Murray Head – One Night in Bangkok

What do you do after selling a few hundred million records? Well, if you’re the guys in ABBA, you write a musical about chess. (Sure you do.) Actually, they did.

So, a confession here: I have never liked ABBA. By that I mean that I don’t think I had ever, with intention, played one of their songs. I would let them play on when they came on the radio, or as part of a compilation, or on a playlist. I have probably even spontaneously sung along, and I’m certain I danced to some of them. But I had never once said to myself, or to anyone else, “You know what would sound great right now? How about a little ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’?” They never created music that appealed to me. It’s okay: they did just fine without my support.

After the band split up in 1982, the two female members, Agnatha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad (under the name Frida), had minor pop hits – “Can’t Shake Loose” and “I Know There’s Something Going On”, respectively – that I sort of liked, or at least wasn’t super irritated by, possibly because they didn’t really sound like ABBA. Meanwhile, the male band members, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, moved on to, among other things, “Chess”, on which they teamed up with Tim Rice, who’d made his name with Andrew Lloyd Webber on such musicals as “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “Evita” and, my favourite from the duo (thanks to my amazing junior high school music teacher, Miss Beaupre), “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”. Before mounting an expensive stage production, as both a fundraising device and sort of proof of concept, the decision was made to release an album of the songs that would likely be in the show. And to sing one of the lead roles, the call went out to Murray Head.

This was not new to Head: he’d been part of a similar approach with “Jesus Christ Superstar”, on which he sang the part of Judas Iscariot. For “Chess”, he was cast as the Bobby Fischer-esque American grandmaster. Early in the second act, the former champion, who lost his world title in act one, takes in the nightlife of the next host city as a journalist. And he celebrates this in “One Night in Bangkok”.

I can’t really say Head sings “One Night in Bangkok”, nor do I want to equate it with talk singing, because what he is doing here is really talking musically. (Wikipedia calls it a rap, and whoever wrote that should have their editing privileges revoked.) It isn’t because Head couldn’t sing: just check out “Superstar” for solid evidence to the contrary. So this was an artistic choice, and it absolutely works, giving a sardonic creepiness to the performance. Rice delivers some great lines – I would give even money that I could sing the whole thing from start to finish, and that’s because zingers like “the queens we use would not excite you” are lodged in my brain. It’s a Thai pop culture journey, with nods to “The King and I”, Buddhism, martial arts and ladyboys. Over it all stands Head, commenting on the corrupt and disreputable setting for “the ultimate test of cerebral fitness”. All of this is to an upbeat tempo – this was a top ten dance hit – that has the synth sheen that was found on 95% (my non-authoritative and unverified guess) of the pop music released in that era. And the video is pretty slick, too: Head has the kind of cool that doesn’t look ridiculous in a white suit.

So, yes, I still love this song, and can’t see that changing anytime soon. But this brings me back to its co-writers and ABBA: why didn’t I care for them? Outside of the music, I was definitely irritated by the suggestion that they were even more successful commercially than my beloved Beatles. But I also never gave them a serious listen either.

So I checked out one of their albums, 1976’s “Arrival”, which is the only one in Acclaimed Music’s top 3000, at #852 (though four singles off the album are also ranked in the top 10,000 songs). A few of the unfamiliar tunes were slick and didn’t really distinguish themselves in any way. But there was much to like here. I caught myself bumping my hip to “Dancing Queen”, some sort of muscle memory from my barely pubescent earlier self let loose on a sweaty junior high school gym turned Friday night dance floor. And now that I’ve really listened to it, “Knowing Me, Knowing You” is pretty cutthroat when it comes to what happens at the end of a relationship, and damned heartbreaking. “Dum Dum Diddle” is silly fun, and “Money Money Money” shows that Andersson and Ulvaeus were writing stage-worthy songs long before “Chess”. The title track is an instrumental save for some aggressive humming, and it had me imagining a “Braveheart”-esque race across an open field to battle. And “Happy Hawaii” ends the record with a fun tune that wouldn’t have been completely out of place on a pre-“Pet Sounds” Beach Boys record (and also feels like a bit of counterpoint to First Class’ 1974 hit “Beach Baby”).

So, my final conclusion is that I should maybe listen to more ABBA. And maybe more Murray Head, too. (“Superstar” is pretty awesome.) The lesson I take away from this is that I need to keep an open mind. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I think I need to go listen to “Knowing Me, Knowing You”.