Wiki
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Length
4:46
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)", (working title "Been and Gone and Done It"), is one of Swedish pop group ABBA's biggest Eurodisco hits. It was recorded and released in 1979 with "The King Has Lost His Crown" as the B-side. It appears on ABBA's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 album, as well as their best-selling album, Gold: Greatest Hits.
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight)" was written and composed by Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, with the lead vocal sung by Agnetha Fältskog. Agnetha, as the narrator, weaves the image of a lonely young woman who longs for a romantic relationship and views her loneliness as a forbidding darkness of night, even drawing parallels to how the happy endings of movie stars are so different from her own existence.
The song was recorded at Polar Music Studios in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1979, and was ready for release in October of that year, in conjunction with the group's tour of North America and Europe.
Originally, ABBA had recorded another song, "Rubber Ball Man", which was planned as a single. It featured the typical "ABBA-arrangement" with both Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad on lead vocals and the use of classical strings. This song was also performed by the group during rehearsals for its 1979 tour as "Under My Sun". However, the group felt that "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!", with its disco sound, would be a better choice, and thus, "Rubber Ball Man" remained nothing more than a demo.
The single version of this song, which was released in its full length of 4:45 everywhere else in the world, was released in the United States and Canada in an edited format, being just 3:36 in length. This was done by removing the first half of the opening instrumental, the first four of the eight bars of the instrumental bridge between the second and final chorus, and fading the song out early. It is believed the edit was done by Atlantic, ABBA's North American record label, and not Polar, hence the reason why it was available only in the USA and Canada. This single version has never appeared on any commercial CD issued by Polar/Universal to date, and along with the US radio edit of Chiquitita, it marked the only time Atlantic ever commercially released an edited version of an ABBA single while they had the North American rights to release ABBA recordings.
The single was never released by Polar Music in the group's native Sweden, instead being featured on the "Greatest Hits Volume 2" album, which did get a Swedish release. While Polar released the single in neighbouring Norway, Denmark, and Finland, copies of these versions were not made available in the Swedish record stores, who thus arranged to import copies of the United Kingdom version on Epic Records. Sales of these imports were sufficient for the single to reach number 16 on the sales chart in Sweden.
"¡Dame! ¡Dame! ¡Dame!" is the Spanish-language version of the song. The song was released as a single to promote Gracias Por La Música in Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries.
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" was another highly successful song for ABBA. It hit No. 1 in Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, and Switzerland, while reaching the Top 3 in Austria, West Germany, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and Norway. It also proved to be ABBA's most successful song in Japan, hitting #17.
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