Ring Ring (ABBA song)


"Ring Ring" is a song by ABBA, released as the title track of their 1973 debut album. The single gave the group their big break in several European countries. The song was written in Swedish by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, along with their manager Stig Anderson, with an original title of "Ring Ring ". Translation into English lyrics was helped by Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody. The Swedish version reached No. 1 in the Swedish charts.
"Ring Ring" tells of a lover waiting alone by the telephone for the object of her desire to call.

History

After the success of "People Need Love" in 1972 by Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid, the group's manager, Stig Anderson, realised the potential of coupling the vocal talents of the women with the writing talents of the men. It was then decided that the quartet would record an LP. This eventually turned out to be the album Ring Ring.
Andersson, Ulvaeus and Anderson were invited to enter a song into the selection process for the Swedish entry in the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest. After several days, Andersson and Ulvaeus came up with the music for the Swedish version of "Ring Ring", with the working title "Klocklåt". Anderson wrote the lyrics with the intention of making a pop-oriented song, trying to remove the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest at the time.
After this, the song was retitled "Ring Ring". To make it more accessible to a universal audience, Anderson asked American songwriter Neil Sedaka, together with his songwriting partner, Phil Cody, to pen the lyrics for an English version.
On 10 January 1973, the song was recorded at the Metronome Studio in Stockholm. Studio engineer Michael B. Tretow, who later collaborated with Andersson and Ulvaeus on many singles and albums, had read a book about record producer Phil Spector, famed for his "Wall of Sound" treatment to the songs that he produced. While Spector used several musicians playing the same instruments in the same recording studio at the same time, such a technique would be far too expensive for the recording of "Ring Ring". Tretow's solution was to simply record the song's backing track twice in order to achieve an orchestral sound. Changing the speed of the tape between the overdubs, making the instruments marginally out of tune, increased the effect. This was unlike anything that had been done before in Swedish music.
When ABBA performed "Ring Ring" in the Swedish Eurovision selection competition on 10 February 1973, they only finished third. Nevertheless, the song fared much better in the Swedish charts, both in its Swedish and English language incarnations, hitting No. 1 and No. 2 respectively.
The quartet then decided that performing as a group was a serious and realistic idea. They toured Sweden, and despite the failure of "Ring Ring" to represent the country at the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest, they began to prepare themselves for 1974's competition with "Waterloo".

Reception and other versions

Though "Ring Ring" did not get the opportunity to represent Sweden in the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest, the subtitled Swedish version performed very well on the Swedish charts, giving ABBA their first No. 1 hit. The English version fared almost as well, peaking at No. 2 in Sweden, Norway and Austria, and reaching the Top 10 in the charts of the Netherlands, South Africa and Rhodesia. On the official South African year-end chart for 1974, "Ring Ring" placed 13th and its successor "Waterloo" finished 14th. It topped the charts in Belgium, becoming the first of 16 No. 1 hits for ABBA there. "Ring Ring" was the group's first release in the UK in October 1973, but failed to chart, selling only 5,000 copies. in 1973 the single won a gold record in Sweden for selling 100,000 copies. In Scandinavia the single has sold 200,000 copies. A remixed version of the song, with overdubbed saxophone by :sv:Ulf Andersson |Ulf Andersson, was later described by Carl Magnus Palm as having a "superfluous saxophone solo and leaden sound". This version reached No. 32 in the UK in July 1974, with "Rock'n Roll Band" issued on the B-side. The remix later hit No. 7 in Australia. A second remixed version, based upon the one that had been released in the UK, was included as a bonus track on the original North American release of the Waterloo album. A German-language version of the song was also recorded but failed to chart in West Germany. A Spanish version was also recorded, but was not released until the 1993 CD compilation Más ABBA Oro in selected countries, and internationally on the 1999 edition of .
The master tapes of the 1974 remix were presumed missing, or at least unobtainable, for some years. For this reason, the remix did not appear on the 1994 four-CD box-set Thank You for the Music. In 1999, a CD box set of singles was released that included the remix, but it had been mastered from a vinyl single rather than the unavailable master tape. In 2001, The Definitive Collection was released, which finally included the 1974 single remix sourced from the master tape. It was later revealed on Carl Magnus Palm's website that Polar Music had acquired the master tapes from Epic Records in the UK. This had presumably occurred between 1999 and 2001.

Track listings

Sweden
A. "Ring Ring "
B. "Åh vilka tider"
UK, Spain, Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, Peru, Austria, Netherlands
A. "Ring Ring"
B. "Rock'n Roll Band"
Sweden, Denmark, Columbia
A. "Ring Ring"
B. "She's My Kind of Girl"
Germany
A. "Ring Ring"
B. "Wer Im Wartesaal Der Liebe Steht"

Personnel

ABBA
;Additional personnel and production staff

Official versions

On 5 December 2010, a poll on British television network ITV placed the 1974 version of "Ring Ring" at No. 25 in a survey of the nation's favourite ABBA song.