Happy New Year by ABBA—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2025-26

                                                                        Happy New Year--ABBA

For Americans New Year’s Day is a kind of low key and lethargic holiday.  Many New Year’s Eve revelers nurse hangovers.  For other’s it is a spend the day in pajamas and robe affair to veg out in front of the tube to watch the Rose Parade and endless college bowl games.   It is the biggest day of the year for ordering pizza delivery.

For many Americans New Year's day means drinking coffee, nursing a hangover and watching the Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena.

There have not been many songs for January 1.  For years we were stuck with U2’s first big hit, New Year’s Day released in 1987 and dedicated to the Polish Solidarity movement.  It set the tone for decades of self-important and self-righteous songs with supposedly meaningful and progressive themes with Bono doing his patented vocal pyrotechnics.  A lot of folks love that stuff, but it has come to irritate the hell out of me.  

In 2017 Taylor Swift offered us an alternative.  I know that there are folks who follow this blog who have nothing but scorn for the pop diva and her endlessly autobiographical songs of failed relationships.  But I have always thought that if you take her for what she is and don’t try to compare her female stars of Country Music’s Golden Age she does what she does very well.  Needless to say, Swift had a very, very good 2025 with a record shattering world tour and a hot new relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce   and ’26 might be even better for her with a new Showgirl identity.  Glad somebody is doing well

New Year’s Day was off Swift’s sixth studio album, Reputation. She co-wrote and co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff.  She debuted the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.  It was only a mid-level Country Music hit, but the critical reception was very positive.  The song, however, does not seem to have long term traction outside Swift’s large and devoted fan base.

But we are not turning to either of those songs, or a Bon Jovi entrant into the New Year sweepstakes.  Instead, we are turning to those relentless Swedish Pop hit makers, ABBA.

ABBA around the piano for the New Year.

ABBA was formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. The group’s name was an acronym of the first letters of their first names and sly pun on a rhyme scheme frequently used in pop music lyrics. Originally a folk quartet, they reached international stardom when they began writing, recording, and touring using English language lyrics even in their home country. They were one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest and establishing that televised completion as the most important international venue for emerging artists.  At the height of their world-wide popularity, they were the biggest and most important Swedish economic export topping industrial giants like Volvo and Saab.

Back when they first penetrated the American charts, my rock snob friends derided them.  But their catchy melodies and tight harmonies produced what seemed like an endless list of irresistible ear worms that have outlasted many of the arena rockers of the era.  Their flashy ‘70s style costumes, heavy on synthetic fibers, bright colors, and glitter and the good looks of the two women were part of the 

                                                        ABBA's 1980 European single release of Happy New Year.

Happy New Year was off their 1980 album Super Trouper written by Andersson and Ulvaeus with lead vocals are by Fältskog. The song’s working title was the more festive and humorous Daddy Don’t Get Drunk on Christmas Day, presumably with different lyrics.  It was released as a single in Europe in 1999 and charted in several counties.

                                                         The Argentine release of Felicidad.

ABBA also released a version in Spanish, Felicidad, which became a top hit in Argentina and other Latin American countries.  But the song never got traction in the U.S.

It has, however, become a New Year’s Eve tradition in Sweden where videotaped performances are the annual highlight of the celebration.

 

Cats Opened on Broadway —The Musical Not Every Other Instagram Meme

  

Part of the original Broadway cast of Cats. 

When Cats opened on Broadway Forty three years ago on October 8, 1982 at the Winter Garden Theatre it was already a sensation in London’s West End.  It opened during an era when the creative energy seemed drained from American musical theater, and a string of grand spectacle British productions, many with operatic overtones, was establishing domination on the Great White Way. It opened with high expectations, but no one expected that it would run for 7,493 performances—then a record and still the fourth longest run in Broadway history.  It lasted so long that the show originally lauded as ground-breaking and fresh, became the butt of David Letterman jokes and required sophisticated New York theater goers to sneeringly dismiss it as sentimental slop for the rubes in town from Iowa. 

