Super Trouper

9 May 2016

I grew up amidst the sun, sea and sand of Umhlanga Rocks – really, a near-perfect place to be a teenager (even one from a liberal family like mine who didn’t easily let us forget that the awfulness of Apartheid was never far away). In the late 70s, our soundtrack was comprised mostly of pop, and when a Norwegian girl arrived at my primary school with all her ABBA LPs, we became best friends over songs like “Money Money Money”, “SOS”, and – the heartbreaker – “Fernando”. By 1980 I was sixteen and had become a follower of Durban punk bands Wild Youth, Le Metro Trois and others, and was listening to UK post-punk groups like Stiff Little Fingers and The Buzzcocks while I helped my brother make the homemade punk badges we would wear on our clothes. Still, when ABBA released its seventh album, my sister and I didn’t waste any time in buying it. We instantly fell in love with the title track “Super Trouper”, and would play it over-and-over just to hear Agnetha and Frida sing “Tonight the super trouper lights are gonna find me/Shining like the sun/Smiling, having fun/Feeling like a number one.” The song was pure pop, a shimmering accompaniment to that summer holiday. In the years after 1980, I didn’t think much more about the song, although it would make me smile whenever I heard it played. Then, when Rolling Stone South Africa was still being published and I was its Music Editor, I discovered an American artist John Murry – his debut album was one of my best releases of 2012 – and set up a Skype interview with him. I followed his career closely after that and one day I happened across an unreleased cover he had done of “Super Trouper” on Soundcloud. Murry had been inspired to do the recording by his daughter’s love for the movie, “Mamma Mia” and his version, slowed-down and featuring just an acoustic guitar, peeled back the layers of pop sheen and exposed the song for what it was; for what I’d never heard as a carefree teenager: a melancholy expression of the awful loneliness of fame and the unrelenting touring that accompanies it.