Fan memories - March 3rd, 1977, Sydney Showground
1) Similar to Feb 2002 in Sydney where we had 21 out of 28 days where it rained, Feb-March 1977 in Sydney was also a very rainy period.
Memories of the 1977 Sydney ABBA concert aren't as clear as they used to be, but I remember the excitement and anticipation of seeing ABBA live on that Thursday night back in 1977. There was a mad scamper to get the best seats and I managed to initially get a seat in front of the main mixing desk. As time passed by however, before the concert, heavy rain forced me to move up into the grandstands, which in hindsight was a bad move. It was so far from the stage it was hard to tell who was who when the concert began. The rain was pouring down; and the sound was...and I hate to say it...pretty bad. By the time they got to Money, Money, Money the rain had eased off a little and the sound improved a little. I think most people around me particularly enjoyed the I'm an A number very much.I was one of the many in the audience naive enough to think Bjorn was serious when he said he was going to meet everyone backstage after the concert and shake hands with us all - I still remember the boos when he said it was only a joke ! The Girl with the Golden Hair musical really did not go down very well withmany in the audience. I remember many people around me were leaving the concert during the mini-musical and the rain had also started to bucket down again too. ABBA were really brave to introduce new music like this at such a concert but I wouldn't have missed it for the world and couldn't wait for the following nights concert.
Harold Hanlon
Sydney, Australia
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The anticipation started
the previous October, when the tickets for 10 concerts went on sale (it
ended up being 11 concerts, with 2 in Sydney
instead of 1).
At the time, I lived in Canberra
(where ABBA weren't going - the closest concerts were in Sydney). I didn't
really expect to go - at the time there
were some "financial difficulties". So imagine my surprise when
I came home from school one afternoon and my mother told me that we were
flying up to Sydney for the ABBA concert! I hadn't even asked - she'd
just gone ahead and booked it. One of the local radio stations was organising
group packages including return flights, accommodation (if wanted, or
you could return the same night) and the concert tickets.
So, after all those months of waiting, finally it was Thursday 3rd March. We (my mother, sister and I) flew up in the afternoon after school. We arrived at the Sydney Showgrounds at around 5 pm. It had been raining for weeks, and in the days leading up to the concert it was feared that it would be cancelled because the Showground arena would have been waterlogged, and the Royal Easter Show was coming up in just a few weeks.
It was raining when we got to the Showground, and mum decided that we would sit in the grandstand rather than on the ground so that we wouldn't get too wet :-( I wanted to get as close to the front as possible - there were still plenty of seats down there- but mum wouldn't let me go alone, worrying that she'd never find me after the concert. So I was stuck miles away from thestage. Bummer. I'd also wanted to take my portable cassette recorder so that I could tape the concert, but mum wouldn't let me do that either. I had all the records, after all. Even though we knew that there were 5 new songs from the reports of the European shows, I didn't take it. I still regret that. You get a quick shot of what my view of the concert was like during the opening of 'Tiger' in 'The Movie' - just before the girls start singing, there's a long shot of the stage. *That* was my view.
So while we waited for the concert, we entertained ourselves with looking through our binoculars at what was going on. There were people on stage continually mopping up water and checking equipment, and at one stage we saw Stig Anderson standing to the side of the stage. I went in search of a concert programme, but didn't buy any other merchandise. Not that they had a lot - they had the Scandecor Arrival poster (not really practical to buy), the ABBA badges (as seen in The Movie - "get your ABBA buttons") and I think the most recent TV Week foldout poster thing ("ABBA books and posters, 75 cents").
I also found another couple of guys from my school who'd won tickets in a radio competition. These 2 guys were good at winning things like that. Coincidentally, they were sitting in the same row as us!
A while after we got there (before it got dark) a few dark coloured cars could be seen driving up behind the stage. The audience erupted as this was probably ABBA arriving! But the cars disappeared out of view so we couldn't see anything.
