Since its release in 1976, ABBA's song "Fernando" has been loved by fans around the globe both for its sing-along chorus and its revolutionary spirit.
In Fernando: A Song by ABBA (Duke UP, 2025), Kay Dickinson takes readers from Sweden and Chile to Australia and Poland, tracing the complicated ways the song could express support with anticapitalist and Third World liberation struggles while remaining an unrepentant commodity.
A song about freedom fighters was unlikely to become a pop mega-hit, yet as Dickinson demonstrates, ABBA's lucrative, longstanding appeal rests on their ability to bridge contradictions within everyday life.
Five decades later, "Fernando's" rousing calls for freedom continue to resonate with gay liberation movements and other social struggles, demonstrating how a song can be both revolutionary and an envoy for global capital.
Kay Dickinson is Programme Convenor for Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow and author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers.
Kay on the University of Glasgow’s website.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.
Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.
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