THE NAKED CITY: ABERATION-FREE SYDNEY
The rivalry between Australia’s two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, has often been overplayed, but there’s no doubt it continues to simmer away. Smug Sydneysiders once joked that the best thing that came out of Melbourne was the Hume Highway. Melbournians seem to have a more factual response pointing to Sydney’s choking traffic, our high cost of living and vast urban sprawl.
When it comes to culture and sport, the prizes are well defined. Melbourne has continually claimed the title of Australia’s sporting capital (if not the world’s!). They have the biggest stadium in the MCG, host the Australian Tennis Open and the Grand Prix and bring the nation to a halt every first Tuesday in November with the running of the Melbourne Cup. Their passion for AFL, clearly reflected in massive crowd numbers, clearly overshadows Sydney’s with Rugby League.
Whilst we might concede their sporting prowess, we would like to think we have the edge when it comes to culture, with the Opera House, a string of festivals and numerous other entertainment outlets. There is intense competition to nab exclusive runs of big name musicals like Harry Potter and host international music, dance and theatre events with all the economic benefits they bring to the local economy.
The latest manifestation of the Sydney v Melbourne cultural grab is the battle to secure ABBA’s multi million dollar hologram show, Voyage. In London, it’s housed in a specially built arena, raking in millions every week and scheduled to run through until 2024. The cost to duplicate the London experience in Sydney is estimated between $50 and $80 million and would involve a considerable investment from the State Government.
Since their Eurovision win in 1974 and a sellout Australian tour a few years later, ABBA have burrowed into the Australian psyche like an infestation of termites, with musicals, movies, cover bands and endless airplay. It’s almost a sin, even unpatriotic not to like them, as their millions of fans mouth their lyrics in a frenzied quasi-religious state. Hey, I have no problem in saying I detest them – their music is like being force-fed fairy floss and their endless commercial proliferation is insidious to say the least.
And I am glad to say I am not the only person out there who wants to gag every time I hear a few bars of “Mamma Mia” or “Dancing Queen”. Some of my fellow ABBA haters have even suggested that subjecting the younger generation to the banal Swedish foursome is a form of child abuse.
British music journalist Neil McCormick summed it up perfectly when he wrote:
“I hate Abba. I hated them first time around, when their cheesy disco pop with its clod-hopping rhythms and banal, repetitive, linguistically challenged choruses made them singalong family favourites. And I hate them even more now, when the flattening effect of nostalgia has lent a spurious retro-credibility to their formulaic Euro drivel.
People talk about Abba as if they were on a par with the Beatles, when all they did was grab one little corner of the Fab Four’s harmonic oeuvre and pillage it for all it was worth. Sure, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson knew how to craft a pop song. The verses are catchy, the bridges prepare us for lift-off, the choruses are relentless and everything falls neatly in the right place.
But they were musical one-trick ponies: the Ramones for squares, a spandex Status Quo. Just because they created hooklines so insistent it would take invasive surgery to remove them from your cranium does not make them classic songwriters. By that criterion, the folks behind the Crazy Frog ringtone would be geniuses.”
Luckily for Sydney it seems the Minns Government is not overkeen on forking out huge sums of money on these populist mega name events. Given the other pressing issues in NSW it would be an obscenity to erect a high tech monument to ABBA in the Entertainment Quarter of Moore Park whilst people are still sleeping on the street and in their cars.
Melbourne you are welcome to this holographic horror show. Build the whole nasty thing on pontoons and float it down the muddy Yarra, make Bjorn and Benny the joint kings of Moomba and broadcast ABBA’s greatest hits 24/7 along the Lygon Street café strip. Just keep this goddam ‘aberration’ out of Sydney!
