Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed

I assume that somewhere on the guided ‘Piers and Queers’ walking tour of Brighton, the participants are enjoined to regard, in awe, the Dome — the venue at which Abba, on 6 April 1974, won the Eurovision Song Contest, thus both launching themselves as a wildly successful band and establishing the town (as it was then) as a mecca (probably the wrong choice of word there) for the UK’s swiftly growing gay community. Hitherto it had been a rather frowsy, Tory-voting seaside resort, best known for dirty weekends and petty villains. The Swedes won with ‘Waterloo’, of course, which may have provided our nation with some much-needed succour. A remembrance of good things past. We were the sick man of Europe, with a minority government, an inflation rate of 16 per cent, seemingly everybody on strike and with recent baleful memories of eating our tea by candlelight. Abba, meanwhile, were a shock to the Eurovision system, which was wholly unused to a perky, competent boogie containing an elongated historical metaphor, and the song is often regarded as the best-ever winner of that incalculably inane competition.