This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

It’s one of those great pub argument prompts isn’t it – which is the most influential band ever?

Someone is bound to lay The Beatles down early. It’s what I call the Citizen Kane play, after the Orson Welles movie which routinely topped those Best Ever lists until people discovered films with subtitles.

Someone else will make a left-field choice – probably The Velvet Underground or The Stooges – and before long you’ll have run through all the old favourites, from the Stones and Led Zep to the Sex Pistols and The Beach Boys. Some joker will mention Pink Floyd and get sent to the bar for the next round in disgrace (and don’t forget the crisps. Anything but salt and vinegar).

Each of those acts has its merits (though only one had Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico in the same room at the same time). But in the tap room of my imagination I always end up circling back to two acts, neither one of them British or American.

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First up, four German dudes who liked cycling and computers. Second, a Swedish quartet who, had it been possible, would have broken the internet on April 6, 1974 when they won the Eurovision Song Contest. Delivered in English by two glamorous female singers, their entry was an expertly-pitched pop banger that turned the travails of a well-known French general into a metaphor for doomed love.

So yes, it’s either Kraftwerk or ABBA for me.

Today it’s ABBA’s star which shines the brightest. The band’s rich musical legacy was reframed as a musical theatre extravaganza as long ago as 1999, when Mamma Mia! opened in London’s West End (April 6, as it happens). It ran there pretty much uninterrupted until 2020. By then there had also been a film version and a sequel, and in 2022 the band laid down another marker when ABBA Voyage opened in London.

In what’s known as a ‘virtual concert residency’, it uses motion capture and whizzy special effects to create avatars (or ABBA-tars as they’re known) of the band as they appeared in 1979. To date the show has grossed £200 million in ticket sales, much of the lucre handed over by new fans who weren’t born when the band split in 1982.

In 1999 I interviewed Swedish film director Lasse Hallström in London ahead of the release of The Cider House Rules, his adaptation of the John Irving novel. Sadly we only touched briefly on his time making videos for ABBA (he shot 30) and his first major directing gig, ABBA: The Movie, which followed the band on an Australian tour. Even then, his only significant recollection was that the budget allowed him to hire a helicopter for aerial shots.

How things have changed. Hallström went on to make My Life As A Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Chocolat, picking up eight Oscar nominations along the way and working with actors of the calibre of Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron and Juliette Binoche. Sit down with him now, however, and you would want to dive straight into his recollections of working with the other Fab Four.

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So our hunger for ABBA’s music only seems to increase year on year, which further burnishes the band’s legacy. In August, I saw 25-year-old singer-songwriter Declan McKenna performing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. He wears his voice-of-a-generation mantle lightly but it’s definitely there and in many ways it’s deserved. He’s also a huge ABBA fan – he’s been to see ABBA Voyage – and at the Edinburgh Playhouse that night he closed his set with an acoustic version of Slipping Through My Fingers, from the band’s sublime 1981 album The Visitors. I’d say the average age of the audience was around 19. Everyone knew the words and everyone sang along.

It’s clearly a good time, then, to publish a ground-breaking book about the band. Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall has done just that, using a decade’s worth of interviews with the band members to write The Book Of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover. The Herald’s Neil Mackay sat down for a chat with him and heard about how he brought the book together – and the world’s favourite band with it. You can read the piece here.

As The Love Continues

Still with music, it’s good to see three long-serving Scottish bands refusing to rest on their laurels and continuing to push their work in interesting directions.

First (but in no particular order) we have Arab Strap, who won a nomination in last week’s prestigious Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) awards for their most recent release, I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Any More. Second, Belle And Sebastian, whose singer and mainstay Stuart Murdoch has written a book of narrative non-fiction – could be a memoir, might be a novel. And finally comes the news that post-rock powerhouse Mogwai have completed their 11th studio album, The Bad Fire. Album number 10 won the SAY Award, you may remember, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.


There’s a single out now (Lion Rumpus) and because you can never be bored when there’s a list of future Mogwai song titles to read, let me tell you the new opus contains tracks called Pale Vegan Hip Pain, Fanzine Made Of Flesh and (my favourite) If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others. The Bad Fire is released on January 24 and Mogwai plays Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on February 23.

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And finally

It has been a busy spell for The Herald’s theatre critic Neil Cooper, travelling from Edinburgh to Glasgow and Perth to Cumbernauld. In the capital he took in Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’s classic drama A Streetcar Named Desire when it arrived for a run at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. At Glasgow’s Tron Theatre another revival, this time of No Love Songs, a hit last year for Dundee Rep before an equally well-received Fringe run. At Perth Theatre he watched a new work – Gabriel Quigley’s tale of four Beatles-daft girls who decamp to the shores of Loch Earn during the band’s brief 1964 tour of Scotland, hoping to catch sight of their idols. Finally, at Cumbernauld Theatre, Neil enjoyed Clare Prenton’s study of male friendship in Men Don’t Talk, presented as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.