Twinge of Saudade

In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety. Improbably, Vicious’s favourite Abba song was the gloopy ballad ‘Fernando’, which, in its English-language version, imagined a conversation between two old Mexican revolutionaries: ‘Do you still recall the fateful night we crossed the Rio Grande?’ The punks loved Abba. The Sex Pistols songwriter Glen Matlock borrowed a few notes from ‘SOS’ for ‘Pretty Vacant’. Siouxsie Sioux and the teenage misfits who hung out at Club Louise, a lesbian bar in Soho, danced to Abba and Diana Ross in the basement. Elvis Costello lifted the piano frills of ‘Dancing Queen’ for ‘Oliver’s Army’. Abba seemed to hark back to the early days of rock’n’roll, capturing its bubblegum paradox of disposability and durability, its youthful immediacy if not its charged libido. They steered clear of 1970s excess, indulging in neither progressive pomp nor sidelong voyaging.

Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid hailed from the exotic frozen north, a Sweden then known to outsiders chiefly for Ingmar Bergman, tinned herring and a relaxed attitude towards pornography. The band became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations of gay disco dancers; a gender-balanced quartet where the men put words in the women’s mouths. The compilation Abba Gold (1992) has sold more than thirty million copies worldwide. But Abba’s nine studio albums are notoriously wobbly. Listen to Arrival (1976) and boggle at the sequencing that leads from the inane woah-woahs of ‘Dum Dum Diddle’ (‘To be your fiddle!/To be so near ya and not just hear ya!’) into the domestic chill of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’: ‘In these old familiar rooms, children would play/Now there’s only emptiness, nothing to say.’ Or Super Trouper (1980), where the mock-medieval theatrics of ‘The Piper’ are followed by ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’, an ur-text of Hi-NRG disco. Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism – the diaristic ‘The Day before You Came’, the post-divorce tremors of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – but could also dish out drippy platitudes without embarrassment: ‘Happy New Year’, ‘Thank You for the Music’, ‘The Way Old Friends Do’, ‘I Have a Dream’.

It was obvious to fans that Abba weren’t on the hard stuff, not like their doomed American counterparts in Fleetwood Mac and the Carpenters. Parents loved Abba. So did children, transfixed by their spangles and cosiness. ‘For adults, it’s a pleasure to be able to enjoy watching a group their youngsters like, a group without unpleasant gimmicks like pop star Alice Cooper’s killing chickens,’ an Australian reporter said in 1977. ‘Two nice clean-cut heterosexual couples.’ Abba appealed to almost every base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established templates for Great Artists – anguished bluesman, impassioned diva, troubadour poet, with an optional Pop Art wink for the big-city kids. Abba, by contrast, were portrayed as Brill Building factory hands pumping out cheap hits for mass consumption. At the peak of worldwide Abbamania, British reviewers sneered at the ‘almost glacial atmosphere’ of their concerts, where these ‘shrewd manipulators’ rolled out ‘single after single with robot-like precision’. Abba were no more than empty vessels. ‘They say we have no soul,’ mourned Björn, the band’s de facto spokesman, ‘but in Europe, and especially in Sweden, it’s a different kind of soul.’

Delivering Abba’s Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech in 2010 – eat that, Christgau – Benny itemised the pan-European influences that made up the band’s sound:

When all of us grew up in Sweden in the 1950s, we had no radio. So therefore we couldn’t hear rhythm and blues, or rock’n’roll. There was a radio, there was one channel, a public service channel, and they would play maybe one hour or two hours of music per day … So we were fed with Swedish folk music, Italian arias, French chansons, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa. Not so bad actually, because if you put all that together, it becomes what you can hear – well, some of it – on Abba records.

To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook – from Leiber and Stoller to the Beach Boys, the Beatles and Motown – and a dollop of classical flair via Benny’s ornamented arrangements. Like so many of their songwriting heroes, the group specialised in hiding their sadness behind smiles. ‘Even the happier songs are melancholy at their core,’ Benny told Jan Gradvall for the band’s ‘approved’ biography. The blues weren’t native to Sweden, but ‘we had some kind of blues,’ he noted in his Hall of Fame speech, ‘because above the 59th latitude from eastern Russia, through Finland, into Scandinavia, there is this melancholy belt, sometimes mistaken for the vodka belt.’

