Revisiting Abba

  I actually have a quite good memory of hearing  I'm a Marionette for the first time. When I became an Abba fan in the late 1970s I had Arrival and The Album recorded on a 60 min cassette with both albums missing their final songs (as they were both a little over 30 minutes long). So it wasn't until I found I'm a Marionette in a jukebox at some gas station on the b-side of Take a Chance On Me single that I heard that missing track for the first time and it took quite a while (maybe a year or two) until I finally bought The Album and could listen to I'm a Marionette like the rest of the tracks.  This rare occasion of hearing this song for the first time and then not being able to hear it again for a while grew an air of mystery around it. And as the song was uncharacteristically dark (drawn from the Girl With the Golden Hair mini-musical Abba played during their tour) it felt very strangely intriguing to me. When I finally bought The Album, and spun it on my turntab...

  This song is a special case in the Abba catalogue in many ways. First and foremost, it is the only track Abba recorded and released that was not written by the group members themselves. Secondly it was recorded not for their own use but as a service to their German record company Polydor for use in a charity album Stars im Zeichen eines guten Sterns in 1975. Abba donated their effort and to keep the other costs to a minimum they recorded a medley of three American folk songs. The distribution of this album was limited so the song didn't have much impact and most Abba fans didn't even know it existed until it was released on a b-side of their 1978 single Summer Night City . Though I had been a die-hard Abba fan since the late 1970's even I didn't know of this song until the summer of 1986, when I found the single at a Brighton flea market among three other single b-side tracks that were still missing from my collection. I played this song a lot that summer, but soon ...

  I know that to many people this low ranking for this beloved Abba track is astounding, and I find it slightly strange myself too. The fact is that ever since I peeled off the gift wrapping from Super Trouper album on Christmas Eve in 1980 this song has never made an impression on me in a way all the other tracks on that wonderful album have. I have always wondered what the other people hear in this song that I don't hear. Maybe a new concentrated listen 45 years later, as if I heard it for the first time, changes things or makes me at least understand the anomaly. I've always heard Lay All Your Love On Me as part of Super Trouper, among a string of some of the best songs Abba ever recorded. After hearing the bouncy and inventive title track, the heartbreaking Winner Takes It All , the underrated synth gem of Me and I and the reflective pair of Happy New Year and Our Last Summer this dance track feels like an outsider, a throwback to the party atmosphere of Voulez-Vous ...

My first meeting with this song was on the same November 2021 morning as I heard for the first time the seven new songs released on the  Abba Voyage album (in addition to the three tracks already released on singles). I was expecting something wonderful, but by the time I heard Bumblebee I had already felt the gloom of not getting what I had been expecting. This disappointment has coloured my attitude to this beautiful song ever since, but I have now tried to have another listen to Anni-Frid Lyngstad 's vocals, Benny Andersson 's keyboards and backing vocals by Agnetha Fältskog and, I presume, Björn Ulvaeus to find something in this song that I hadn't heard before. During the four years of its existence I've categorized Bumblebee among other songs on Voyage that I think are "lost opportunities", "songs they should have worked on more" and songs "that lack a certain something to make them fulfilling Abba recordings". After trying to lis...