Thank you for the music

By Matthew Sweet

A basement in Stockholm. A tomato-red plastic telephone mounted on a pedestal. Behind it, a wall-size photograph depicting two women and two men. Young, cheerful, pristine – and known throughout the world as the blonde one, the brunette, the one with the beard and the one without the beard. Bolted above this, an official-looking sign with a message in urgent upper-case italics, hinting that in the advent of some distinctly Scandinavian catastrophe – the coming of Ragnarök, the fall of the great tree of Yggdrasil – help would be at hand. “OM TELEFONEN RINGER, SVARA, DE AT ABBA SOM RINGER!”

I know what you’re thinking. Where are the faience ushabti? The fragile Venetian tapestries? The photographs of a Booker winner in a reverie before a vitrine of Meissen ware? And hang on – isn’t that the helicopter from the cover of “Arrival”? Surely this writer has misunderstood the brief. What next for these pages? Madame Tussaud’s? Planet Hollywood? Peppa Pig World?