Punk Rock Factory have today (March 31st) released their new album It’s Just A Stage We’re Going Through, a collection of songs taken from the world’s biggest musicals. And to celebrate, they’ve given their take on an ABBA classic.
That is “Mamma Mia”, the title track from the wonderful, life-affirming musical based on the music of the Swedish pop legends, and the band have transformed it into something truly special. Taking the iconic melodies and beats and pushing them through a chaotic pop-punk mesh, they’ve turned it into a total pit anthem. There’s even a breakdown. And with a video paying homage to the song’s original concept – costumes, dance moves and set all included – it’s hard not to crack a smile whilst listening to it.
The band had this to say about it:
“We were already aware of the accompanying iconic video that the original song had. So we thought how absolutely hilarious it would be if we could recreate that video shot for shot. We love having fun with our videos, and we love any excuse to make idiots of ourselves so this was right up our street.
We got to work on trying to match the outfits as much as we possibly could (it’s not easy finding size 12 knee high boots)! We painstakingly looked for every element of each of the outfits and anything else you see in the video and we synced the original video to our track so we could learn our parts and make sure every little nuance was copied.
We shot the video at Band Studios in Bristol with our good friend Jay Hillyer after a very long drive back from our sold out show in Glasgow the previous day. We had the original video on a screen in front of us to make sure we could copy every part of the video as closely as we possibly could, and then spent most of the day in fits of tears laughing back at takes.
Mamma Mia is definitely one of our favourites from our new musicals-themed album. We think it came out great and this has to be one of the most ridiculous videos we’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. We hope everyone finds it as funny as we did. Our hope is we can get it in front of ABBA, and hope they find it as funny!!
Punk Rock Factory have also paid homage to other classics on the record.
Here’s “Gravity” from Wicked:
And here’s “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton:
