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“I Know Him So Well” — Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson
I heard a lovely new version of “I Know Him So Well” recently, but the definitive performers will always be Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson for me. Their version was a UK Number One in 1985 and remains a favourite song for many almost 40 years later.
The new version (linked below) is by Amanda Holden and Sheridan Smith. Neither are top of my favourite artists list, if I’m honest, but they do a lovely job together and the end result is a credit to them both.
Of course it helps when you’re starting off with great material.
Written by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus from Abba, together with incomparable lyricist Tim Rice, “I Know Him So Well” comes from the musical Chess.
It’s also known to Abba fans as one of the best Abba songs that never was.
Recorded after the Swedish supergroup broke up in the early 1980s, Benny and Bjorn wanted to get their teeth into something more substantial than three-minute pop songs. (As a fan, I’d say their three-minute pop songs were about as substantial as any musical creation could ever hope to get, but I can see what they were getting at.)
The result of their collaboration was the concept album Chess, which was later transferred to the musical stage in the West End.
Long before Anya Taylor-Joy’s worldwide hit Netflix show, The Queen’s Gambit, made the board game cool again, Chess was a Cold War-inspired story of intrigue played out through the medium of a chess tournament.
Slightly confusingly, the musical Chess had completely different versions for UK and US audiences — to protect the political sensibilities of Broadway theatre patrons, I can only presume. Portraying Russians in a sympathetic light wasn’t seen as a wise commercial move in Reagan’s America of the mid-1980s.
At any rate, the UK version of Chess was significantly more popular than the US one, and has stood the test of time in the West End in a way that its sister production struggled to do on Broadway.
“I Know Him So Well” has an intriguing dramatic premise. To be fair to Benny and Bjorn, this element of the song has the influence of Tim Rice written all over it.
