Pop in a new light

Waterloo: I feel like I win when I lose | Music | Guardian Unlimited Music

Winner of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, Waterloo on first hearing can easily be written off as typical Abbian popsy-wopsian hokum. But a closer examination of the lyrics reveals the band's astonishingly deft insights into the nuances of 19th century European geopolitics and also demonstrates the quartet's remarkable ability to re-contextualize the lessons of that dark period for our own times. This is perhaps because Ulvaeus had started out in a skiffle group called the Hootenanny Singers, and Swedish folkies know European history inside out. For example, he almost certainly knew that painters always depicted Napoleon with one hand stuck inside his jacket not because he had an ulcer but because painters hate painting hands and this reduced the workload by 50%.

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