The show had an unusual origin, not a novel, or a conventional stage play, a movie adaptation, or an original book, but in a whimsical throw-away from the proclaimed greatest English Language poet of the 20th Century—T.S. Eliot.  Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was collected from cat psychology poems enclosed in letters to Eliot’s God children signed as Old Possum.  Eliot published a limited edition with his own illustrations in 1939.  It stirred enough interest that a second edition for the general public was published the next year with illustrations by Nicolas Bentley.  Despite its success the usually serious minded Eliot did not regard the little book as one of his important creations.

 

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats illustrated by T. S. Eliot himself. 

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber was already famous for his collaborations with lyricist Tim Rice for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita.  He was in search of projects to develop on his own.  Fondly recalling Eliot’s book as a childhood favorite, he began to set some of the poems to music as early as 1977.  He premiered a concert version of the songs in 1980 at the annual Sydmonton Festival that he hosted in an old church on his Hampshire estate.  Eliot’s widow Valerie was charmed and ultimately gave the composer permission to stage a full scale musical under the unusual provision that no script be written and that Eliot’s original poems be used as the text.

In early 1981 the show went into rehearsals produced in partnership by Webber’s Real Useful Group and Cameron Mackintosh, then beginning his run as the world’s most successful super producer.  As Weber finalized the score he added adaptations of two other Eliot poems to the lyrics from the Old Possum’s book—Rhapsody on a Windy Night which Trevor Nunn adapted to the plays signature song, Memories and the brief song The Moments of Happiness was from a passage in Eliot’s Four Quartets.

During rehearsals the cast, an unusually large number of whom had “speaking”, singing, and featured dancing parts, was confused with the unusual structure of the play and the lack of conventional dialog or even a plot.  Theater goers, even those who ended up loving the show, were often equally perplexed.  It was said that without explanatory notes in the program, no one would know what was going on.

All of the action for the play took place on, or in front, of one set—a junk yard—over and around which a tribe of Cats roamed, related, and told their stories.  The slender premise was that it was the night of the Jellicle Choice when the tribe gathers and the wise Old Deuteronomy and selects one of their number to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.  The cats, each with a colorful name and distinct appearance and fur, discovered they are being observed by humans and explained The Naming of Cats.  They took turns telling their own stories—or sometimes having their stories told by others in songs for which Webber employed a wide and eclectic variety of styles—classical, pop, music hall, jazz, rock, electro-acoustic music, and hymns.  Gillian Lynne choreographed extended dance sequences and there was even a play-with-in-a-play recalling a performance of a now elderly actor cat.

What almost passed for a plot was what happened to Grizabella, a former Glamour Cat, who long ago left the Tribe and returned used up, sick of body and soul, only to be shunned.  It was Grizabella who introduced herself with the plaintive aria Memories, which became the huge international hit from the show.  She was ultimately redeemed by the tender attention of kittens and ultimately was selected by Old Deuteronomy for the ascent to Heaviside. 

As rehearsals drew near to opening night a young Judy Dench, who was cast in the key role of Grizabella, severely injured her ankle and was replaced by Elain Page, the actress most associated with the part in its long West End Run, on tour, and later in Webber’s video production.

Cats opened on May 11, 1981 at the New London Theater to ecstatic reviews and sold out houses.  It went on to run for 8,949 performances, exactly 21 years with a final performance on May 11, 2002.  It won the most important British theatrical awards—the Olivier Awards—for Best New Musical and Outstanding Achievement in a Musical for choreographer Lynne.

 

 Betty Buckley as Grizabella on Broadway.

With a smash hit in London under their belt, the core creative team including Weber, Mackintosh, Director Trevor Nunn, and Lynne turned to mounting a Broadway production on even a grander scale.  The show opened with Betty Buckley, best known as the stepmother on the long running TV family dramedy Eight is Enough, as Grizabella.

At the 1983 Tony Awards Cats received 10 nominations wining seven trophies including Best Musical, Best Book posthumously to T.S. Eliot, Best Score for Webber, Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Buckley, Best Director for Nunn, Best Costume Design for John Napier, and Best Lighting Design for David Hersey.

