Gemini - I Am The Universe (1987)

With ABBA returning from a 40 year hiatus with a new album, their name is everywhere at the moment, and this blog is no exception. After releasing their masterpiece 'The Visitors' in 1981, followed by the singles 'The Day Before You Came' and 'Under Attack', the band broke up in 1982, and both Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstag launched solo careers. But what happened to Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus? Well, they carried on making music, but in a much more low-key manner, taking established brother and sister duo The Glenmarks under their wing and writing and producing two albums with them. Karin and Anders Glenmark, together with their aunt and uncle, had been recording since 1972 and had released four albums before Anders left for a solo career. There was already a connection to ABBA, as Anders had provided backing vocals on Faltskog's 1975 solo album, as well as playing guitar on Lyngstag's 'Ensams' from the same year, and so when Bjorn and Benny were looking for a pair of vocalists to replace the girls, the Glenmarks were the obvious choice. After contributing backing vocals to the soundtrack album of Bjorn and Benny's collaboration with Tim Rice on their 'Chess' musical, they were encouraged to change their name to Gemini, and they signed to the Polar label and started recording at the Polar studio in Stockholm, using many of the musicians who'd played on ABBA's albums. Their first single was the unreleased ABBA composition 'Just Like That', and it was promoted in the UK with a live appearance on The Terry Wogan show in 1986, but ABBA were considered a bit passe by then, and even a high profile appearance on British TV couldn't launch the group to an apathetic UK audience. They were reasonably successful in their native Sweden, however, and so a second album 'Geminism' appeared in 1987, and as with the first one, the songs were a mix of Andersson/Ulvaeus originals and songs written by Anders Glenmark and Ingela Forsman, and while Anders' songs were perfectly acceptable pop fare, the quality of Bjorn and Benny's easily eclipsed them, and so it is those songs that we really want to hear. As it happens, if we extract the Andersson/Ulvaeus songs from both records we end up with a great 46-minute album, played on and produced by Bjorn and Benny, and therefore being the nearest thing to new ABBA music in the mid-to-late 80's that we'll ever get to hear.

Track listing

01 T.L.C.
02 Slowly
03 Too Much Love Is Wasted
04 Mio My Mio
05 Slow Emotion
06 Just Like That
07 Ghost Town
08 I Am The Universe
09 Have Mercy
10 I'm A Bitch When I See Red
11 Another You, Another Me
12 Nearly There