Yet no constituency hated Abba more than their own countryfolk, whose cultural elites were repelled by their success – anathema to the Swedish model, which prized fairness and hated commercialism. Abba were the thin end of the wedge: empty-headed stooges for capitalism, imperialist collaborators writing ditties in dumbed-down English. Naturally, they got their big break by winning a competition. I wasn’t born in 1974, the year Abba won Eurovision, but I can instantly call to mind the royal blue sequins, the tightly tucked velvet, an orchestral conductor in a Napoleon hat. Britain’s judges awarded nul points on the night, but the country took Abba to heart at once. ‘Waterloo’, a shrink-wrapped glam-pop symphony made for colour TV, shot to number one.

Back home, Abba were already household names. All four had been performing since their teens: Benny Andersson as the live-wire keyboardist in Sweden’s biggest beat combo, the Hep Stars; Björn Ulvaeus as guitarist and singer in the implausibly named, hugely popular folk-schlager outfit the Hootenanny Singers; Agnetha Fältskog as a teen ingénue inspired by the American singer Connie Francis; and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, or Frida, as a budding chanteuse singing jazz standards in touring bands. The boys had met on Sweden’s ‘folkpark’ circuit in 1966 and quickly started writing songs together, encouraged by their soon-to-be manager and label boss Stig Anderson. In 1970 the four of them went on a couples’ holiday to Cyprus, where they marvelled at the combined effect of their voices during evening singalongs. Within three years they had pooled their individual careers, and names, into Abba – with permission from the original Abba, one of Sweden’s biggest producers of herring.

By August 1975, Sweden’s Social Democrats had been in power for 39 years. The prime minister, Olof Palme, was one of the few Western leaders to openly criticise America’s war in Vietnam and the overthrow of Salvador Allende. This was the backdrop to the socialist ‘music movement’ – also known as ‘progg’ (from progressive) – which dominated the Swedish music industry at the time. Rooted in Dylanesque folk pop, progg had nothing to do with the symphonic rock of Yes and the like, but shared something of punk’s do-it-yourself attitude and scruffy dress code. In the mid-1970s, prompted by a progg action committee, Sweden even abolished radio broadcasts of the pop charts. The progg movement took Abba’s Eurovision victory as a provocation.

Anderson had built up his pop empire by buying the rights to foreign hits and re-recording them with Swedish lyrics. After Eurovision, he cannily leveraged his network of international contacts to release ‘Waterloo’ in 54 countries. On the night, however, a Swedish interviewer didn’t offer congratulations, but accused a stunned Benny of making light of a military massacre: ‘Last year you made a pop song about calling someone on the phone [‘Ring Ring’]. This year you made a pop song about how forty thousand people died.’ When Sweden hosted Eurovision the following year, progg musicians responded with their own televised variety show, in which one act mocked the winners of the ‘immoral schlager festival’: ‘Here come Abba, dressed up in plastic, just as dead as tinned herrings/They don’t give a damn about anything, just want to make a quick buck.’ But as Björn points out, ‘if you look at record sales during that time, you get an entirely different picture of what music resonated deeply with the public.’ Their Swedish fans – typically more working-class than the proggers – kept Arrival at number one for twelve consecutive weeks.

Benny briefly envied the ‘burning ideological conviction’ of progg. ‘When you have all these forces working to make things better in society, it can be very provocative with a band that just runs around in platform boots and plays music.’ While Abba themselves were treated with derision, their brash and ambitious manager fared even worse. Mr Trendsetter, a TV documentary from 1975, portrayed him as a cynical megalomaniac and a drunk. Unlike nice, polite Abba, Anderson was happy to be a lightning rod for hate. He once quipped that ‘people are not as stupid as you think – they are even more stupid.’ The antagonism grew as the money, money, money rolled in. ‘The Rolling Stones’ manager never spoke of how much his band made, but ours did,’ Björn said. Complaining that the taxman was the chief beneficiary of Abba’s success, Anderson embarked on a series of avoidance schemes, including an umbrella company called Abba Invest, the purchase of a sports equipment firm that went bust after a bad winter, and a bungled deal for crude oil that lost the band several million dollars. Yet Abba themselves have always defended Sweden’s redistributive system, choosing to stay put rather than flee to tax-friendly domiciles; only Frida left, moving to Switzerland in the late 1980s to live with her third husband, Prince Ruzzo Reuss.

