In a rare interview Bjorn Ulvaeus tells Cosmo Landesman why 30 years on his pop creation is a cultural phenomenon
It’s hard to believe that there was a time in Britain when to admit to a passion for the works of Abba was — in certain circles — a form of social suicide. They arrived into our lives in 1974, at a time when ageing baby boomers were listening to Pink Floyd and their brattish offspring were preparing to pogo to punk. Abba’s catchy tunes and kitschy outfits symbolised all that was awful about middle-of-the-road pop. Yet 30 years later, we ’re all Abba fans now.
The Abba musical Mamma Mia! — written by the two men of the group and featuring all the band’s biggest hits — is celebrating its fifth birthday, and has been seen by 10m people worldwide. The newest convert is the Prince of Wales, who will see the show this week. Meanwhile, the group’s greatest hits album, Abba Gold, is busy making its own records, celebrating its 469th week in the UK charts. (Overall they’ve sold about 400m CDs and records since their first hit.) And next month thousands of fans from all over Europe will be attending the Abbafest in Brighton to celebrate the band’s Eurovision Song Contest victory of 1974.
But why is all this happening? How has it happened? Everyone seems to have forgotten the one fact that doesn’t show up in all the mind-boggling Abba statistics: the Eurovision Song Contest is supposed to be a one-way ticket to obscurity. But Abba won and then went on to win the hearts of the world.
In doing so Abba has defied what was once the central commandment of pop music: thou shalt be here today and gone tomorrow. Ye shall shine in sequence, sell a million records, enjoy your 15 minutes of fame and be forgotten. But no, not Abba. They are the band that time refuses to forget.
Abba’s longevity is one of the great mysteries of pop music, so I turned to Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus for some help. He was the one who played guitar and was slimmer than Benny. Okay, let’s try that again. He is the clean-shaven one (usually) and was married to the sexy-blonde one, Agnetha.
These days, aged 59, he is not clean-shaven. He has a furry, subtly grey-flecked beard and small, smiling teddy-bear eyes and a mop of luxuriously deep-brown hair. He lives with his second wife, Lena, in Sweden with their two kids, Emma, 22, and Anna, 18.
He is willing and able to put the British Abba obsession into a precisely scientific international context. “Abba are certainly more popular in Britain than southern Europe,” he says, “but compared with Sweden and Australia, they’re really about equal.” The Americans, he says, lag far behind: in Britain the band had nine number one hits; in the United States they had just the one, Dancing Queen.
But is there any country on the planet that has been able to resist the tuneful charms of Abba — North Korea, maybe, or Outer Mongolia? Bjorn chuckles: “No.”
“What about Africa? Deep in the Heart of Darkness? Not much Abba mania going on there?” I suggest. He is keen to disabuse me of such naivety. “On no,” he says, “A friend was recently out there in the bush on safari. He was enjoying the sun, the great silence of the plains when suddenly he heard the sounds of Dancing Queen.”
Perhaps one reason for the continued success of Abba is that in a Britain that’s so culturally fragmented, they’re the one thing that we can all agree on. Abba are chicken tikka masala for the nation’s ears.
One of the most fascinating things about the Abba consensus is that people — critics and snooty rock fans — who hated them back in the 1970s now claim to have “always loved Abba”.
Bjorn mulls the idea over. “It’s strange,” he says. “For those people we used to be the Antichrist. I remember when we split up in 1981 and Abba was still very uncool.”
Not only were the band uncool but on the brink of being forgotten. It was a fate that Bjorn and the rest had prepared themselves for.
“When we split up, I thought that’s it. Our records might get played now and then on the radio, but nothing much else would happen,” he says. “After all, pop music is a here-today-and-gone-tomorrow thing. So nobody is more astonished by what has happened than us.”
Abba’s return was, he explains, rather a spontaneous, grassroots revivalism. Their music was introduced to a new generation by two Australian films, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding. About the same time artists such as Erasure began covering Abba hits. Slowly but certainly, the band became cool.
Bjorn admits he has little idea why this happened. “I don’t have a good answer. I guess the songs and the recording must be good. I mean the production is done with so much care and craftsmanship. And by chance we had the unique sound that the two girls created. It’s that special sound that makes Abba so distinct.”
The big problem facing the ex-Abba members is that they can never really find a future that lives up to their past. Both Agnetha and Frida have released albums, but have found only a modest success.
And the theatrical collaboration of Benny and Bjorn hasn’t really set the theatre world on fire either, beyond the Abba-based musical. True, they had a few hits with the Tim Rice musical Chess back in 1983 but since then their new music has failed to make its mark. Bjorn admits that life after Abba has its problems: “Yes it has been difficult for us.”
One of the reasons that so many critics hated Abba when they first appeared is that they were seen as a manufactured group put together for Eurovision. Today, thanks to programmes such as Pop Idol and Fame Academy, manufactured groups and stars are the norm.
To an old-school musician like Bjorn — who cut his pop teeth playing in a Swedish folk group — “it’s a pity. I don’t like these manufactured groups. People said that about us, but it wasn’t true. We were thrown together by fate”.
But were Abba as squeaky-clean as people imagined? Did they have a dark side? Bjorn says: “We were two married couples. That’s different from what all-male groups in the 1970s went through. We would just argue, like married people do.”
But that doesn’t mean they weren’t a touch rock’n’roll. There must have been pot-smoking on the way? “Yes, absolutely. It happened,” Bjorn says.
Since the end of Abba it seems that that the two men have come out of it slightly better than Agnetha and Frida. It’s said that Agnetha has become a recluse since a series of disastrous affairs and that Frida has never recovered from the death of her husband Prince Ruzzo Reuss in 1999.
But Bjorn denies this. “Agnetha is not a recluse — she just doesn’t like to travel. When I saw her about two months ago she looked perfectly happy and perky — to me she gets on with her life. She has a grandchild and they’re living on the same property. And I still see Frida quite often and she’s in great shape.”
So if they’re all so friendly how come Abba refuse to reform or play live? “We’ve said what we wanted to say. There’s no musical motivation for us any more and we don’t need the money,” says Bjorn.
“But for me the most important thing is that I don’t want people to be disappointed. We’re all close to 60. People are used to seeing the Rolling Stones get older,” he adds, a touch dolefully. “But not us.” Eternal, jaunty youth — perhaps after all that is the secret of their continuing appeal.