Scandipop Classics 1: The A-Teens

The A-Teens may have started life as a slightly dubious ABBA cover band but became so much more.

Debate may rage as to what were their finest musical moments (and there were many, meaning you may see them featuring in our Scandipop month again sooner rather than later!), but here are our picks for their three greatest hits.

Floorfiller

Worth a mention just for the most thrilling intro in recent pop memory – Waaa wa wa waaa wa wa… Floorfiller!/Waaa wa wa waaa wa wa FLOORFILLER!

Think of this track as a less morally corrupt little sister to Lady Gaga’s Just Dance, an ode to pulling some serious shapes (or in A-Teens’ own words ‘hands flying high like a chopper in the sky’) to a few ‘fat kind of beats’. The video signposts its intentions clearly – radio thing with ‘Floor Fillers’ written on, record with ‘Floor Fillers’ written on, dance routines of both genuine and comical varieties occurring left, right and centre at the most clean-cut looking rave-up since the one in S Club 7’s Don’t Stop Movin’ video.

Lyrical genius awaits at the end of every line, with ‘shouty bits’ where hitherto unthought-of rhymes to ‘floorfiller’ pile up with a delirious intensity – Spine Chiller! Club Thriller! Groove Killers! And as ever, those cheeky Swedes throw in a couple of lyrical curveballs, in the shape of lines like ‘A bomb-diggy drum coming at me with a POOF’ (with lines like this, the material just writes itself).

The bridge features brilliant use of pauses – ‘FREEZE! * pause *’ – as well as funny vocoder effects and more shouty bits. Add an epic chorus – yes, more of those much-vaunted shouty bits – and you realise that when Dhani (blonde dude) sings of wanting ‘a groove so unique that it kicks me off my seat’, Floorfiller is exactly the kind of track he meant.

Closer To Perfection

The most amazing single ever that wasn’t actually a single – why oh why was this never released? The phrase ‘hidden gem’ has never been more apt.

What initially seems a slightly underwhelming vaguely electro number suddenly somewhere somehow around the sixth listen magically transforms into the most blissfully wondrous perfect piece of pop. Like some beautiful Swedish caterpillar… or something. Proof that break-up songs need not be all soaring powerhouse voices and clenched fists – the chorus of ‘I’m back in the light getting over you, now I got it together, I’m stronger than ever/Back on the track with a better view and I’m getting closer to perfection cos of you’ is as quietly empowering as the best of them.

There is some sprinkling of Swedish fairy dust over it, especially the utterly transfixing shiver-down-spine middle eight to final chorus transition (epic key change alert!). I can’t explain it – all I know is that Closer To Perfection exerts some sort of unshakable hold over me and I am drawn to it like Sleeping Beauty to the spindle.

Halfway Round The World

The song itself is a bouncing boundless slice of smiles and sunbeams – especially surprising given that it’s is about how the A-Teens will still be loving their beaus even when they’re halfway round the world. However, the thing that makes this song even more brimming with golden deliciousness is the video.

Precisely, 2:47 of the video. I don’t want to spoil it but it’s one of those elusive magic moments that is a more sure-fire way of making make me smile than freeze framing that Zac Efron topless scene in HSM3. I have watched it on repeat far more than is healthy (well the Zac Efron scene too…) and it never fails me. If that wasn’t enough, the A-Teens then break out into one of their most high-octane dance routines yet (and, Brucie bonus, at 2:07 there’s also a great Amit – the brunette guy – move of him doing a heart-shape and point directly to camera that is just too cute). And if THAT wasn’t enough, the video, previously a tale about how a guy who looks a bit like Russell Howard off Mock The Week if you squint is pining after a girl who looks a bit like Audrey Tatou from Amelie if you squint because they’re halfway round the world and all, is turned completely on its head in a shining example of what I am going to brand a meta-music video. Does Scandipop get any better than this?! (Well, maybe if they figured out a way to incorporate a topless Zac Efron… but then again, A-Teens were before his time…).

Did you like the A-Teens?