10 September 1980
I love classic ABBA as much as the next sentient life-form, but I’ve never understood why there’s such fawning adoration for ‘The Winner Takes It All’. It seems to be based on the fact that the two couples were divorcing, and it’s a song about divorce, so therefore they are baring their souls, turning their private pain into public entertainment, and what have you.
But hang on: they’ve written and performed loads of songs about romantic travails; it’s their job. The following year they’ll release another single about a troubled break-up, ‘One Of Us’, which will also go to number one and which is far better as a song and as a treatment of its subject matter. All ‘The Winner Takes It All’ does is fuel-inject your standard ABBA song with a dash of showbiz gossip.
On top of that, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ doesn’t strike me as being particularly profound or revealing about its chosen topic. That’s because, like ‘Thank You For The Music’, it’s essentially a show tune, at a time when Bjorn and Benny were already looking to pivot to West End musicals. Its big moments are pure melodramatic bluster: “But tell me does she kiss / Like the way I kiss you?” “The gods may throw a dice / Their minds as cold as ice“. A few years later the two lads would finally get their West End on, and the big showstopper of Chess, ‘I Know Him So Well’, shares a lot of its state-of-the-failed-union DNA with ‘The Winner Takes It All’. Even the very next ABBA single after this, which also goes to number one so we’ll be seeing it here shortly, is literally about being on stage night after night—and pointedly puts the love interest as not also being on stage with them.
No big ABBA hit is totally worthless, of course. (Well, apart from the campfire horrors of ‘Chiquitita’, ‘Fernando’ and ‘I Have A Dream’, which I’m embarrassed even just to name here.) ‘The Winner Takes It All’ has that towering chorus, two fine and different readings of the line “I don’t wanna talk”, and more of Benny’s signature icy piano runs. But there are plenty other peerless, perfect ABBA classics for us to love without having to lavish excess adulation on this averagely good show tune.
