British guitarist analyses ABBA live in 1979!

hello Phil here from wings of pegasus and welcome to another analysis video if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe on the agenda tonight we're going to be taking a look at the much requested ABBA back in 1979 performing gimme gimme gimme so let's get these four up on screen to see how they get on [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm just gonna jump in here while we get into a bit of choreography because ever were one of those bands that had the mastery of the hardest department that I always refer to as in the music industry and as an artist and musician writing great songs and they just wrote song after song after song there was just hit after hit after hit because of the appreciation that they all had individually as musicians but also obviously Benny and be honest songwriters together having such an affinity for melody and putting everything together musically also we've got these two great singers at the front of the stage who are not only singers but have such a great ear for melody themselves so it means that when they'd gather around the piano they would often come up with lines as a four-piece vocally that would then work together some of those lines would be hooks there could be instrumental hooks played on the piano or the guitar others would be vocal hooks and vocal phrases at the throw in there and you've got underlying progressions that Benny and Beyond will throw in there so there is so much to it but they just had it down to an arm just taking this chorus as an example because there's so much going on with the first two or three bars we've got just the lead vocal in their being harmonized with and then the backing harmonies come in and supply that alternative under layer to the lead vocal and then by the end of the chorus just before the turnaround we get a little riff a little hook right at the end and that was in the last bar and then the whole process starts again so this course is just the same section repeated but there's so much changing all the time then once you've heard it once through you're ready to hear it again and you want to hear these hooks and the little line that's right at the end of every phrase of that chorus at the end of the eighth bar of every course you'll get that cool little hook and then it'll just reset and repeat you can have this view about every abba composition because there is always so much going on but it always stems from a simplistic memorable melody and it's something that when you hear a song just once you can remember the course and you'll be singing it back in your head and when you rewind back to the beginning the beauty about these kind of compositions with Abba is that there's so much depth and complexity to the arrangement and through the composition that is just hiding underneath the simplicity of the melody and this is when you rewind it back to the beginning and you hear it for a second time you start to notice the hooks then you listen again and you start to notice all the harmonies in there you listen again you can hear the piano you can hear the guitar you can hear the riffs going on so there is so much depth to it and this is the art form of writing a hit this sounds on the surface so simplistic and so easy but then break it down musically and we've got some seriously complex things going on with the timing of all of the riffs with the Harmony lines of course you've got to have technically advanced singers and technically able singers in order to sing harmony lines like I mentioned before fortunately they've got these two ladies at the front of the stage who are such great singers technically and singing in harmony with each other also being able to control their voices vibrato you name it they've got a handle on it just putting the spotlight on Agneta when I'm talking about that vocal control that she has at two minutes and four seconds the way that she holds onto that note and just applies for broto at the end of the line but it is so controlled and it's a slow wide vibrato that just gets that note to sing and by adding it to the end of the vocal phrase and the vocal line it means that the line is interesting the whole way through because she's bang on pitch too start with and then after holding that note straight just applying that vibrato just sells it and it is such a great sound just agni at his voice . when she's got such control you could listen to that kind of thing all day not to take anything away from Freda because in this live version of the song they're both singing the main vocal that main melody line in the chorus but they can mix their voices so well it just sounds like one uniform voice so Agni Etta and Freda have got such control that they can not only match each other pitch wise sing in harmony with each other as well if required but nail it dead-on pitch and adjust their tone so that those two voices blend into one and are separate from the backing harmonies that we've got going on because we have got backing singers here as well of course on YouTube there are a lot of ABBA videos that are overdubbed with the recorded version on it and obviously a lot of music videos as well but we're definitely looking at a fully live video here which you can tell because of the push tempo we've got going on and this is something that I do mention in other videos about the drums just being pushed and being a little bit faster than the original recorded version and it certainly is here to the point where we've got a very dramatic decrease in tempo into the verses and this is obviously rehearsed and something that they've worked on because they're all slowing down at the same rate but I think maybe when the tempo starts to speed up it's just on that borderline of being a little bit too fast but they all handle it so well this is the