The chap as written some great songs and also sung a few of them. He has a decent amount of talent I'd say. And he is back in our minds based upon his songs and not because of a Hollywood studio doing loads of publicity.

Abba a bit less impressive for me. A few wonderful pop moments (SOS, The Day Before You Came, Dancing Queen off top of head) but also a lot of average stuff - Voulez Vous, Does Your Mother Know of top of same head.

Top of the Pops was only any good if Peel was on it - the only one who approached it with the required sense of irony required for pop music.

Good man, esp Diamond and ABBA. Rotten then, rotten now - perfect.

I think "Rock Snobbery" was a problem with the attitude to the above acts. For the longest time "rock" was given a level of seriousness and profundity by critics and therefore their listeners and acts such as Abba and Neil Diamond were frowned upon as though they were frivolous and light and therefore somewhat unworthy and undeserving of our attention. I remember a spot-on article by Mick Farren which praised the music of Abba for its ability to create perfect pop moments. I also think "This is Spinal Tap" exposed the ridiculousness of a lot of the "serious" rock acts of the time(please stand up Sabbath, Yes, ELP, Uriah Heep etc).
I also think that when Glam Rock came along with Bowie, Roxy, the New York Dolls etc it showed that music could be fun and melody would always trump a 15 minute drum solo or an endless fretboard wank.

During their heyday Abba tended to get very good reviews. I remember a long rave review in the NME of either "Arrival" or "The Visitors|". This wasn't a view shared by their readers either then or since.

During his commercial heyday Neil Diamond was regarded as kitsch that was only good for Lebanese discos. It was only the very clever repackaging of him as Johnny Cash Mark II that put him on the main stage at Glastonbury. as Nik Cohn said, there's nobody so easy to fool as the bloke who thinks he knows something.

When it was on TV Top Of The Pops was slated just like Match Of The Day is slated but it didn't mean that people didn't watch it. I hated Peel on "Top Of The Pops". It was the worst case of wanting to have your cake and eat it I've ever seen.

you didn't, um, like them 30 years ago and you don't like them now?

How REMARKABLE. I hated cabbage 30 years ago and i still bloody loath it now...

Abba Gold.....ahhh Abba Gold. Great for a party, no doubt about it.

Was so so about Neil Diamond although I do own a couple of his Greatest Hits plus the 12 Songs album because I heard "Save Me A Saturday Night" and I loved it and still do.

Top of the Pops. Its like Topper, Hotspur, Victor, Wizard, Battle, Warlord, 2000AD. Part of my growing up and wouldn't have it any other way.

And John Peel...could take or leave....mostly leave....sorry.

is that their two-ostensibly-happy couples schtick, their bad hair, their bad clothes and their bad videos notwithstanding, they put out about ten songs whose verses and middle eights were hookier than almost everybody else's best ever chorus.

Pop is pop. And they did it better than anybody since or, Beatles apart, before.

Scratch the surface of a group of people who superficially appear to have a lot in common and you will find that they have very diverse likes and dislikes.

With the exception of a Nik Kershaw album, I didn't start buying music until I was 18, however I watched Top of the Pops religiously from age seven.

I became familiar with ABBA as they entered their divorce years and although I won't be rushing to see Mama Mia, a 2CD collection of their hits currently forms part of a small stack of CDs on top of one of my hi-fi speakers.

I don't know very much about Neil Diamond.

Ask a different person here and you'll get a completely different response.

EDIT

...deliberately liking the fare despised by the mere rock snob. Outclassed only by the uber duber do rock snob.......
Small, bearded, lives near bridges, often seen with a family of goats.
Usually very keen on the ELO version of Hall of the Mountain King. But nothing else in their pantheon. OK, 10358 overture is quite good........ Evil Woman at pinch. O, and Roll over Beethoven and Rock Aria, of course.

...mmm, something about that band I never got along with. Maybe it was Jeff Lynne's sometimes heavy-handed production jobs. Have a soft spot for '10358 Overture', but then so does Paul Weller. Quite like 'Mr Blue Sky', 'Telephone Line' and the daft '...Horace Wimp' too.

is king. I have a soft spot for the works of Mr Lynne as my Dad loved them. Out Of The Blue makes me smile.

Same point re. Peel on TOTP - it worked for me and thats good enough. As a kid, it was simple stuff - either good or bad.

