26 December 1981
‘Don’t You Want Me’ stayed at number one in the UK charts into the New Year, but in Ireland it ceded the floor after a week, allowing us an extra chart-topper and post-Christmas treat.
Of ABBA’s singles in the ’80s, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ seems to take all the critical love, challenged only by the more hipster choice of ‘The Day Before You Came’. When The Guardian’s music writers ranked all of ABBA’s 27 pre-2021 UK singles, those were two of the top five; ‘One Of Us’ was a middling number 14. I’ve discussed ‘The Winner Takes It All’ previously so I won’t dwell on it here again; ‘The Day Before You Came’ takes a single lyrical idea and drags it to a clumsy, laboured death. ‘One Of Us’, however, knocks those two tracks into a cocked hat. It’s superb.
We start with shimmering mandolins and angelic voices, like moonlight on the Aegean. Then a sparse reggae groove teleports us to the Caribbean. But the song itself is of the cold harsh fjords of Scandi-noir drama: a broken relationship described in far better lyrics and storytelling than the stagey melodrama of ‘The Winner Takes It All’. Our narrator, another of ABBA’s strong female characters, has left her partner but is now having regrets, or at least a serious case of dumper’s remorse. The ‘one of us’ angle, with great economy and a slight sharpness, hints that the ‘other’ isn’t feeling the same way and may even be getting along swimmingly: oops! Is there any other lyric in pop as brilliantly bleak as “One of us is lying in a lonely bed / Staring at the ceiling / Wishing she was somewhere else instead”? All served on a sumptuous rolling melody, of course; the chord change immediately after that bleak chorus lyric above is particularly satisfying.
As much as I like ‘Under Attack’, their final ’80s single, ‘One Of Us’ is the last great ABBA classic. Not only that, it’s a God-tier, platinum-level ABBA classic, right up there with ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Waterloo’, which means it’s as close to perfect as any pop record can be.
