Song: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”
One of ABBA’s biggest international hits, it set the stage for techno music
Recorded in 1979 in support of ABBA’s Greatest Hits: Vol. 2 album, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” may not be very familiar to US listeners old enough to remember the Disco Era, even though the song was a massive international hit at the time.
In the US, the song’s release came after the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, a promotion intended to attract more fans to a baseball game. It succeeded beyond expecations, with more than 50,000 attending to witness a crate of disco albums being blown up on the field in between games of a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers. The event ended in a riot, and the playing field was so damaged by the explosion and the rioters that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game to the Tigers.
Many attribute the event as marking the precipitous decline of disco music in American culture.
For “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” it meant that Atlantic Records canceled the pressing of singles to put on the US market, essentially stopping the song at the shoreline.
The song is also noteworthy because of the synthesizer riff played on an ARP Odyssey. This brought an electronic element into ABBA’s disco sound and set the stage for techno music and synth-powered rock in the post-disco era. You can still hear echoes of it in music by the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish, for example.
“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” reached #1 in Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland and Switzerland, and hit #3 in the UK. It didn’t chart in the US for obvious reasons.
The song was hugely popular in clubs where many people were looking for a man after midnight, when it was often played.
Of course, the decline of disco was due to many factors — the AIDS epidemic, the rise of punk, metal, rap, and alternative rock, and the fact that trends only last so long anyhow. But the song remains popular. It appeared in a 2022 episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race and in the 2019 movie Swoon. Of course, it’s in the 2008 ABBA musical Mamma Mia!, where it finally made it to America, probably sounding especially fresh.
Enjoy!