John Peel did Top Of The Pops because, at the time, he had a bit of a rapport going with Kid Jensen, whose show preceded his in the Radio 1 evening schedule. Radio 1 management like this sort of thing. It’s good for the brand. When they asked the pair (and by this time they had given themselves some of sort of corny “tag”, but I can’t remember what it was) to present Top Of The Pops, Peel and Jensen did it because it suited their own particular brands too (although it suited their brands to do it in a snotty school rebel way, teasing the show.) You don’t survive at a place like Radio 1 for as long as John Peel did if you are a genuine “rebel”; a real thorn in the side of the management. Though it may be convenient for both you and the management to pretend that you are.
I don’t want to criticise John Peel, a great broadcaster and a lovely man but I think what he did should be seen with a bit of more perspective than the gushing praise that now seems obligatory. His “act” was as much of an “act”, as fake in fact, as any of the his Smashie & Nicey Radio 1 colleagues from the ’70s and ’80s. It was just a different kind of “turn”. He cheerfully admitted, for instance, that his accent was a complete contrivance, done for effect to suit the kind of persona he wanted to project, the mood of his show, the milieu in which he operated, in which his genuine plummy Cheshire accent would have grated and just seemed wrong.
As for this idea that he played wonderful music and “broke“ countless acts. Well, yes and no. His music policy was pretty much to chuck everything at the wall and bank on some of it sticking. And I’d say he was more of a taste follower than a taste shaper. The natural progression for a band in those days (apart from pre-packaged record company launches) in terms of getting noticed etc.would be: live review in the weekly papers, Peel session, indie single, evening airplay, possible step up to major label for daytime airplay etc. The Peel stage is where bands would be first “heard” on the radio, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he “discovered” them. He just read the music papers and found out what was happening. Same as Joe Whiley’s made a career of.
I don’t mean all this as a criticism of dear old Peelie, just a bit of perspective.

As far as TOTP goes, I don’t think anyone has particularly fond memories of the show itself, which was always corny and naff, just of many, many great o(or indeed memorably awful) performances. It was where you could see pop stars: simple as that. In fact I don’t see why the BBC don’t use the vast audiences they have for Radio 1 and Radio 2 as the basis for two weekly straightforward half-hour music performance shows, based on the stations’ playlists (as opposed to the chart which has become rather irrelevant). It’s not as if they haven’t got enough channels. I’d watch Radio 2-on-TV every week as would millions of others I imagine.

is most of my musical taste was set by what Peel would play. I don't agree that he threw loads of stuff up randomly and saw what stuck. Yes he played some stuff that I really didn't get, but a chunk of it worked for me. I feel he gave me a decent musical education at an impressionable age. The main one being listen to everything and then work out if you like it. And I am very concious that my view on music has been shaped by Peel first and foremost and I will always be grateful for that.

I agree around the personality stuff - no one is going to have a media career without having to act a role out on occasion. And he was never a particularly rebellious rebel let's be honest. But he always did what he did with a bit of style, good humour and his tongue in the general direction of his cheek.

A tad harsh, Richard, but I accept much of what you say. Less certain he was following towards the latter years,as I am not sure anywhere would give or gave space to some of his more provocative offerings, especially not ahead of his airings thereof. As someone who, like many, first listened under the sheets and heard then "exotica" like the Albion Country Band or the Faces first through his show, I genuinely struggled with his later direction. OK, punk and dub I could assimilate, but I could never quite believe he really was listening to some of his latvian deathcore (or whatever it would be)away from the show. So I gave up about 1979, but still found a place for his R4 saturday show, which seemed to fit his persona a little more easily then than his choices in music. I was amused to see the Pigs choice, a CD of old 20s and 30s songs, come out, as I think that was a fib: I will bet they were his real preferred choice.

I was glad when he was on as he was genuinely funny and witty, as opposed to Travis, Saville, Bates, Blackburn and the like who thought they were highly amusing superstars on the beeb but were tiresome, cheesy 'personalities' who knew little about music. Sure he developed his own persona but I don't think it was anything like as contrived and absurd as the daytime guys and their pathetic catchphrases and jingles. He was a great enthusiast who believed his job was to play new stuff that would not otherwise get played. I think he really thought that if the music he played got more exposure than just his show it would get into the charts and make them better, so he had every right to be on TOTP. Actually I really think in some ways he was quite innocent and naive about the music business but that was part of his charm. For example he found it hard to understand why the people who had been his mates on the way up dropped him once they made it big.

People like Neil Diamond and ABBA were surely pretty ubiquitous in their day? I'm a wee bit younger than the people who seem to be fulminating about them so when I heard their music it was pretty much after their time had past (at least in a charts sense) so I had no baggage really to lose about them.

I think this boils down to what was all around when we were teenagers that we hated when our music taste was forming so in my own case if anyone tried to explain to me that U2, Simply Red or Stock Aitken and Waterman are actually pop or rock geniuses there will be fight. What I wont say is that while hating all that lot I was listening to a pile of Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax so what do I know...

And I love Mel and Kim's Respectable these days...

Whatever sinks your boat. Thank god everyone is different. A mars a day makes you work, rest and play. Ahh cliches. You know what I mean.

Something for when you want to boogie at a wedding or when you are feeling maudlin after too many drinks at the weekend. A record for when you are studying for your exams and then again a corker of a tune to impress the opposite sex. Indeed whatever.

When grooving on "the decks" at a college disco in the late 70's, when confronted by two people asking for Abba & Sex Pistols respectively, I did what all good DJs do. Agree to play them later but carry on playing what made everyone dance. Then forget the requests.

Dancing Queen a guaranteed dance floor filler??? Curiously what were you playing Beany??

...there was a hint of Donna Summer and Althia & Donna in there somewhere. A bit hazy since my psychiatrist has tried to block out those times. Just too painful for an old rocker to endure. It was part of "the day job".