Carl Magnus Palm​ ’s brick-like Bright Lights Dark Shadows, now in its third edition, attempts a complete chronology of Abba, juiced with surprisingly candid quotes from old interviews. It’s a fan’s compendium, though not overly fanatical about its subjects, who come off as lifelike rather than stiffly iconic. Gradvall’s slim and digressive biography, on the other hand, finds space for interviews with fans – the brain surgeon who blasts Abba in theatre, the music critic whose immigrant parents loved ‘Money, Money, Money’ – and detours on Björn Borg’s tennis training regime, Swedish pizza toppings and the train journey from London to Bristol. His book is concerned less with the band members’ inner lives than with situating the Abba phenomenon historically: their roots in working-class ‘dansband’ culture, the social democratic milieu that regarded them as grasping capitalists and the melding of anglophone rock with European schlager that came to dominate pop after Abba.

Agnetha and Frida were in their teens when they started singing in dansbands, the steady-rocking Nordic equivalent of country music, with a touch of cabaret thrown in. Björn and Benny toured the same circuit, and Abba never quite shook off the theatrical impulse: the chintzy outfits, stilted between-song banter and a repertoire that at times included a mini-musical and a medley of children’s songs. At Wembley in 1979, Benny led a rendition of ‘The Way Old Friends Do’ on his piano accordion, the chief instrument in Swedish folk music and the basis of his musical education.

But Abba were also open to experimentation. They quickly understood themselves to be a studio band, particularly as Abbamania intensified and touring became an ordeal (their 1974 tour, with its entourage of 52 people and 30 tons of equipment, barely broke even). Crucial to their advancement was Michael Tretow, a young, self-taught studio whizz who engineered all of their hits. In 1972, after reading a book about Phil Spector he’d chanced on in a Stockholm bookshop, Tretow secretly overdubbed the backing track of ‘Ring Ring’, the band’s soon-to-be first hit, tweaking the speed ever so slightly: ‘It was like the roof was caving in. Björn and Benny were ecstatic.’ Each single was a leap forwards: 1975’s ‘Mamma Mia’, a scrum of counterpoint melodies vying for attention; 1976’s monolithic ‘Dancing Queen’, gleaming like an ice sculpture; 1979’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight)’, white disco’s zenith. The magic came from the pairing of Frida’s dramatic mezzo, grown-up and glamorous, with Agnetha’s belting soprano, bright and naive. ‘The girls were always on the max,’ Benny said. ‘The highest note was as high as they could manage, and then the rest was adapted to whatever that note was.’ Songs were stuffed with trills, frills and complex harmonies. With the exception of a hi-hat on ‘Dancing Queen’, cymbals were prohibited – too messy for Abba’s brightly buffed chassis. The value of lengthy toil in the studio ‘was awakened in us all’, said Tretow, ‘when we discovered it was possible to do proper records, when we all pulled ourselves out of the schlager swamp’.

For seven years, just about everything they touched turned to gold. Some did even better, like the Unicef charity single ‘Chiquitita’, which sold millions of copies across South America and led to Gracias por la Música, an entire Abba album en español. Resistance at home eventually faded along with the progg movement; in the late 1970s, a group of Swedish musicians travelled to Cuba hoping to exchange ideas about revolutionary music, only to be met with enthusiastic enquiries about Abba.

Super Trouper dazzled, but by 1980 the band were exhausted. ‘All I do is eat and sleep and sing,’ Frida laments on the title track, ‘wishing every show was the last show.’ Agnetha hated being away from her children and grew fearful of flying. She travelled separately from Björn in case of an accident, or perhaps for their sanity. Abba were staples of Sweden’s gossip rags, but it was Agnetha who attracted the most attention. The media fixated on what one journalist described as the ‘most handsome backside in pop’. In Abba: The Movie, a semi-fictionalised account of their 1977 Australia tour, her bum practically gets its own storyline, with a weary Agnetha trying to deflect further questioning: ‘Don’t they have bottoms in Australia?’

Agnetha, the only member of the band who could read music when Abba formed, was a prodigiously talented pianist; her tutor apparently ran out of things to teach her when she was thirteen. Four years later she signed a record deal on the basis of her own compositions. Hearing a string ensemble add their parts to a song she’d written was, she recalled, ‘the best experience I ever had’. But she suffered from stage fright, and even considered her nervousness to be some kind of ‘punishment for getting to do what I so deeply wanted’. While Frida brought muscularity and precision to their vocal alloy, Agnetha had something else: she could ‘cry with her voice’, as Tretow put it. ‘What I’m really good at is understanding what a lyric is about,’ she explained: ‘I enter into it, become the lyric.’ Björn claims he always knew which of the two voices he was writing for. How then, Palm wonders, did he fail to notice his tendency to make his wife sound ‘weak and devastated’ (‘The Day before You Came’, ‘SOS’, ‘The Winner Takes It All’), while Frida (‘Me And I’, ‘Money, Money, Money’, ‘Should I Laugh or Cry’) came across as a ‘woman in charge of her own destiny’?

