This is an album that has a long personal history for me. Firstly, I am a child of the 80s who can remember the 70s turning into a big new round number. Which means I'm not intimidated or chilled by 80s production values and synths and pompous drum sounds or even the odd spot of late chintzy disco. My first record was a disco compilation. Also, my father often worked in the Persian Gulf in those years, and brought back a polite stack of bootleg cassettes from everything that was on the charts then. A lot of it in questionable taste, of course, and I’m sure in retrospect he bought so many Abba and BoneyM and Kenny Rogers tapes only because they were so very cheap. But these tapes were my first big musical experience, and I sat around for hours tucking into these catchy melodies and dancy beats and even DJing my own compilations. I was also inadvertently picking up a lot of English, as I discovered a year or two later (having moved to Australia) and found I could recite lyrics from memory and with sudden understanding.

After a huge number of relocations I’ve now taken on the best pickings from the bootleg stash and keep them due to mild nostalgia and occasional archival reference. Their sound quality is often atrocious and the track order meddled with, and sometimes you can hear the needle drop on the source record, but it was a great way to be introduced to a lot of music. It’s a different experience of music (say in contrast with the radio) when you can listen to things over and over again, and really let it sink into the gray matter. The music becomes a part of the time and memory. You tune into the feel and memory of music more.

Now that Abba has gone through its revival and re-acceptance phases, it’s pretty safe to come out and say that one loves their superb melodies and crafted records again, and not be lamely ironic or kitschily camp in saying so. And now that my musical obsession has er, matured somewhat, I’ve come to The Visitors with wildly impressed new ears.

I have a theory that disco can reach high art at times, but that’ll have to wait because this isn’t a disco album in the sense that Voulez-Vous was. Nonetheless, The Visitors is riddled with very fine melodies. Damn if it's not their most mature album musically, even down to the oompa coda of Two For The Price of One. Everything is in proportionate service to song: canny lyrics sung with Nordic inflection; tricky backing vocals arranged with variety; boppy and precise playing all round. The musical changes and progressions lift what in other hands would’ve been a dour melody into high contagion of freshness and musical optimism.