Cats has subsequently been translated into more than 20 languages and major professional productions have been mounted around the world.  Webber produced a made for TV version in Britain in 1998 starring Elaine Paige, Ken Page, who originated Old Deuteronomy on Broadway, Sir John Mills as Gus, Michael Gruber as Munkustrap, John Partridge as The Rum Tum Tugger, Jo Gibb as Rumpelteazer, and dancers and singers drawn from various stage productions of the show.  The production is available on CD.

 

 A 2019 star studded movie version was a monumental flop and Taylor Swift was singled out for particular scorn.  Maybe the only serious failure in her relentlessly succesfuly and self-topping career.

A star studded Universal Pictures movie was a Christmas release in 2019. It was an enormous flop with both critics and audiences despite the cast which included James Corden, Judy Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Francesca Hayward, Ian McKellen, and Rebel Wilson.  But superstar pop diva Taylor Swift was the target of exceptional scorn for her appearance.  Unlike other famous flops, this film does not seem to be developing a cult following.

 

Happy New Year by ABBA—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2023-‘24

                                                        Happy New Year--ABBA

For Americans New Year’s Day is a kind of low key and lethargic holiday.  Many New Year’s Eve revelers nurse hangovers.  For other’s it is a spend the day in pajamas and robe affair to veg out in front of the tube to watch the Rose Parade and endless college bowl games.   It is the biggest day of the year for ordering pizza delivery.

For many Americans New Year's day means drinking coffee, nursing a hangover and watching the Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena.

There have not been many songs for January 1.  For years we were stuck with U2’s first big hit, New Year’s Day released in 1987 and dedicated to the Polish Solidarity movement.  It set the tone for decades of self-important and self-righteous songs with supposedly meaningful and progressive themes with Bono doing his patented vocal pyrotechnics.  A lot of folks love that stuff, but it has come to irritate the hell out of me.  

In 2017 Taylor Swift offered us an alternative.  I know that there are folks who follow this blog who have nothing but scorn for the pop diva and her endlessly autobiographical songs of failed relationships.  But I have always thought that if you take her for what she is and don’t try to compare her female stars of country music’s golden age she does what she does very well.  Needless to say, Swift had a very, very good 2023 and ’24 might be even better for her.  Glad somebody is doing well

New Year’s Day was off Swift’s sixth studio album, Reputation. She co-wrote and co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff.  She debuted the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and was only a mid-level country music hit.  But the critical reception was very positive.  The song, however, does not seem to have long term traction outside Swift’s large and devoted fan base.

But we are not turning to either of those songs, or a Bon Jovi entrant into the New Year sweepstakes.  Instead, we are turning to those relentless Swedish Pop hit makers, ABBA.

ABBA around the piano for the New Year.

ABBA was formed in Stockholm in 1972 by Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. The group’s name was an acronym of the first letters of their first names and sly pun on a rhyme scheme frequently used in pop music lyrics. Originally a folk quartet, they reached international stardom when they began writing, recording, and touring using English language lyrics even in their home country. They were one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest and establishing that televised completion as the most important international venue for emerging artists.  At the height of their world-wide popularity, they were the biggest and most important Swedish economic export topping industrial giants like Volvo and Saab.

Back when they first penetrated the American charts, my rock snob friends derided them.  But their catchy melodies and tight harmonies produced what seemed like an endless list of irresistible ear worms that have outlasted many of the arena rockers of the era.  Their flashy ‘70s style costumes, heavy on synthetic fibers, bright colors, and glitter and the good looks of the two women were part of the appeal.

                                        ABBA's 1980 European single release of Happy New Year.

Happy New Year was off their 1980 album Super Trouper written by Andersson and Ulvaeus with lead vocals are by Fältskog. The song’s working title was the more festive and humorous Daddy Don’t Get Drunk on Christmas Day, presumably with different lyrics.  It was released as a single in Europe in 1999 and charted in several counties.

                                        The Argentine release of Felicidad.

ABBA also released a version in Spanish, Felicidad and became a top hit in Argentina and other Latin American countries.  But the song never got traction in the U.S.

It has, however, become a New Year’s Eve tradition in Sweden where videotaped performances are the annual highlight of the celebration.