Björn and Agnetha’s divorce was, by their own account, a ‘parting of two egocentrics’. Their split in 1979 brought no salacious revelations, just the drip-drip of incompatibility and resentment, as Agnetha sank under the pressures of motherhood while Björn disappeared into the studio. To appease the press they gave a post-divorce interview, which finished with a polite handshake. ‘It’s important to stress that this is a so-called happy divorce,’ Björn said, ‘if such a thing exists.’ Frida and Benny had finally got married a few months earlier, but they separated in 1980 and divorced the following year. Benny’s calm had been a cushion for Frida’s prickliness, a haven for her insecurities. She was the product of a wartime romance between a 19-year-old Norwegian girl and a German soldier. She had been raised by her grandmother after her mother’s death from kidney disease. Frida believed her father to be dead too, until in 1977 an unexpected phone call led to a brief reunion, her half-brother having pieced together the facts from a magazine profile. Frida had herself become a teenage mother after marrying the trombonist in her dansband, but chose to leave the children at home in order to pursue her career (Benny, for his part, also had two children already).

It’s hard to tell the Abba story without creating a tragic heroine or two. In the 1990s Agnetha remarried briefly, embarked on an inexplicable relationship with her stalker and stopped listening to music for a decade. Frida was vaporised into the European aristocracy, but her prince died young, and her daughter in a car crash soon afterwards. The gossip press painted them as a distant princess and a hysterical recluse, but in these books it’s the boys who come across as the weird ones. Emotionally distant and seemingly free of the parental guilt that ate away at the absent mothers, they’re tight-lipped even with their approved biographer. Björn struggles to remember his own life and blames this on his parents’ ‘unequal and very unhappy marriage’. ‘If I wanted to write my memoirs I wouldn’t be able to,’ he says. Benny, meanwhile, wonders whether his autobiography could be in musical notes rather than words: ‘That way you don’t have to write anything or tell anyone about how things have been.’

The final album​ in Abba’s initial run, The Visitors (1981), is a frigid outlier in their catalogue. Pulsing with Cold War paranoia, the synth-driven title track imagines a fateful knock at the door: ‘They must know by now I’m in here trembling/In a terror ever growing.’ ‘The Day before You Came’ points towards the oncoming decade of melancholy electronic pop forged by Abba’s descendants, with Benny’s Yamaha GX-1 synth edited by Tretow to sound as regimented as a drum machine. But the 1980s also brought synthetic excess, camp pastiche and sampled bricolage to the charts, as discos throbbed to new wave, hip-hop and Hi-NRG. Abba weren’t coming along for the party. The boys devoted themselves to writing their Cold War musical, Chess, with Tim Rice; Benny later released an album of Swedish birdsong accompanied by a book of watercolour illustrations. The girls picked up their solo careers with a few moderately successful albums, Frida dipping a toe into adult-oriented rock with Phil Collins, while Agnetha worked with Mike Chapman, producer and songwriter for the Sweet and Suzi Quatro. ‘The general feeling at the time was that Abba was really uncool,’ Björn told Gradvall. ‘If you’re predisposed to low self-esteem, like I am, it was hard not to think, “Okay, that’s that. It’s over now.”’ But Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink. Abba provided the foundation for the emergent synth-pop scene, from Stock Aitken Waterman’s hit factory to the Human League’s reincarnation as ‘an art Abba with the men wearing make-up’, as their keyboardist and guitarist, Jo Callis, put it. In the wake of punk, Gradvall points out, Abba and new wave were ‘aesthetically united’ in ‘bringing back pop as a means of direct communication’.