thing about ABBA playing live when we analyze it we've effectively got two lead singers at the front of the stage a pianist and a guitarist so getting the same sound as the records and how produced they were would be impossible for the four of them to achieve and I know that they could strip things back and do a performance that way they've all got the ability to sing and harmonize with each other but replicating those release records would certainly be a full band set up that would be required and that's exactly what we've got here we've got so many musicians that put in all of those production elements that you got on the records so a great live performance around here and Abba were perfectionists in the studio to get that sound exactly ripe they'd often spend five days mixing one track and this is often something that happens it's good to go back to a track the next day to have fresh ears so that you can hear the mix without being oversaturated with the sound because that can happen with mixing anyone who's into the production will know what I'm talking about at the end of the video we'll get a little bit into the history but let's get back into this performance [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and there we have it I think a burr as a band were the perfect mix because sometimes you have songwriters who never really make it into the spotlight because they write for other artists and then those artists become very successful but ever had great songwriters in there as a four-piece because they would all get together and exchange ideas but I'm sure these songwriters are always looking for great vocalists in order to put their ideas in front of people but really sell the ideas as they were thinking of them you always imagined a great vocalist in your head when you're writing a song and that's exactly what Bo Han Benny had these two women at the front of the stage that has such great vocal ability like I said just the perfect mix of vocal ability songwriting ability and technical ability at instruments because they had to be able to play an instrument and I'm talking about the composer's here for the most part Bjorn and Benny in order to get the ideas down and to arrange them exactly how they were hearing it all in their head and back in the 70s and the 60s and the 50s you had to be able to play an instrument to write music and compose those that didn't play an instrument would have to go to somebody who did and try and sing the notes and find out what chords they're imagining in their head more often than not the person who played the instrument would come up with the chord variations and the root cause for whatever the singers singing and whatever the cause played underneath will then give a slightly different sound to the melody that the singer might be singing and the singer might think oh yeah that's an interesting take on what I was imagining in my head so I'll use that chord so it's something that nowadays you can get computers that give you all the chords so just to get into a bit of the background behind Abba I'm sure you guys already know a lot of this information but starting with Benny and Beyond because they in separate bands Benny was age 18 when he was in the band called hip stars and they were referred to as the Swedish Beatles so they were very popular and Beyond was also in a band at the same time and they were called the hootenanny singers so because they were playing in the same circles and they're playing the same venues they bumped into each other and decided to start writing songs together so it just so happened that there's this thing called Eurovision which I'm not sure people outside Europe really get but it's like a competition for songs and all the nations in Europe competes have the best song but anyway Benny had written a song for the Swedish entry for Eurovision but unfortunately it wasn't taken on but being involved with that process is when he first bumped into Frieda but it was only a brief meeting they didn't get together properly at that point so Beyond and Benny's bands went their separate ways and broke up so then Bjorn and Benny got together and started to record some of these songs and ideas that they had been working on together just shifting the focus to agnya tur because by the age of 18 she had already had a number one in the Swedish charts and she was writing and performing her own material which in itself was a rare thing for a female artist to be doing not only in Sweden but across the whole music industry she had multiple charting singles and during a TV special that was being filmed she bumped into Berlin for the first time and they got on famously well and in 1969 when this was they started their relationship at that time that was the same year that Frieda bumped into Benny at first of all a festival called melody festival but they bumped into each other again a few weeks later at another concert and that's where they started their relationship together in 1970 they decided to go on holiday as a four and this turned into their first live performance I think it started out as them singing on the beach and then somehow turned into them performing for UN soldiers who were based in Cyprus which is where they went at that time and apparently it didn't go down particularly well so they thought maybe it wasn't a good idea for all four of them to sing together but they still recorded together in the studio and of course Bjorn and Benny kept on writing but then Benny and Bjorn had a bit of a breakthrough because one of their Swedish spoken songs that they had written got to number one in the Swedish charts so they kept on writing and in 1972 they wrote she's my kind of girl and that was a top ten hit in Japan so they started to think maybe we're onto something here so in 1972 they wrote people need love and this was the first