There was a guy in our part
of the grandstand selling fairy floss (cotton candy) - except he kept
saying "fairy's floss". We all though that was
hysterically funny, and every time he came past, we'd all yell to *him*
"fairy's floss!!!". We heard later that night that he'd slipped
on the wet
stairs and broken his leg.
So we waited and waited.
The rain kept coming down, and even in our "sheltered" spot,
we were getting wet. Not drenched, but wet anyway.
Eventually it got dark, and occasionally lights would come on on the stage.
There were occasional announcements about remaining seated so that people
behind would be able to see, how many minutes it was until the concert
started ("twenty minutes till you get your rocks off!" - perhaps
not the most appropriate thing to say in regard to ABBA or the audience,
with lots of young kids or older people, but they said it repeatedly anyway).
Finally 8.30 rolled around, and the rain was teeming. Would the concert go on? It was worrying...
Not too many minutes late, it was time. The musicians took to the stage andlaunched into 'Tiger' - not that we could tell exactly what it was, it sound so different to the studio version. I immediately regretted not having the tape recorder. As the members of ABBA ran onto the stage, the audience erupted into this huge cheer/scream that lasted for ages - as I recall, at least for half the song, which may have been a good thing as it drowned out the sound system that wasn't coping well with the rain. The entire arena had a constant strobe from camera flashes going off, which lasted non-stop until the middle of 'That's Me'. What you see in 'The Movie' of this goes nowhere near showing the true excitement of that moment. I'd never heard a sound like it, and have never really heard anything like it since.
I don't remember the concert
as a whole, but I remember lots of little bits and pieces. I remember
Björn's introduction and his bit about us making them "forget
the rain". I remember missing Frida slip over during 'Waterloo' (on
her front, not on her bum, and not during SOS, as so many reports say)
- I was hitting my sister cause she was whinging about being there. Mum
said "Frida's fallen over", but by the time I looked, she was
up again. I remember during 'Sitting In The Palmtree' a silhouette of
a palm tree was projected onto the back of the stage. And how weird it
was that the song faded out, rather than ending. I remember during 'Fernando'
there was a fire effect projected - and then the stars came out (on the
back of the stage, not in the sky) for the chorus. I remember Björn's
thanking us for persevering with the rain, and how he wanted us all to
come backstage afterwards so that they could shake our hands! I was excited
for a nano-second, then thought "how in the world do you get 30,000
people through a backstage area, and will I miss out?" By which time
Björn said that he was "just kidding". There was another
similar joke after the singalong bit of 'Fernando', when he said that
we'd all sung so well, he wanted to sign us
all up. Is that man full of shit or what? ;-) The rain died down and then
stopped at some stage, but I have no idea when that happened.
The only bits of 'I Am An A' that I remember from that night were Agnetha'sline to Björn "you should live in a cave" and Björn's line about Agnetha "craziest woman I've met". Those 2 bits stayed with me for years until I finally got a copy someone had recorded.
I don't really remember much of "The Girl With The Golden Hair". I remember'Thank You For The Music' sort of, and then there was this song 'Marionette' that seemed to go on for hours. Months later I was rather surprised when'The Name Of The Game' single was released, and had this song 'I Wonder (Departure)' "recorded live in Sydney, March 1977" on the B side. Where the fuck did this come from? Eventually I found out that it was the 2nd song in the mini-musical. But I didn't recall it at all.
Ditto with 'Get On The Carousel', and my surprise when it appeared in 'TheMovie'. Years later, hearing the full mini-musical, I finally understood why I'd missed it and thought that 'Marionette' went on forever, with the chorus of 'Marionette' reprising in 'Carousel', I probably just thought that it was just one long song. And now I wonder if I only noticed those 2 songs because in all the reviews from Europe, only 'Thank You' and 'Marionette' had been mentioned.