In 1981, the DJ Raul A. Rodriguez used a reel-to-reel machine to cut an extended version of ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’, providing DJs with the extra ‘runway’ needed to blend tracks and build momentum. At first Björn and Benny weren’t convinced by this musical development, but later that year Abba released their own official edit of the gay disco staple. It became the best-selling 12-inch single in British history until New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ two years later. Abba’s camp canonisation was sealed in 1994 by the release of two films: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a drag-costumed road movie for the dolls, and Muriel’s Wedding, a friendship fairy tale for the gals. The heroine of Muriel’s Wedding, Muriel Heslop, a jobless shoplifter, dreams of her white wedding and drowns out her loneliness by playing ‘Dancing Queen’ on repeat. ‘You’ve got no dignity, Muriel!’ her frenemy Cheryl tells her. A love of Abba was supposed to be a shameful secret, but for fans such as Andy Bell of Erasure that was entirely the point. ‘I embrace any kind of stigma and try to empower myself with it a bit, like reclaiming the word queer,’ he told Elisabeth Vincentelli for her book Abba’s Abba Gold (2004). ‘Being a total nelly in school, I made it cool to like Abba.’ Erasure’s electronic makeover of ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ was followed by Abba-esque, an EP of covers – accompanied by videos of the duo dressed up as Agnetha and Frida – which went to number one in 1992. Kurt Cobain demanded that Björn Again, an Abba tribute band, open for Nirvana at the Reading Festival that year. Barely a decade after their final album, the Abba revival had begun.

Meanwhile, the record label PolyGram was cooking up Abba Gold, a carefully manicured double album that removed the ruffles and bell bottoms and repackaged Andersson/Ulvaeus as era-defining songwriters to rank alongside Lennon/McCartney. The tracklist is eerily perfect. By the late 1990s Abba were basically tap water. Pete Waterman’s nightmarish vision of an ‘Abba on speed’ had taken corporeal form in the group Steps, who were part of the ensemble that performed an Abba medley – ‘Thank Abba for the Music’ – at the 1999 Brit Awards. An underage troupe, Abba Teens, was concocted to introduce a new audience to the back catalogue. Anderson’s legacy at Polar Music paved the way for Stockholm’s Cheiron Studios, which in turn gave a leg-up to Max Martin, whose more than 80 Top Ten hits and 25 Billboard number ones place him above Abba and behind only McCartney in the hit-making stakes. Without Abba, Palm notes, there would be no Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys or Katy Perry (who got their break on songs written by Martin), and we’d all be poorer for that, I suppose.

If the Beatles​ cast a shadow over pop songwriting from the 1970s to the 1990s, every decade since has belonged to Abba. The musical Mamma Mia! opened in the West End in 1999, followed by two film adaptations saved only by the presence of Meryl Streep. (Completists can also visit Mamma Mia! The Party, a rowdy themed restaurant in London’s O2 Arena and the only spin-off not sampled for this assignment.) Even the Swedes came to terms with Abba being their most famous export. By the 1990s economic boom and bust had hollowed out Swedish social democracy. Pop culture ate itself, yet Abba remained – and remain – pure and unspoiled, an original juxtaposition of modernity and folk tradition. What came after was always going to be a ‘blank parody’, as Fredric Jameson would have it. Nobody in Steps, to my knowledge, played the accordion. ‘Is there no one who can come up with any new stuff, who can do something corresponding to what we did back then?’ Benny wondered in 2000. ‘Something isn’t quite right, that’s not how it should be.’

Abba themselves are still marooned in the rose-tinted past. In a purpose-built, sauna-like wooden shrine at the tatty edge of the East End, their holograms play the same songs, night after night. Abba Voyage, which opened in 2022, offers the peculiar sensation of seeing the band’s faces not on TV but in cinematic close-up, captured at their 1979 peak and projected onto moving screens. The music is mostly live, with an energetic band accompanying freshly recorded vocal tracks, but the effect is as uncanny as you’d expect. The Hollywood effects studio Industrial Light and Magic created the Abbatars by zipping the septuagenarian band members into motion-capture suits for a month and recording every muscle movement on 160 cameras, inscribing their presence into code. The reunion also led to a surprise album, Voyage, a saccharine restaging of their naffest impulses: an ode to bumblebees, a Christmas song with – what else – a children’s choir.

But the new songs can’t dim the glow of Abba Voyage. Best not to spoil it for those who haven’t been, but it’s notable that the space is designed so that the audience can see one another. We’re lit up in our sequinned glad rags, experiencing something like time travel. I find that I’m crying into my red wine, thinking of my parents, both dead now, who met in 1974 at a hotel disco in the Arctic Circle, close to where Frida was born. I’m not the only one experiencing a twinge of saudade in this crowd of old friends, sisters, grandsons, divorcées, the whole family picnic. It’s enough to silence any doubts about the commercial spectacle. Who needs a soul when you can live for ever?