This is an extremely rare video from Top Of The Pops 1974.
Thought to be lost and no longer in the archives, this was recently sourced by Sara of abbaontv fame from a private collection.
Many thanks for her persistence in obtaining this amazing footage !
Click the link to watch it on youtube:
Click the link to watch it on youtube:
More info courtesy of Alex Jones:
As with all appearances in Britain (which was why they stopped coming to Top Of The Pops after Fernando!) they had to re-record their track using British technicians.
So the song was re-done in the BBC studio and then they lip-synched back to the new "hastily made" recording for the TV broadcast. So what you're seeing probably isn't wholly live, but it is definitely a new recording just for the occasion.
This was terribly unfair as UK groups could appear on TOTP miming to their records. ABBA were, after all, masters of the "recorded sound" but they were unable to show this off on TV in Britain as they could elsewhere in Europe.
They got around this for the Mike Yarwood Show and just added slight British elements to their studio recordings of If It Wasn't For The Nights and Thank You For The Music to "fool" the British unions into thinking that they were completely "redone".
To add insult to injury, this So Long performance was reported to have never been broadcast in the UK owing to industrial action blacking out the show at the time (Unions were very strong in television and elsewhere in Britain in the 1970s) and therefore So Long became the only ABBA song not to get properly exposed and failed to chart in Britain.
For years it was thought to have been a lost recording...but now it's surfaced in someone's private collection.
Thanks to Sara for her continued endeavours in ABBA fandom in bringing this to the world's attention. The crowing glory of her ABBA On TV website! x
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