What will be the next Mamma Mia?

I was flicking around the tube this evening and I happened to stop on some special on a music network for a few minutes called Abba's All Time Greatest Hits, which basically ran their songs through some computerized program that is supposed to be able to figure out what will be a hit song for a record company (and we all know we needed that kind of technology didn't we), and ranked them based on how well they would do if they were released today.

Anyway, in the course of watching this, the producers managed to squeeze between Bono and Lulu talking about "SOS," some of the musical numbers from that smash hit Mamma Mia and it got me wondering, what band that is recording today might also have the kind of material that would lend itself well to that sort of thing.

Of course, artists like the Who created rock operas on purpose, but I was more thinking of the spontaneous collecting on songs from a single artist. And of course, you know I am going to pick artists that I like anyway, so this is totally biased.

The first group I thought of was Saint Etienne. They have a really large back catalog of songs, most with a narrative element to them, the right kind of melodic structure to put songs together in a meaningful and pleasing way and a lot of their songs could be sung with a male or female lead(though I can't really see a dude singing something like "Split Screen" or "Sylvie".

Then there's Belle and Sebastian who have many of the same qualities as Saint Etienne. A lot of albums, a lot of nameless narratives, and that old-time pop sensibility, though I have my doubts that they would ever use a song like "Chalet Lines", but the majority of their songs are about love, sex and disappointment, so why wouldn't that work to advance a larger plot again?

I was going to put some songs into a narrative order but I thought that most people wouldn't want to see that... but if you do, you could always leave a comment and tell me that you'd like to see it.

Tags: abba, sos, mamma mia, bono, saint etienne, good humor, sylvie, split screen, chalet lines, belle and sebastian, musical, theatre, narrative, pop, music, play, waterloo, action, i fought in a war, stars of track and field