My My!

On the fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo – the song, not the battle - one super-fan sits down to listen to the ABBA Gold album from start to finish, and looks back over the half-century he has spent in the company of ABBA’s music, and attempting to unlock the secrets of its hold on him, and on all of us. 

Reviews

‘[Giles Smith] is a perfect guide to ABBA’s ups and down on pop’s stock market [and] an astute musicologist, able to take apart these songs without wrecking their delicate internal workings . . . For such a droll book, then, My My! comes with an existential kick, concerned with the effects of time’s passing on art, the way it can become distorted through hearsay and assumption, like a fuzzy tenth-generation mix tape . . . It’s not a stretch to say that, at its core, My My! is a book about time, death and the possibility of immortality . . . As Smith’s loving testament to the band so clearly shows, in 2024 there’s nothing to hide. ABBA, their avatars facing down death itself from their purpose-built arena, have won the war’