There are only two types of wedding discos. The ones that start with Dancing Queen, and the bad ones.

The song is catchy, evocative, euphoric and perfectly encapsulates the carefree bliss of being young. Like all great pop songs, it has an alluring first line. “Friday night and the lights are low..” Boom! We’re hooked right away and can’t wait to hear more.

Indeed, the song starts with a bang, after that initial piano roll, that astonishes us and catapults us right into the middle of the chorus! The band knew they had struck gold before it finished. Frida Lyngstad, the lead singer said later, “I cried out of pure happiness that I would get to sing that song, which is the absolutely the best song Abba have ever done.” No wonder it’s a wedding staple.

The song evokes images of a seventeen year old girl on a nightclub dance floor, enthralled by the music and lost in the moment. The sonic euphoria reminds us of the freedom that lies on the dance floor, and simultaneously embeds in it what can only be described as a certain Nordic melancholy. The narrator is not the girl herself, but an observer who could be any of us. Rather than drag us into the despair of nostalgia, the song firmly establishes us in the glory of this very moment that is now for four exhilarating minutes.

Making the song about a teenage girl on the dance floor may seem unnecessarily dramatic but there is something to be said about dedicating a whole song to a girl wanting to dance without corrupting it with romance and love and other such things.

Dancing Queen may be about a seventeen-year-old girl but it transcends age and gender, and effortlessly translates its joy across generations. It’s very conceivable that an 89-year-old grandfather might get up from his chair to dance at a wedding exclaiming, “That was our song!” Even Queen Elizabeth II (rest in peace) was extremely fond of dancing to the song. “I am the Queen, and I like to dance.” This is what people do when they hear it. They surrender to its abandon.

May it live forever in our lives. For as long as it calls to us, we know that we still have joy left in our hearts and that this amazing world that we find ourselves in will be okay no matter what happens tomorrow.