Bubbling Under: ABBA- "One Of Us"

In time for The Singles: The First Fifty Years

Welcome to Bubbling Under. Each edition I cover an artist that charted outside the Hot 100 on Billboard's Bubbling Under chart. This week: ABBA

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By 1983, ABBA had gone on a break which lasted until 2021’s Voyage album. In most territories, “Under Attack” would be their final new single until 2021’s “I Still Have Faith In You”. As I mentioned in my post on Frida’s English-language solo career, new tracks “The Day Before You Came” and “Under Attack” were released as singles as part of a Greatest Hits package called The Singles: The First Ten Years.

Over here, however, after “The Day Before You Came” initially flopped¹, a different approach was taken. Rather than release “Under Attack”, the year-and-a-half-old “One Of Us” was dusted off and finally given a North American single release.

When The Visitors was released in late 1981, most countries chose “One Of Us” as the first single. North America went with the equally strong “When All Is Said And Done”. This resulted in one final Top 40 hit (#27 Billboard) in early 1982.

Canadian 7” single for “When All Is Said And Done” by ABBA. Scan is from my own collection.

“One Of Us” probably could have charted had it been released about a year earlier. As it stood, it was a track taken off an album that wasn’t Thriller-level huge but has since been re-evaluated as a classic. “One Of Us” had to settle for an unfortunate #107.

“One Of Us” is solid. Lyrically, it’s similar to “The Winner Takes It All”. Whereas the latter was about divorce, the Agnetha-led “One Of Us” is about starting over after post-divorce.

When it came follow-up time, Atlantic chose another completely different album track, “The Visitors (Crackin’ Up)”. Personally, I like this track and feel it was a worthy choice for a second single. It’s also considerably stronger than “Head Over Heels” which most countries went with.

While ABBA’s fortunes were diminishing in several territories including the UK, they were still massive enough in Europe that their songs were being used in German shampoo commercials:

I find it fitting that the track used in that commercial was “Move On”. That’s exactly what ABBA was doing by this point. Frida had already worked with Phil Collins and had a solo hit with “I Know There’s Something Going On”. Agnetha wasn’t far behind her with her own solo hit (“Can’t Shake Loose”). Bjorn and Benny were about to develop Chess, the musical that spawned Murray Head’s “One Night In Bangkok”. Clearly, the band were ready to move on and pursue other endeavours.

ABBA’s music was becoming more mature. Younger pop fans (at least in the UK) were moving on to things like Bucks Fizz. Over in North America, it was normal for ABBA to have a couple of hits and then some lower-charting singles.

ABBA was smart to take a hiatus and allow people to re-evaluate their music. Had they not, the group might have lapsed into self-parody.

While promoting their final singles, the band made several TV appearances to promote them. Here they are on BBC’s juggernaut Top Of The Pops with Canadian Ex-pat Kid Jensen as the host:

And here they are performing the Frida-led “Cassandra”, B-Side to “The Day Before You Came”. I previously went into more detail on “Cassandra” in the Frida post.

One more single, a belated release of “Thank You For The Music” was released in the UK at the tail end of 1983. I know it’s such a cliche to close off a piece on ABBA with this, but here we go:

Next Week: Beyond The Guess Who takes a look at the all-too-brief career of Canadian Punk/New Wave musician BB Gabor.

1. “The Day Before You Came” has since been re-evaluated and is considered one of ABBA’s classics.