ABBA – When I Kissed The Teacher

Benny Andersson counted it among his favorite ABBA songs. It opened their biggest album and was never released as a single.

Benny Andersson has named When I Kissed the Teacher as one of his favorite ABBA songs. The group chose it to open Arrival, the album that carried Dancing Queen and made them the biggest pop act in the world. And then they never released it as a single. It was left off the hits collection that sold in the tens of millions, left out of the stage musical built from their catalog, and did not appear on a British singles chart until 2018, sung by somebody else.

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It began under another name. Sessions started on June 14, 1976, at Metronome Studio in Stockholm, with the working title Rio de Janeiro. By the time Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus had finished, the song had a new lyric and a new subject: a student with a crush on her teacher who, one day in class, kisses him. Agnetha Fältskog sings the lead. The record lasts three minutes and sounds like a deliberate salute to the American girl-group pop of the early sixties, which is exactly how ABBA’s biographer Carl Magnus Palm has described it.

Polar released Arrival on October 11, 1976, with this track first on side one. The label had a problem most labels would envy. The album also held Money, Money, Money and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and there were only so many singles a year could absorb. The opening song stayed an album track. American critics noticed it anyway. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1977 that it was the most convincing thing the group had done, and its critic Robert Hilburn later called it the best ABBA track that was never a hit in the United States.

The Man at the Blackboard

Swedish viewers saw it acted out. Around the album’s release, the broadcaster SVT produced a television special about the group called ABBA-dabba-dooo!!, directed by Leonard Eek and Per Falkman, which mixed interviews with specially filmed songs. For this one, all four members of ABBA sit in a classroom in sports clothes, playing the pupils. The teacher is Magnus Härenstam, and that casting was the joke. Härenstam was a comedian and one of the best-known faces on Swedish television, later the host of the Swedish edition of Jeopardy! for fourteen years. He died in 2015. ABBA’s official channel premiered the clip on October 9, 2026, describing it as taken from the special, produced by SVT and first aired in November 1976.

The storyline has not aged without comment. What played in 1976 as a piece of harmless bubblegum has drawn raised eyebrows from later writers, and when the song was finally recorded again, the words were adjusted. That version was made for the film Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, sung by Lily James with Jessica Keenan Wynn, Alexa Davies and Celia Imrie and produced by Andersson himself. Released on May 8, 2018, it reached No.40 in Britain. Ulvaeus appears in the scene, cast this time as one of the teachers.

So the song took forty-two years to reach a chart, and it got there in other voices. That does not make it a minor work. It was the first thing anyone heard when they put on ABBA’s best-selling studio album, placed there by two writers who knew exactly what they had. One of them still counts it among the best things they did. It is the rare case of a song that everyone who owns the album knows by heart and that the charts never registered.