I’ve posted a song from Blancmange before – 14 years ago! – with their version of ABBA’s The Day Before You Came. Sadly co-founder of the band, Stephen Luscombe, died last week.

They had seven Top 40 hits in the 1980s.

This one got to no. 8 in 1984.

Blancmange: Don’t Tell Me

Stephen Luscombe: 29/10/1954 – 13/9/2025. So it goes.

Psychedelia sometimes pops up where you least expect it.

That was true of Porpoise Song and it’s true of this which has hints of Tomorrow Never Knows.

ABBA: The Visitors

I heard this on the radio a couple of weeks ago and immediately thought, “That’s Phil Collins drumming.” It’s very reminiscent of his contribution to the track Intruder from Peter Gabriel’s third solo album and is a signature drum sound which Collins seems to have created with Hugh Padgham.

I confess I didn’t remember who had performed this song and was a little surprised to hear the DJ say it was Anni-Frid Lyngstad – she from ABBA.

It was indeed Collins on the drums and he also produced the track.

The song was taken from Anni-Frid’s first solo LP, Something Going On, released in 1982. It only reached no 43 in the UK charts.

Anni-Frid Lyngstad: I Know There’s Something Going On

This has an unusually grown-up lyric for a pop song, dealing as it does not merely with a teen break-up, but divorce, with the viewpoint partner obviously still enamoured of her departed husband.

“But tell me does she kiss/Like I used to kiss you?
Does it feel the same/When she calls your name?”

ABBA: The Winner Takes it All

This is the song with which I would have started off this category in the best of circumstances.

It’s the lyric on this that I really like. It has that sense of contingency, of paths that might not have been taken, and in that context reminds me of Abba’s The Day Before You Came which you may remember I waxed lyrical (ahem) about some moons ago now.

It was the last single taken from Pulp’s big breakthrough album Different Class but not the least.

Pulp: Something Changed

Last week I heard a DJ on Radio 2 saying when Agnetha came to sing this song for Abba she must have said to Björn and Benny, “The lyric on this is insane! It doesn’t scan or rhyme.”

Silly, silly man.

It does both.

I think this lyric is fantastic, precisely because of the rhymes and scansion.

The rhyme scheme for the first verse is AABB*CC*DEFF* (where the * is for a part rhyme – which is more than common in popular music.) Moreover the D and E lines have an internal rhyme of lunch with bunch. Indeed, if you consider the line break is at “lunch” – which verses 2 and 3 suggest is more correct – the rhyme scheme becomes a near perfect AABB*CCDDEE.
The second and third verses both have an absolute AABBCCDDEE rhyming.

As to the scanning; it’s brilliant. In fact the line, “Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then,” is a wonderful iambic heptameter.

“There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see,” is superb; the best line in any Abba song bar none. If you allow the “see-ee” at the end as an iamb it’s also a near perfect iambic nonameter.

The only thing I dislike about the lyric is it’s written in USian. Gotten is now archaic in British English – except for the phrase “ill-gotten gains” – and we don’t say “to go” but “to take away” or, in Scotland, “to carry out.” But then “to go” provides the rhyme.

Plus there’s an element of SF to it all, with the looking back to something that has changed, the implication of a life transformed.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Blancmange version.

Blancmange: The Day Before You Came

There is also an eight minute version on YouTube.