound flat and distant. Just as I love the Erasure original of this
track, I really love the Chris & Cosey remix too.
7"/12"/c/cd:
1. Lay All Your Love On Me
2. S.O.S.
3. Take A Chance On Me
4. Voulez Vous
l12"/lcd:
1. Voulez Vous (Brain Stem Death Test Mix)
2. Lay All Your Love On Me (No Panties Mix)
3. Take A Chance On Me (Take A Trance On Me Mix)
4. S.O.S. (Perimeter Mix)
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