Actually, the main memory of "The Girl With The Golden Hair" was trying to work out which one was Frida and which one was Agnetha. It was hard at thatdistance, even *with* binoculars!
After the mini-musical, there was quite a long break after ABBA left thestage. But they hadn't done 'Dancing Queen' - surely they weren't going to miss it? But no, Björn came back on stage and said that we all had to get up and dance. And then it started. Fabulous. The ABBA logo appeared on the back wall, and people everywhere were dancing - the arena was a mass of moving people.
Then ABBA and the band all lined up on the front of the stage to sing 'Thank You For The Music' again, and it was all over. Fireworks filled the sky, and in one of the pavilions (very close to us) was spelled out a "thank you" message from ABBA and Paul Dainty (the tour promoter).
During the concert I'd written down every song that was sung (so that I would remember, and so that I could report back to people from school who hadn't gone). Sadly, I've lost that bit of paper, though recently I did come across where I'd attempted to write it out neatly (which in my handwriting is near impossible, which is why I don't write by hand anymore!). I'd also taken quite a few photos on my little Kodak Instamatic, but of course they didn't come out - just a small coloured square in a sea of black. The photo shop didn't even make prints! My sister took a couple of photos with a flash, so there are a couple of photos of heads, blackness and a tiny coloured square in the middle. I have no idea where those photos are today - probably in one of my boxes of ABBA junk cluttering up the house ;-)
So after the concert we had to get out of the Showground and find our bus to take us to our hotel for the night- the Hyatt Kingsgate at Kings Cross. We were rather high up, and on the Darlinghurst Road side of the hotel (for the uninitiated, Kings Cross is the "red light" area of Sydney, and Darlinghurst Road the main street through it). Feeling hungry and thirsty (I don't think any of us had eaten or drunk anything since we left Canberra in the afternoon, unless we had a Coke or something at the Showground, I don't remember now). So we walked down to the Boulevard Hotel (at midnight or thereabouts!) to go to the coffee shop (the first time I'd ever been in a "coffee shop"!) - my mother, my sister and me. There were a few other family groups there who'd been to the concert, so we all got to talking, and it came up that everyone was surprised that ABBA didn't finish the concert with 'So Long'. It was only then that I realised that they hadn't done it at all! Guess it was dropped to go straight to 'Dancing Queen' as that the concert would be over and everyone could get out of the rain.
Afterwards, we went back to the hotel, and mum and I spent ages looking down on Darlinghurst Road, through our binoculars, at the men coming and going to the Pink Pussycat. An unusual activity for a mother and her 13 year old son, but there you go. My sister must have gone to sleep.
The following day, we were leaving Sydney on a 9 am flight. I complained to mum that we should have made the flight later so that we could go sightseeing. I probably wanted to go to the Sydney Opera House, which I was obsessed with at the time. It would have been funny if we *had* done that - because you-know-who were there for a photo call ("no interviews, just press photographers today").
Instead, we went to the airport. It was still pissing down with rain. At a newsstand of giftshop or whatever, I saw the 3 ABBA cloth banners - but mum wouldn't buy them "because you already have those pictures". So unfortunately, I only have one of them now that I got years later. But I did buy up the morning papers, both of which had pages of reviews and pictures (including The Daily Telegraph's "Whoops! ABBA's Slip Is Showing" as seen in 'The Movie').
So we boarded our plane, which was then stuck in a queue of planes waiting to take off in the rain. We probably waited 30 minutes or so, which is how long the flight took! And what I found fascinating was that when we eventually got in the air, we were in cloud the whole way back to Canberra.
By the time we got home, it was too late to go to school - which we'd beenplanning to do, even if we would have gotten there a bit late. So I went to the newsagent and bought the Sydney papers again (we had earlier editions that were trucked down in the middle of the night) which had some different pictures to the later editions I'd bought in Sydney, as well as some other papers that had reviews. So I didn't get to tell everyone at school about the concert until the following Monday.
