ON Saturday, April 6 1974 pop music changed forever. Well, arguably the most important pop band since The Beatles shot into the consciousness of popular culture with their win at the Eurovision Song Contest, hosted at the Brighton Dome.
The shock of the evening was not that Waterloo should have won the tournament so spectacularly but the fact that the British awarded the era-defining anthem an incredible nil points. The irony being that Britain was to prove crucial to the eventual rise of Sweden’s greatest cultural gift to the world. Forty years on to the week, the Waterloo album receives a reverential treatment no one could have dreamed of back in the day.
The CD set boasts an additional eight multi-language versions of the best songs, and the DVD features the all-important Eurovision performance plus archive appearances from Top Of The Pops and various important European music shows of the time. Interestingly, the fabulous Honey Honey was never released as a single in Britain. The hit version was a cover by Polly Brown’s Sweet Dreams.
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