Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
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| "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" | ||
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| Single by ABBA | ||
| from the album Greatest Hits Vol. 2 | ||
| Released | October, 1979 | |
| Format | Single | |
| Genre | Pop | |
| Length | 4:46 | |
| Label | Polar Music | |
| Writer(s) | Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus | |
| Producer(s) | Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus | |
| Certification | — | |
| Chart positions | ||
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| ABBA singles chronology | ||
| "As Good As New" (1979) |
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" (1979) |
"I Have A Dream" (1979) |
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" is one of the Swedish pop group ABBA's biggest disco hits. It was recorded and released in 1979 with "The King Has Lost His Crown" as the B-side. "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" features on ABBA's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 album, as well as their bestselling ABBA Gold album.
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[edit] The song
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" was written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, with lead vocals sung by primarily Agnetha Fältskog, along with Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Agnetha, as the narrarator, weaves the image of a lonely young woman who longs for a romantic relationship and views her loneliness as a forbidding darkness of night, even drawing parallels to how the happy endings of movie stars are so different from her own existence. The song was recorded at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm, Sweden in August of 1979, and was ready for release in October 1979, in conjunction with the group's tour of North America and Europe. The song was also part of ABBA's second Greatest Hits album.
Originally ABBA recorded another song, "Rubber Ball Man", which was planned as a single. It featured the typical "ABBA-arrangement" with both Fältskog and Lyngstad on lead vocals and a classical string arrangement. This song was also performed by ABBA during the rehearsals for their current tour as "Under My Sun". However the group felt that "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" with its disco-sound would be a better choice, "Rubber Ball Man" remained nothing more than a demo.
[edit] Chart success
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" was a number-one hit in European countries as diverse as Belgium, Switzerland, Finland and Ireland. It made number two in the French, Austrian, Norwegian and Dutch charts, while hitting number three in the United Kingdom and West Germany, and number eight in Australia. The single failed to make it into the USA's Billboard Hot 100. By ABBA's standards, this was a modest success, if not quite as successful as many of their earlier hits. 1979 was the year in which ABBA released five singles in the UK, all of them reaching the top five, but none of them reaching number one.
The song has remained well-known over the years. A faithful cover in 1986 by British synthpop duo Erasure, who released it as the B-side to their 12" single "Oh L'amour", gave the song an even greater camp appeal, as gay male singer Andy Bell didn't change a word. Such was its success - and the band's appeal to gay audiences - that Erasure would go on to record a further EP of ABBA songs. In the same year the song was also recorded and released as a single by the Swedish band The Leather Nun.
A decade and a half later, teen pop group A*Teens, who recorded a full album of ABBA material, released their cover of the song as a single. As a B-side to their single "Gimme Back My Brain", the Northern Irish rock band Therapy? recorded a cover version. More recently, it was sampled by Madonna, a self-confessed ABBA fan who used it on her worldwide hit "Hung Up". Madonna claimed to have begged Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to use the song as a sample [1], since the Swedish songwriting duo are reluctant to let other artists sample their material. It was only the second time an ABBA track had been officially sampled, the first being the Fugees in 1996 with their hit "Rumble in the Jungle" sampling part of 1977's "The Name of the Game". The famous guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen released a metal version of the song, titled "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (your love after midnight)". The song features the same lyrics, with minor edits, and the same music with a more powerful metal feel. Malmsteen plays an arpeggiated version of the main theme in his version, and has added guitar solos in the instrumental bridge.
[edit] Trivia
- The single version of this song, which was released in its full album length of 4:46 everywhere else in the world, was released in the United States and Canada only in an edited version of 3:36 in length, removing the first half of the opening instrumental, removing the first four of the eight bars of the instrumental bridge between the second chorus and the final chorus, and fading the song out early. It is believed the edit was done by Atlantic Records, ABBA's label in North America at the time, and not by Polar Records, hence the reason why it was available only in the USA and Canada. This single version has never appeared on a commercial CD issued by Polar/Universal.
- Another piece of trivia surrounding this release by Atlantic is that it marked the only time the label released an edited version of an ABBA song on a single. All other ABBA singles in North America used full-length album tracks, even if edited single versions were released in other countries by Polar Records and their international affiliates (such as Epic in the UK).
- A looped sample at the end of the chorus before the eight-bar instrumental was used for a song with the same title, by Shana Vanguarde.
- The instrumental was also used as a sample on Madonna's "Hung Up", with the full permission of ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. ABBA is known for not allowing the use of their recordings as samples by other artists but gave special permission to Madonna because they both liked Hung Up and Madonna's previous work. Madonna was only the second artist granted permission to use ABBA material by Andersson and Ulvaeus.
[edit] See also
[edit] External link
- Video of the song being recorded (from Abba's official web site)