This is the first time I've been in any discussion of the man when everyone didn't look at the floor, nod sagely, and go "Mmmm, great guy, tragedy", so may I take this opportunity to ask...
"The Undertones.... weren't they a bit obvious?"?

Diamond had a lot of stinkers like 'Love On The Rocks' but come on! 'I Am, I Said'? 'Cracklin' Rosie'? You'd need a lot of ideological baggage to dislike that.

Abba are and were clearly geniuses of commercial entertainment and while the fact that a lot of people detested them has been airbrushed out of history, we can at least say that those people are wrong. Yes, 'Chiquitita' and 'Fernando' and the farrago that is 'Mamma Mia' but the credit side is so overwhelming as to be unanswerable.

I always thought that what made TOTP good was the amount of rotten music that appeared on the show. It made it so much more special when a Bunnymen or New Order got the nod. The programme only went rubbish when they messed with the original, perfect formula. If only as a generator of instant history, it was irreplaceable. It will be back within three years, mark my words.

As for the poster who can't stand ELO, my heart goes out to you.

you wouldn't catch Bruno Brookes coming out with this stuff.
I like the Aretha Franklin/George Michael introduction.

Clearly your ears are crocheted on... ;-)

A mid-80s Peel session, Altered Images cover Neil Diamond's Song Sung Blue with Peel on backing vox. It was crap.

...where I grew up was never in style, until some of the lads I grew up with discovered getting stoned then it was all they listened to.

Which makes me very surprised to see the amount of prog fans on this particular site. That bile that sits in certain postings for ABBA or TOTP is in a jar marked 'prog' around my house.

Meanwhile TOTP was a much better show than a lot of other music programmes we had over the years, despite the miming or the stupid dancers trying to look like normal audience members. It was where I first heard: Blondie, The Jam, The Skids, Elvis Costello, Dexys, The Specials, The Beat, The Human League, Soft Cell, Madness etc etc etc.

Bowie performing Starman on the same programme back in the 70s is cited as a key influence on a lot of the late 70s/early 80s musicians.

And as for ABBA: they were a great pop band, perhaps one of the best. Some of the songs are cheesy, but you could say that about a hell of a lot of artists. McCartney and biscuits anybody?

Always a fan and will defend it on my death bed.

TOTP gave me David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, The Pistols, Manhattan Transfer, John Travolta and Roland Rat.

Nothing ever so ecelectic and probably turned a huge proportion of posters on this site aged between 25 and 50 directly on to music in the first place.

ABBA begat punk - Glen Matlock's well known revelation of nicking the bass line and rhythm of "Does Your Mother Know?" for Pretty Vacant.

Sometimes the memory is not so good as the years advance, but 'Top of the Pops' was the BBC answer to 'Ready Steady Go'- Hosts Keith Fordyce and Cathy McGowan - which ITV broadcast on a Friday night(regional variations did ensue after a few years). 'Pops' was transmitted on a Thursday night and used the safe format of the previous Sunday's 'Pick of the Pops' Chart.
Brian Matthew presented the ABC TV show 'Thank Your Lucky Stars' from their studios in Aston, Birmingham. The review panel featuring Janice "I'll Give It Foive" Nicolls, Billy Butler(Local Liverpool DJ and later Radio 2 Presenter) and some other teen was a direct attempt to be more hip than the David Jacobs hosted 'Juke Box Jury' on the BBC - both transmitted on a Saturday night.
Another 'Pop' show around this time was the Kent Walton hosted 'Discs A Go-Go' broadcast from the Harlech TV Studio in Pontcanna, Cardiff. The show attempted to be a hip 60's Youth Club and even featured future Radio Caroline/ Luxembourg DJ Tony Prince running the Coffee Bar.
Heady years they were but we always found time to criticise the formats in the school playground the next day. Something passed on through our children's children to this very day. In fact the only way to see music is 'Live' and video is really not the answer......unless you want to ogle at babes in states of semi undress.
These days I'm getting to the point that I've seen and heard it all.Creative TV ended in the UK with 'Whistle Test' and Radio has become a homogenised product to create revenue. Wouldn't it be constructive programming to put Radio 2's Radcliffe and Maconie on in the daytime and sod the cosequences.

is one of the greatest pop songs ever.

Anyone who says differently is just wrong.

So there...

until I saw The Last Waltz in 1979/80. There he was with all these musicians I really liked: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison etc and (apart from his clothes, he seems to think he's still in Vegas) he fits in easily with that group. The song he performs "Dry Your Eyes" never appears on any of his Greatest Hits but is fantastic.

Didn't Robbie Robertson produce "Beautiful Noise"?

Neil Diamond's album of (mostly) covers is a truly stunning record. Diamond croons/growls his way through stripped down readings of The Last Thing On My, Husbands And Wives, If You Go Away, Suzanne & I Think It's Gonna Rain Today against doomy string quartet arrangements. Mercy!

Abba, meanwhile, are The Devil's Spunk. I preferred John Peel when he had long hair. After that, NOWT.