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With 2007 shaping to be a relatively quiet year on the ABBA front, there's not much going on to get excited about ABBA at the moment. Although it's funny how the random play feature on iPods will bring up some songs from the depths of the collection that haven't been heard in ages and make you want to delve a little deeper because it's all of a sudden tickled your fancy again. Such was the case for me when Erasure's cover of "Take A Chance On Me" fired up on the iPod unexpectedly. I found myself enjoying it for the first time in ages and it was good.

I immediately had to exit the random play and look up the Erasure ABBA-esque tracks and give them a play for the rest of my journey to work. It was probably the most fun I've had all year involving ABBA songs. And I think it's perfectly okay that it's not even the original versions to get me in the mood to enjoy these select songs. It's such a shame that Erasure only did so few of the ABBA songs, but I suppose some is better than none at all. I am not much of an electronic fan but their creative adaptations of the familiar ABBA classics was certainly a welcome breath of fresh air when originally released in the 1990's and surprisingly for me bringing some much needed freshness to these songs for me here in 2007.

"Lay All Your Love On Me", as interpreted by Erasure was probably not the most original interpretation as it's very similar to Information Society's interpretation of the song that was done in 1988, but adding 4 years and Andy Bell's smooth vocals was definitely an improvement. I do recall from the early days of my ABBA fandom having a local friend from the job I had at the time love Erasure's version and even knew of Information Society's version but had no clue the song was originally by ABBA. In fact he thought, the Information Society version was the original.

Erasure's version of "S.O.S." has a wonderfully hypnotic quality about it with its smooth flowing electronic sounds that almost feel like an auditory massage of the mind. While the interpretation may not have the emotional depth to suit the lyrics, I think the emotionally evasive interpretation leaves the message up to the listener, as it seems to take a sense of ambivalence often found in that stage of getting bad news and before it truly sinks in. That calm before the storm so to speak.

It was with a little bit of surprise to find out later on when buying Erasure's "Pop!" greatest hits package, that they had not topped the charts until they covered "Take A Chance On Me" but upon putting this version on, it's easy to see why it stormed up the charts to claim the top position in the U.K. I wasn't even yet an ABBA fan at the time it was also quite popular here in the U.S. The beat of the song seemed to be a perfect fit for an electronic reinterpretation, and the great vocals including the breathy parts from ABBA's original make it fun. The only detracting part is the rapping done by MC Kinky. Fortunately it's not too long as to be completely intrusive. Even the video is a complete joy with Andy Bell and Vince Clarke spoofing the original ABBA video playing some very frightening looking drag versions of Frida and Agnetha.

And closing out the original EP is Erasure's version of "Voulez Vous" which is probably where the electronics come across as the most annoying. But the true irony for me is that while on the original EP, this song is the least listenable, on the remix EP which included a remix of each of the ABBA-esque songs that Erasure covered, the "Brain Stem Death Test Mix" as it's called is the only remix I can actually listen to. In fact the remix is one I love to listen to in the car and will often repeat it on the rare occasions it comes up. I've always found it unfortunate the other remixes just were not that enjoyable.

Now that would be the extent to which most fans would know about for the ABBA-esque covers by Erasure. However, Erasure did one more song and actually pre-dates the ABBA-esque EP by five years, and it's available in two versions, if you know where to find them. That last song is "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" The more readily available version is their live version which is tacked on as a bonus track to their "Two Ring Circus" album back in the days when bonus tracks were added to CDs to encourage their sales over vinyl and cassette versions. The other is a studio version that appears as an extra track on the "Oh L'Amour" single.

The live version of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" starts out with Andy singing lines from ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" about finding a wealthy man and not having to work at all and having a ball before jumping into the song. This version is a lot of fun as the audience helps feed some energy into the performance and it gets faster as the song goes along. Also the instrumentation sounds a little smoother here than in the studio version. The studio version has smoother vocals but that's to be expected.

All in all even in 2007, it's still quite fun to enjoy Erasure's reinterpretations of five ABBA classics. It's a shame that when Erasure recently released a live album of their songs reinterpreted in an acoustic fashion that their didn't give a unique acoustic treatment to their biggest hit, even if that hit was a borrowed ABBA classic.

Ryan