A few weeks ago, I did a round in my quiz where I stripped the music away and left just the acapella vocals and it’s great to really hear the quality of the voices of the artists. Not all are great, but in this round, I featured Karen Carpenter singing Close To You, Linda Perry (of the 4 Non Blondes) singing What’s Up and Agnetha singing The Winner Takes it All which were all absolutely stunning. A couple of days later, I had an email from Steve, a regular attendee, who said, “Just note to say that it was a pleasure to hear just the vocals on The Winner Takes it All. My God, Agnetha can sing! Not my favourite ABBA track by any means but the quality of the vocals just blew me away. A classic anyway, it made me realise just how good the song is. There has been so much talk about the story behind the track that the raw emotion of it all gets a bit lost at times. This just reinforces just how good it, she, is.” So I asked if he would like it as a Single of the Week and he replied, “Sounds like a good idea, why not!” Love the enthusiasm Steve!!! Anyway, why not indeed, so let’s begin.
When you know what’s behind the story and you watch the video of Agnetha singing it, you can really feel her pain and anguish. Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus were the writers behind every ABBA song, and, like Lennon and McCartney, they were both credited as joint writers regardless of which one actually put the words and music down. In the case of The Winner Takes It All, it was Björn who wrote it about his and Agnetha’s marriage which was falling apart. The opening line ‘I don’t wanna talk about the things we’ve gone through, though it’s hurting me now it’s history’, summed up where Björn and Agnetha were in their relationship. Divorced. What made it even more ironic was that now Benny and Frida were starting to have problems of their own. The way they were writing songs at that point was Benny and Björn would compose a tune, then Björn would take the song home and play it over and over again until some lyrics came into his head and fitted the tune.
If you’ve ever been through divorce, it can usually be hard to deal with let along write a song about it. So, with all the emotion and possibly anger, how do you write a heartfelt song about the demise of your marriage knowing that your, now-ex-wife, was likely to be singing it? The answer? Get drunk. Björn had come home and opened a bottle of scotch and, as he recalled, “I was drunk and in a rush of emotion the words just came to me. Normally that doesn’t work because they look or sound good when you’re drunk and the next day they look awful, but this one actually worked.” He added, in a different interview, “It is the experience of a divorce, but it’s fiction. There wasn’t a winner or a loser in our case. A lot of people think it’s straight out of reality, but it’s not. Usually it’s not a good idea to write when you’re drunk, but it all came out on that one. By the time I wrote ‘The Gods may throw their dice’ the bottle was empty.” He had completed the song in just one hour.
The next day he took the song, which he’d initially titled The Story of My Life, into the studio, “I sang a demo of it myself which a lot of people liked and said, you have to sing that. But I saw the sensible thing, of course, it had to go to Agnetha.”
What is Agnetha’s feeling towards it? “It’s actually my favourite ABBA song. Björn wrote it about us after the breakdown of our marriage. The fact that he wrote it exactly when we divorced is touching really. It was fantastic to do that song because I could put in such feeling. I didn’t mind sharing it with the public. It didn’t feel wrong. There is so much in that song. It was a mixture of what I felt and what Björn felt, but also what Benny and Frida went through.”
After Björn recorded the demo he played it Benny. He liked it and suggested they record another demo, so with Benny on keyboards and with the aid of session musicians Lasse Wellander on guitar, Mike Watson on bass and Ola Brunkert on drums, this first attempt at the song took them into a fairly uptempo arrangement: an insistent beat, punctuated by handclaps – a bit ‘stiff and metrical’, as Benny described it. It actually wasn’t a bad backing track and it could easily have formed the basis for an excellent pop song in its genre. A rough mix of this instrumental recording was copied onto a cassette tape for Björn and Benny.
The next day when they drove home from the studio, they listened again to the backing track and, according to the official ABBA website, still sensed that they were onto something with this tune, but they concluded that they hadn’t quite captured its full potential. “We felt that it was a really important song, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t ‘lose’ it”, Björn remembered.
On another listen, they decided something was needed to loosen it up, and, again, according to the website, it was Benny who found the key that would unlock the song: a descending melody line, played on the piano during the intro and then reoccurring throughout the tune. This simple yet effective device rubbed off the edges of the square, giving the tune a smoother flow: it was lifted out of the stiff and metrical territory and into a romantic French ‘chanson’ landscape. A new backing track was recorded four days after the first attempt, on 6th June, and it was certainly an improvement. The musicians were the same this time, with the addition of percussionist Åke Sundqvist, who no doubt contributed to the rhythmic elasticity of this second version.
In July 1980, 10 days after their marriage was dissolved, the group made their way to the town of Marstrand, on the west coast of Sweden, to shoot the promo video for the song. The video’s director, Lasse Hallström, purposely chose to have Agnetha’s role as the lonely abandoned woman as the lyrics describe. The video took five hours to complete. Things were a bit awkward, as both Björn and Agnetha had brought their new partners to the location. But it showed a genuinely heartbroken Agnetha talking to the camera whilst the other members of the group just stood around talking and laughing.
In 2008, Mamma Mia, the movie, was released with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Amanda Seyfried, and it was Streep who sang The Winner Takes It All in the film and did it in one take, but what did Björn think of it? He stated in an interview with The Telegraph, “She is a goddess. At first, we couldn’t believe that she wanted to do it. I was completely taken by surprise when I saw her performance in the movie. To hear her delivering the songs with all the emotion we put in the lyrics is more than we could have dreamed of.”
The song peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave ABBA their final top 10 hit over there, in the UK it went to number one where it spent two weeks and was their penultimate number one with the final one being the title track of the album where both songs were lifted, Super Trouper. It also went to number one in Belgium and the Netherlands, number two in Sweden, three in Switzerland, Austria and Norway and four in Germany. It has been covered numerous times by the likes of Beverley Craven, Hazell Dean, The Corrs, Michael Ball, Laura Branigan, Bruce Forsyth’s daughter Julie who was a former member of Guys ‘n’ Dolls, The Vaccines, Susan Boyle and lest we forget the cast of Glee, but nothing will top the emotion Agnetha portrayed because she really lived it.