ABBA single by single thread

Thanks for proving it's a fake.

 

I know we will "Move On" with this album soon.

As noted above yes, I agree "Hole In Your Soul" is a great song and it rocks! One of my all time favorite ABBA songs. I am enjoying this thread, being one of the newer fans relatively speaking. Looking forward to continuing this journey with y'all.

Regarding "KC," I think the Doris Day style delivery could of worked for Thank You For The Music. The version done on TV, was basically a snooze-fest. That said, I enjoyed hearing Karen singing something different. But ABBA did it better, and added a touch of theatrics which makes the song memorable.

 

Hard to imagine that you had never heard "Eagle" before!
Great stuff Tim! Are there more faked ABBA singles? Looking forward to the next single story!
Thanks to everyone who is contributing story and content to this great subject. This thread is a fun read, even without any Beatles content! lol

 

New Zealand had reverted from a top 50 back to a top 40 by then. Eagle didn't appear in the top 40, according to charts.org.nz - New Zealand charts portal

 

I always tell a collector buddy of mine that I check 45 RPM labels on Cat45. The results are user-submitted, but usually large and clear.

 

Not only was it never released, that photo is fake in more ways than just the typeset/font described by Tim. Notice the typeset for "45 R. P. M." is not straight?

 

@Bobby Morrow
I just discovered this thread yesterday, and man did it move fast! I'd love to go through each song and add my opinions, but it's too late for that.

 

I don't think either of these songs actually held the record at the time, though they would have been close. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the record was 20 weeks, set by "Love Machine" by The Miracles, later tied by "A Fifth Of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy.

With the slow turnover on the charts, the record was tied or broken repeatedly during this time period. Nick Gilder's "Hot Child In the City" set a new record of 21 weeks, which was tied by Robert John's "Sad Eyes", and later broken by Vangelis' "Chariots Of Fire" (22 weeks).

For the rest of the '80s, the pace picked up again, and there were few serious challengers to the record. Two songs later in the '80s broke Vangelis' record, but both arguably merit an asterisk, because they needed two separate chart runs to reach #1: "Baby, Come To Me" by Patti Austin & James Ingram (23 weeks), and "Red Red Wine" by UB40 (25 weeks).

In the '90s, partly due to changes in the way Billboard complied its charts, partly due to changes in how the record and radio industries operated, the behavior of songs on the charts changed dramatically. One effect was that the charts slowed way, way down, well beyond anything ever seen previously, making many chart longevity records vulnerable. I'm not sure exactly what happened with this record after that, but the current record holder is "Macarena" by Los Del Rio (33 weeks). Like "Baby Come To Me" and "Red Red Wine", though, "Macarena" actually needed two separate chart runs to reach #1. I don't know what the current record is for a song that reached #1 within the confines of a single chart run (I doubt Vangelis still holds it, but I don't know that for certain).

 

Why do people do this?

Can anyone make out the master number on the label? To me, it looks like ST-A-37555, although I'm not sure about the second number. 37555 would not fit the time period when this single would have been made; that number would be from 1979. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn't match any of the master numbers Tim mentioned earlier, nor is it anything that would fit in with the sequence of master numbers used for other songs on ABBA: The Album. The site linked to earlier in the thread states that the master number for the album version of "Eagle" was ST-A-34597.

I was puzzled as to why the fake uses the catalog number 3469 (a number actually used for a completely different, non-ABBA single) if 3486 is actually known to have been assigned to "Eagle" (due to the existence of a test pressing with that number). If you were going to make a fake, why not make a fake with the catalog number 3486?

I've come up with a theory. The U.S. 45 of "The Name of The Game" has the catalog number 3449 and the master number ST-A-34557. I think the fake may have been made by altering an image of a legitimate RI copy of "The Name of The Game", changing the third digit of the catalog number to a "6" by flipping the "9" upside down, and jumbling the digits in the master number to change 34557 to 37555. Compare this image of an RI copy of "The Name of The Game", from 45cat, to the image of the fake "Eagle":

45cat - View Image

All information on the label seems to match, including the lack of album credits that Tim mentioned (I guess they were omitted from this single because it was released before the album was?) and the less-than-level typeset for "45 RPM" that Grant noted. One difference is that Stig Anderson's name appears in the writing credits for "The Name Of The Game" but not "Eagle". It wouldn't have been too hard to delete his name, though. Four of the five letters needed to write the song title "Eagle" even occur in the "The Name Of The Game" (all except the "L").