song that they recorded all together and that did really well got to number 17 in the Swedish chants so they started to think that maybe we're not as bad as we thought initially at performing together the other thing about that song is that it charted in the USA but unfortunately the label that distributed it at the time was playboy records which wasn't a big label so the amount of copies that they wanted to distribute they couldn't so they just couldn't get the volume of sales that they wanted because they literally couldn't distribute the amount that people wanted to buy 1973 is when they decided on the band name ABBA and as you probably all know it's just each letter of their first names put together what you might not know is that ABBA in the 70s was a very popular fish canning company in Sweden but it wasn't known around the world so because they owned that trademark Abba ABBA the band had to go to the fish canning company and try and get the rights from them to use that as a band name and this is how things used to happen back in the day they just went to the fish canning company and asked them can we use ABBA as our band name they said okay as long as you don't bring any embarrassment to our product then it's fine and that was it there wasn't any contracts or anything they just said okay go for it so they were then known as Abba from 1973 onwards just a bit of trivia about the logo as well because I'm sure you all know it we're the first B is back to front so it looks like it's a mirror image halfway down the logo and this is Wolfgang Heinemann's who was taking pictures of them whilst they were holding letters of the band and it was supposed to spell out Abba but Benny had his round the wrong way and he was holding the B so when Wolfgang then developed these photos he could see a ver with that B round the wrong way so he then came up with this as a proposal for the band logo in 1974 is when their big breakthrough came they performed Waterloo at the Eurovision Song Contest and they won the contest for that year and they performed the song in English which meant that it went to number one in the UK it was a massive hit all across Europe and it got to number six in the USA so due to this success they then went on tour around Europe and unfortunately during the first half of this tour they actually had to cancel shows because they had sold enough tickets so they were a bit downhearted they continued the tour and the second half of the tour was the exact opposite because that took them back through Scandinavia where they had a massive support for every show and I think beyond said at a later date that's they were trying to be too glam because that's just was what the music industry was going through at that time so during 1975 and 1976 they were releasing such hits as SOS and Mamma Mia also Fernando was released with the greatest hits album in 1976 and that song in itself was a massive hit as well as the greatest hits album just a bit of trivia about Chiquitita that was donated to UNICEF in terms of the copyrights for that song so anytime that that is played or downloaded the money goes to UNICEF obviously I'm not gonna have time to go through every Abba hit because there's too many of them but fast forwarding to 1979 this is when Agni otter and beyond unfortunately divorced they said that it wouldn't affect anything though and it didn't they kept releasing hit after hit having massive success in 1981 was when beyond remarried and it was also the same year that Benny and Freda mentioned that they were filing for divorce as well and by 1982 1983 they were going in different directions obviously from a personal perspective it is so difficult to have four people in a band who used to be married and now are separated and keeping the personal and professional side of the relationship totally separate is definitely going to be something that would have been awkward so around this time they were going their own separate ways and by 1986 I think that was the year that was their last real performance together and they hadn't actually been together for about two years maybe over two years before 1986 so they really had gone their own separate ways by that time just to finish with Abbott totally dominated the UK charts when they were releasing albums because they had eight consecutive number-one albums in our charts they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 there's a movie in 2008 called Mamma Mia that featured all of their songs and that soundtrack went to number one in the US charts they've sold over 385 million records I think that's actually quite a conservative estimate probably a lot more than that but beyond has also mentioned that in 2020 there will be five new ABBA songs and that's all part of a digital entertainment experience that he's involved with at the moment so that'll be interesting to see what happens we those compositions and that's experience as a whole but it's great to look back and be able to experience this performance firsthand from 1979 with all of the band involved in order to get that sound that you got from the record but in a live setting so thank you guys for all of the requests to take a look at ab a-- and keep all of your suggestions coming in the comment section below if you did enjoy this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe and I'll see you guys at the next one rock

Channel: Wings of Pegasus

Views: 142,567

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Keywords: abba, abba live, abba gimme, abba gimme gimme gimme, abba gimme gimme gimme live, abba songs, abba live wembley, abba live wembley 1979 dvd, abba live wembley 1979, wings of pegasus, wingsofpegasus, british guitarist reacts, british guitarist analysis, british guitarist analyses, abba band

Id: ujfE02cQdXk

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020