Music /  The Music of Abba, Blamey Street Big Band. At The B, Queanbeyan, May 24. Reviewed by BILL STEPHENS.

The Blamey Street Big Band may well have achieved a world first with its innovative concert, which drew a large audience to the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre.

In his opening remarks, jovial musical director and conductor Ian McLean was at pains to point out that this would definitely not be a tribute show but rather a big band extravaganza with which the Blamey Street Big Band would celebrate the music of Abba.

It would do this by performing 21 of their songs but re-imagined in the style of some of the great swing bands of the ’40s and ’50s, and notably, every one of these songs had been musically re-arranged by band member Andrew Hackwill.

Hackwill’s imaginative musical arrangement have always been a feature of the Blamey Street Big Band’s concerts, but this was the first time he had undertaken the task of creating the musical arrangement for its entire concert.

Imagine I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do as it might have been played by the Glenn Miller Band,  Abba’s great break-up song, The Winner Takes It All as it might have been interpreted by any of the Cotton Club singers or Take A Chance On Me with a Bo Diddley beat.

All were featured in this intriguing concert that began with the ever-popular Mamma Mia. Each song was introduced by either McLean or vocalist Leisa Keen, taking turns in sharing intriguing facts about Abba’s songs or Hackwill’s inventive arrangements.

Who knew that Neil Sedaka had a hand in writing the English lyrics for Ring Ring? That SOS was really about Morse code, so Hackwill managed to embed the song’s title in Morse code into his arrangement, and the sounds of honeybees into his re-imagining of  Honey Honey, the last song the group wrote in Swedish. Or that the royalties for their song Chiquitita raised $5000,000 for UNICEF?

Although most of Hackwill’s arrangements included superb vocals by Leisa Keen and backing vocalist Ashleigh Harris, their work was particularly highlighted in a pretty arrangement of I’ve Been Waiting For You.

There were also two songs arranged specifically for musical instruments.  The first, Slipping Through My Fingers was arranged as a haunting solo showcasing trombonist Bronwen Mackenzie, and the other, I Wonder, a little-known song written for a projected mini-musical The Girl With The Golden Hair, here arranged as a beautiful flugelhorn solo for Mark Du Rieu.

Other members of the band were highlighted in feature solos embedded in the arrangements throughout the concert together with too many other delightfully gossipy tidbits to share here.

Suffice to tell that this hugely enjoyable concert was meant to end with a cracking arrangement of Waterloo, the song with which Abba won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. However, the audience wasn’t going to let it get away without an encore. They obliged with a final Hackwill original, a medley of Hasta Manana and So Long.