For months afterwards, I
would sit there with my list of the songs performed, and play the songs
from the records in the order they were in in
the concert. Except for 'I Am An A' and "The Girl With The Golden
Hair", of course. And finally in January the following year, I got
to relive the
concert again (sort of) when 'The Movie' finally opened.
There's a chunk of my ABBA
Phenonenon site about the Australian tour, if anyone's interested to see
it.
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Studio/5073/
Ian Cole in Sydney Australia
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Hello everybody,
Well I've been sitting in
the rain down here in Melbourne today 2002, just like a Thursday night
25 years ago. I often drift back to that night when I'm listening to ABBA
music. I don't know why, it must have been a great escape time in my teenage
years. I remember the lead up to the concert night for months before hand
there was never an issue of a magazine or a paper that didn't carry a
story about ABBA and what they were doing. Every week a new picture would
appear or a different size of the journalist favorite picture of ABBA.
Mum and I went to Moore Park to buy the tickets for the concert in October
1976 and when we got there,there was nobody except for one person in front
of us
and he was buying tickets for a radio competition. Mum asked why there
was nobody and the man told her to look behind her as
there was a sea of people coming across the park, we must have come in
between buses or something!
I was sent to school on the Thursday and mum was expecting me to come home at normal time but I had other ideas. I did the morning and when it was time for Latin I disappeared. Mum was not happy to the point of not wanting to go but we left about 1pm for the show grounds mum cursed all the way in saying we were to early and it was ridiculous to stand in the rain all that time. The crowds were starting to arrive and we were at the top of the queue but when they opened the steel roller doors about 4pm, mum couldn't run that fast to stay at the top of the line. I was worried about mum so I stopped running but we still had great seats about 13 rows from the front.
We sat in the pouring rain
for 4 hours it didn't do anything for my mum she just kept saying that
they won't perform in this weather.
Hotel California and New Kid in town was the only record that they had
because they played it over and over again just checking the speakers.
The people, mopping the stage was unbelievable a true case of all hands
on deck. The were just pushing sheets of water off the stage and they
had placed white towels everywhere.
Mum made friends with the
lady behind us she had a cask of wine, I went and bought a programme and
a button that i didn't have and from then on in I didn't move and I was
so wet, it was even starting to rain through the umbrella. It was dark
and wet and then we had the announcer start to tell us about the show
and the lights went down then up again and the show was on. I stood in
front of the piano because I wanted to see Benny and Frida and I was hoping
that they would be together on stage.I was so rapped when they were, I
just stood there staring at them and Mum was trying to pull me down of
the seat because she thought that i might slip. I didn't but poor Frida
sure did and It happened so fast. I'm staring at her and then bang, the
microphone hit the stage even though Frida never let go of it. Frida got
up just as
fast as she fell and I could see the pained look on her face but she looked
at Benny and carried on.
Now 25 years later I can not remember the order of the songs unless I go to Ian's site first :) I do remember soaking up a lot of the new songs and a lot of water at the same time. Bjorn said that he would shake hands with us for standing in the rain for so long.I was so disappointed that it didn't happen.I remember being asked to clap along by which one I don't remember but after standing in the rain and your hands are like prunes, they don't really make any noise.I had a hoarse voice from screaming out. It was one of those warm and fuzzy nights that never leave your memory. While Thank you for the music was playing my mother dragged me away, through the mud and onto the last train to Bankstown. We arrived home about midnight.(see public transport has not improved)
I spent the whole next day talking about the concert, I think my class mates did not share my enthusasim but it got them out of class work.Even though I can't remember lots of the finer details that night will always be with me it was one off the highlights of my life and I'm sitting here looking at my little pictures taken with 126 film and a cube flash. I can just make them out on stage, I wish the person in front of me didn't have such a bright green coat, it has reflected the flash badly.
Carolyn Styles
Melbourne Australia
All reviews were posted on ABBAMAIL,
March 3rd, 2002
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