 

I was going on memory while using my Billboard Hot 100 Charts: The 70s book, and I forgot about the two older cuts.

Two songs have peaked at #1 in their 27th consecutive week in the Hot 100: "With Arms Wide Open" by Creed (November 11, 2000) and "All of Me" by John Legend (May 16, 2014). The latter actually hit the top in its 30th week, but only the last 27 of them were consecutive. It debuted September 21, 2013; left the chart after one week; returned on October 26, 2013 and remained on November 2; left the chart again; returned on November 16, 2013 and stayed.

 

I don't know why people do this. Being a Bowie fan I see a lot of people "uncovering" rare Bowie tracks which then turn out to be people recording covers of his demos or whatever and making them out to be rare band recordings, or vice versa, similarly they will mock up fake photos, for example this last week someone posted an arrest picture of Bowie from 78 or so, when there was no arrest (it was 76). They maybe do it just for fun, but down the road, years later these things just confuse people as they don't know the story behind them. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should, and it is so annoying.

 

I think Tim's posts are providing the backstory for how it came to be that that there was no third single from The Album, but I also find it surprising, for two reasons:

1) While it was still rare at this point to see more than three singles released from an album, singles were ABBA's bread and butter in the U.S., and they usually did three. I believe that every other ABBA studio album released in the U.S. had three singles released from it, except for The Visitors. It seems odd that they would stop at two with an album that fell right in the middle of their peak as hitmakers in the U.S.

2) The second single from this album was one of ABBA's biggest hits in the U.S. If the second single had been a relative flop, I could see them stopping at two, but the opposite was actually the case. You'd think Atlantic would have wanted to capitalize on that momentum and squeeze out one more hit.

 

Three singles were released from 'The Visitors' as well: 'When All Is Said and Done' (Jan 1982, peak #27) , the title track (April 1982, peak #63) and 'One of Us' (February 1983 (!!!), peak #107)

 

Actually, the reason for the late release was to promote The Singles: The First Ten Years.

 

I wonder if it was considered for release in the UK/Ireland in 1978 but then the idea was dropped. I remember that both songs were played on the radio A LOT at the time & the videos were shown on Swap Shop IIRC. I certainly thought both were released as 45s back then as their familiarity was on the same level as the other big hits they had.

 

Yeah, the picture sleeve for the single of "One Of Us" is from The Singles: The First Ten Years. It doesn't even indicate the Visitor album. Here it was the follow up to "The Day Before You Came," and "Under Attack" wasn't released by Atlantic as a single to my knowledge. I apologize for getting ahead of things with this. Point being Atlantic did things here differently than the rest of the world concerning ABBA singles.

 

Never too late to join the conversation Grant!

 

I just have to figure out how to comment on all those songs!

 

Feel free to comment on any of the earlier songs.

 

Since I am not going to go through 34 pages to see what songs were discussed, i'll just go through ther U.S. chart hits I like and do them in batches. But, i'll do it later.

 

Summer Night City (1978)


B-side: Medley
Released: September 6, 1978
Charts: #5 (United Kingdom), # 1 (Sweden), #13 (Australia)

 

This was the one Bjorn and Benny were never happy with. They felt they never got the right ‘mix’. It wouldn’t help that SNC would be the first ABBA single not to make the top 3 in the UK in 3 years... Personally, I like the song and bought the single that summer. If anything, it has too many ‘hooks’ which perhaps prevents it from quite hanging together like the best ABBA singles do....I don’t like the longer version with the slow intro that appeared on the Voulez-Vous deluxe edition....The single mix is as right as the song will ever be.

This was the week the single peaked in the charts. 7/10/78.

 

I like "Summer Night City". It might not be one of ABBA's greatest singles and I feel like some of their distaste for it is warranted but it's an enjoyable and catchy song nonetheless.

I consider this single as the beginning of the second half of ABBA. Incidentally we're just about halfway through all the singles too.

 

The first time I heard "Summer Night City" was when I finally obtained a copy of MORE ABBA GOLD. I liked it OK, but when I heard the longer version with the slow, dramatic opening on THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC box set, it cemented itself as a favorite. So, I'm the opposite of Haristar in that I prefer the longer version.

 

I liked the song, didn’t love it. It was the last single I got for awhile not because of anything Abba did, just because I was 11/12 and my musical starts was starting to explode in a million directions. Nowadays I like i a lot more than I did then. Was never that fussed on the b side though.

Always was sad that this song was part of the undeleted medley on the box set as I have trouble not singing “money money money” Along to it now.