ABBA: Against The Odds (Netflix) travels again 50-plus years to 1974, when Sweden first gave ABBA to the world. A band of two {couples}, Agnetha Fȁltskog and Björn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, ABBA represented their nation in the annual Eurovision Track Contest, gained it with “Waterloo,” and have been abruptly the greatest factor going on the world pop music stage. Directed by James Rogan, ABBA: Against The Odds is a manufacturing of the BBC, which as a broadcaster of the 2025 Eurovision Track Contest – and its championship spherical in Might – has an curiosity in supporting materials that showcases the competitors’s historical past. So if you wish to understand how Netherlands or Luxembourg or Greece voted in Eurovision 1974, it’s included in the archival footage used to create ABBA: Against All Odds.
The Gist: “It’s a damp squib – it’s going to finish. Cheesy, plastic.” Go away it to the snippy British music press of the early Seventies to place a damper on ABBA’s success, simply as they’d discovered it. Regardless of the haters, the quartet’s 24-point victory at Eurovision in ‘74 launched their onslaught on the market for deceptively easy, effervescent tunes that anybody might sing alongside to, and by 1976, ABBA had scored early radio hits with “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” and “Fernando,” and taken their aptitude for non gender-specific and outrageous flights of rayon, low-cut, or in any other case be-frilled outfits to media appearances all through Europe and Australia. “Dancing Queen” adopted – “Once we recorded [it,],” Agnetha Fȁltskog says of that basic in Against The Odds, “each Frida and I, we received goosebumps” – and ABBA’s lasting identification as a pop group was set.
Against The Odds instances its topic’s development into the world’s consciousness by the penetration of their most well-known songs. Whereas Europe and Australia have been early adopters of ABBA singles, America was a wholly separate problem for the group, and when “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” hit in 1979, its sound clashed with the racist and homophobic US backlash to disco typified by Disco Demolition Evening. Punk music was climbing as much as take area, too, which additionally put ABBA’s happy-go-lucky, typically plasticky materials on a cultural again foot. However Against The Odds additionally appears at the inside workings of ABBA in the years after their preliminary success, when the altering tastes of the public and the music trade weren’t the solely supply of friction. Fȁltskog hated flying, there was friction between beginning a household and remaining a pop star, and then the divorces got here, placing extra strain on Ulvaeus and Fȁltskog and Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson to keep up ABBA as a skilled, however not private entity.
For this doc, all of it goes again to Eurovision, and ABBA’s reputation in England. Whereas the quartet by no means formally broke up, they have been on hiatus by 1982, and Against The Odds makes use of footage from the group’s six-night stand at Wembley Area in 1979, later launched as a reside album and DVD, as its concluding bookend. With the continued pop tradition presence of their music, it appears like a doc with a fuller image of the group’s music might nonetheless occur. However in the meantime, this one’s a giddy celebration of ABBA’s greatest early splashes, marked by catchy melodies and yard after yard of skintight blue satin.
What Motion pictures Will It Remind You Of? One other BBC doc about ABBA does exist, The Pleasure of ABBA, and it’s available to stream on YouTube. In the latest docuseries Ace of Base: All That She Desires, the cycles of Swedish pop music historical past repeat in the Nineties with the meteoric rise of Ace of Base. And if you happen to don’t know something about the real-life Eurovision, let Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams – and a scene-stealing Dan Stevens – educate you in poptastic enjoyable trend with Eurovision Track Contest: The Story of Fireplace Saga.
Efficiency Value Watching: Archival footage makes up the entirety of ABBA: Against The Odds, however a few moments stand out. Like the group’s look on Polish tv in 1976, a glittering illustration of Western pop music, reside from behind the Iron Curtain. Or the memorable photographs from the first present ever on their 1977 Australian tour, the place ABBA emerges in flurries of falling rain to the opening strains of “Tiger.”
Memorable Dialogue: In the late Seventies, as ABBA’s reputation grew, journalist and creator Viven Goldman says the band “appeared to challenge a relentless good cheer,” a cheeriness that was straight against the forces represented in the rise of punk rock. “Punk got here alongside,” Goldman continues, “overturning and turning its again on all that had come earlier than.”
Intercourse and Pores and skin: None.
Our Take: Today, the music of ABBA has fueled a Mamma Mia! jukebox musical that’s develop into a complete trade unto itself, and in London, you may even purchase tickets to see digital avatars – “ABBAtars,” natch – perform the quartet’s songs at a Sphere-like purpose-built leisure venue. So the sturdiness of the band’s melodies isn’t in query, and ABBA themselves take pleasure in a sort of enduring fame indifferent from its bodily maintenance. That detachment doesn’t essentially change with ABBA: Against The Odds, since none of the interviews we hear are on-camera, it’s unclear whether or not the audio is new or repurposed from present tapes, there isn’t a exterior commentary, and the doc doesn’t develop the sort of arcing narrative that may contextualize the quartet’s early experiences with what got here later.
So possibly it’s cool simply to observe Against The Odds for the footage, as a result of in that respect, it’s received a ton of visuals to supply. From the sparkly exploding star electrical guitar performed by Björn Ulvaeus for “Waterloo” at Eurovision – the provenance of this instrument is a topic for web sleuths – to Frida Lyngstad and Agnetha Fȁltskog sporting fantabulous arrays of tight-fitting jumpsuits accentuated with wing-like cloth panels in each colour of the seventies aesthetic rainbow, the six years of ABBA lined in Against The Odds are replete with unimaginable drip and era-specific gear.
Our Name: Stream It. It may not be the last, most full phrase on its topic, however ABBA: Against The Odds accesses a grip of great-looking archival footage because it flows from the Swedish quartet’s massive win at Eurovision in 1974 by means of a whirlwind few years of worldwide pop stardom.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an unbiased author and editor dwelling at giant in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Information, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
