That’s the Broom Leys Choral Society concert done – as always a very enjoyable evening. There was lots of good music but, if I had to pick the songs I enjoyed playing the most I might go with the ABBA numbers. It isn’t because I think they were the best songs or the ones I’d be most likely to want to listen to but just plain old nostalgia.

When I was in the process of taking up the bass, the music teacher at school had a number of medleys that he used. There was definitely a Beatles one, a Simon and Garfunkel one and, the one that perhaps made the deepest impression on me, an ABBA one. I think I just had words and chords to work from. That medley was used in one of my first public performances… and I haven’t played a lot of ABBA since. We did have a bit of ABBA in the ukulele group at Oxford but I don’t think we ever performed it and I’ve played a medley with the concert band but that doesn’t have any singing and all the notes are written down for me.

For tonight’s performance, I managed to track down some transcriptions online for three of the numbers (although they all needed work to mesh with the choral arrangement) and I had to work up Super Trouper from scratch. So the fruits of some labour, a dash of nostalgia and an enjoyable evening.