ABBA‘s “Mamma Mia” is world famous. With a catchy chorus and a blockbuster film starring Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried behind it, people of all generations know the tune. But back in 1975, the band nearly gave the song away.
ABBA was not at all sure of their future that year. They’d won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, and had a hit with the song “Waterloo,” but their subsequent singles didn’t fare as well and their tour dates didn’t sell out. It began to seem as though ABBA’s fate was that of a one-hit wonder band.
“If you look at the singles we released straight after ‘Waterloo,’ we were trying to be more like the Sweet, a semi-glam rock group,” Bjorn Ulvaeus later recalled to The Guardian in 2014. “Which was stupid because we were always a pop group.”
Nevertheless, the band kept writing songs. At one point, Ulvaeus and his bandmate Benny Andersson convened in the library of Ulvaeus’ home in Stockholm. Here, they casually penned a song they called “Mamma Mia.” Their manager, Stig Anderson, helped come up with the name.
“That turned out to be another distinctive and memorable title, and one that maybe a native English writer would have thought was too European – and very uncool,” Ulvaeus recalled in the book Mamma Mia! How Can I Resist You?: The Inside Story of Mamma Mia! and the Songs of ABBA. “The saying ‘mamma mia’ is used very, very commonly in Swedish and is just as well known a phrase as it would be in English.”
‘Mamma Mia’ Was Nearly Given Away
But at that point, ABBA didn’t think all that much of the song, to the extentt they offered it to the British pop group Brotherhood of Man to record.
“We knew it was a potential smash,” singer Martin Lee recounted to The Guardian in 2022, “but left it for the next recording session because we wanted to do ‘Save Your Kisses for Me.’ Of course, ABBA then did it themselves.”
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This turned out to be an excellent stroke of fate. “Mamma Mia” was the last song ABBA recorded for their self-titled 1975 album. On March 12 of that year, the band gathered in Metronome Studio in Stockholm, where they were joined by drummer Roger Palm, bassist Mike Watson and guitarist Finn Sjoberg. There’s also the famous marimba intro, which came about merely because there happened to be one sitting in the corner of the studio that day.
Which is not to say ABBA took a haphazard approach to recording the song.
“If you listen to ‘Mamma Mia,’ it’s very intricate, no one is playing rang-a-lang-a-lang-a. Everyone is knowing exactly what they’re doing,” Andersson said to The Guardian in 2008. “That was one of the first tracks when we started to do that. Everything is tightly arranged.”
Vocals were done then, strings were overdubbed and some additional guitar recorded on March 15, and the song was completed less than six weeks before it appeared on ABBA.
Slow Success for ‘Mamma Mia’
Despite its promising sound — and an accompanying promotional clip — “Mamma Mia” was not chosen to be released as a single anywhere in the world with the exception of one country: Australia. ABBA’s music was particularly popular down under, which led to Anderson, the band’s manager, allowing “Mamma Mia” to be released as a single there in August of 1975, where it went to the No. 1 spot for 10 weeks. Finally, it was released as a single in the U.K., grabbing the No. 1 spot there, too.
Australia’s love of ABBA continued, but it did not appear entirely out of the blue — there were people championing the song along the way.
Watch the Music Video for ‘Mamma Mia’
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Gallery Credit: UCR Staff
