Here is a test of your character. Cast your mind back to April 1976 – fifty years ago this month – and tell me honestly, without cheating, which song was playing on your transistor radio, your kitchen clock-radio, your car stereo. Because if you were in Australia that month, there is only one possible answer. There was only ever one answer, for fourteen magnificent, maddening, gloriously absurd weeks in a row. It was Fernando, by ABBA. And if you cannot hear those opening notes right now, filling the exact interior of wherever you were in 1976 – bedroom, kitchen, shearing shed, pub – then I don’t know what to tell you.
On 5 April 1976, Fernando reached number one on the Australian chart, replacing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at the top spot. It would stay there for the next 14 weeks. That’s longer than some governments last. It was the longest-running number one in Australian history, a record that stood for over 40 years until Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You finally surpassed it in 2017. And before you dismiss this as mere chart trivia, consider the context: ABBA had actually visited Australia just weeks earlier, appearing on The Don Lane Show, and the country had essentially lost its collective mind. During Fernando’s run, there were two weeks in April when five separate ABBA singles sat simultaneously in the Australian top 40. At once. It was less a pop chart than a Swedish occupation.
Those of us of a certain age know exactly what Fernando sounded like coming out of a tinny speaker on a autumn evening – warm, slightly distorted, with that military snare drum and Agnetha’s voice riding over the top like something from another planet. Which, in a sense, it was. The song’s English lyrics tell the story of two old freedom-fighters from the Mexican Revolution, sitting outside at night, looking at the stars and reminiscing about a long-ago battle. This was, let us remember, the most popular song in the country. Not a breezy little ditty about dancing, but a meditation on mortality and the passage of time, delivered by four Swedes in very tight trousers. Australia, you always were wonderfully odd.
If you managed to drag yourself away from the radio for a couple of hours and head to the cinema that April, you had some excellent options. Alfred Hitchcock released his final film, Family Plot, on 9 April — the old master’s last bow, a stylish, witty thriller that showed he hadn’t entirely lost the plot, so to speak. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was making its cult rounds as a midnight movie, and if you’d stumbled into one of those screenings not knowing quite what you were in for, you had almost certainly emerged wide-eyed and mildly disoriented. Rocky Horror was officially re-released as a midnight movie at the start of April 1976, beginning a run that, in certain cinemas, has technically never stopped.
The big films doing the rounds for the year included One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest — which swept the Oscars that spring — and the remake of King Kong, which featured an alarming young Jessica Lange and the kind of special effects that look, in retrospect, as though a man in a gorilla suit was climbing a rather small model. Carrie was frightening teenagers everywhere. And somewhere on a soundstage in England, a young man named George Lucas was quietly beginning to film something called Star Wars, which nobody yet knew would change cinema forever.
If you were the reading sort – and many of you were, because there was no streaming, no internet and only three television channels – April 1976 had plenty to occupy you. The New York Times fiction bestseller list for 1976 was dominated by Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal and Leon Uris Biblioklept – Trinity, Uris’s sprawling Irish epic, was flying off shelves worldwide.
Meanwhile, the world outside was doing what the world has always done: making history, most of it alarming. On 1 April 1976 – April Fools’ Day, appropriately enough – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed the Apple Computer Company. Two young men in a garage in California, bickering about circuit boards and dreaming of something nobody had yet imagined. There was, at the time, not a single person on earth who could have predicted that this particular piece of news would one day seem more consequential than anything else that happened in 1976. The device you are reading this on almost certainly traces its lineage to that day in April. You’re welcome, or I’m sorry, depending on your feelings about technology.
In China, the political intrigue was reaching a fever pitch. Acting Prime Minister Hua Guofeng was elevated by the Communist Party’s Central Committee to First Deputy Chairman, a signal that he was intended to succeed the ageing Mao Zedong. At the same time, Deng Xiaoping was stripped of all his posts. Mao himself would be dead by September. A billion people were holding their breath.
Here in Australia, April 1976 was, politically speaking, the morning after a very long and bruising night. Malcolm Fraser had swept to power in December 1975 following the constitutional crisis – the Dismissal – that still divides Australians the way certain families are divided over Christmas lunch. Gough Whitlam was now Opposition Leader, licking his wounds and looking for a fight. Fraser was making grim pronouncements about the economy, declaring that no soft options remained to pull Australia out of its difficulties, and warning that it was a choice between wage increases and jobs. Different times, same tune.
The Family Court of Australia had just opened its doors for the first time in January 1976, a direct result of Whitlam’s Family Law Act – no-fault divorce had arrived, and whether you thought that was liberation or catastrophe depended entirely on your marriage.
You want to know about the petrol. Everyone always wants to know about the petrol. In 1976, you were paying somewhere in the vicinity of 13 to 15 cents per litre to fill the tank of your Holden Kingswood or your Ford Falcon. Thirteen cents. The Falcon probably did about 15 litres per hundred kilometres, which means a full tank cost you roughly the same as a good lunch. This is not actually as cheap as it sounds – wages were considerably lower then – but every time you fill up today and wince at $2 and change, you are entitled to remember 1976 fondly.
What you are not entitled to do is pretend the cars were better. They weren’t. They rusted, they broke down, and they had no air conditioning. You were hot and mechanically anxious. Fernando was on the radio, though, and on balance, that made everything considerably more bearable.