At the height of their pop superstardom, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson were asked the secret of their song-writing success. Sometimes, they revealed, they’d simply play two old songs over the top of one another to create a new one, the combination creating a previously unheard set of melodies, or a hook from which they could build.
In modern parlance this would be called a mash-up, and the resultant sampling has any number of benefits — not least of which is an easy familiarity with the blended outcome. And if you doubt that works, see what happened when Madonna extracted 30 seconds of intro from ABBA’s own ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ to kick-start ‘Hung Up’, which went to number one in a record 41 countries and sold more than five million copies worldwide.