MICHAEL TRETOW

There are too many fifth Beatles to count – Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and at least a couple of their wives – but there was only ever one fifth member of Abba, recording engineer Michael Tretow who death at the age of 80 was reported today.

        “You meant more to us four in ABBA than anyone else,” says Benny Andersson. “Our music lives on, it seems, and you are the one who made it timeless.”

        “His significance to Abba cannot be overstated,” added Björn Ulvaeus, and the two Abba singers, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, are of the same mind.  

        So, too, is my friend Magnus Palm, the group’s premier archivist and historian and author of several Abba books, among them the definitive Abba biography Bright Lights Dark Shadows, commissioned by me in 2000 and still in print having been revised and updated many times. “Michael Tretow was an endless source of ideas on how to make their recordings more exciting,” Magnus tells me. “He was Benny and Björn’s unofficial co-producer. Just as importantly, he was an empathetic human being who knew how to lighten the mood when spirits sank during the group’s interminable backing track sessions, or when Agnetha and Frida got stuck during the recording of a vocal overdub.”

        It was Magnus’s epic biography that drew my attention to Michael’s contribution to Abba, specifically how keen he was to explore new studio techniques in an era when Sweden’s studios lacked the hi-tech capabilities of those in the UK and US. Like the group, he was ambitious, never one to stand still or abide by outdated procedures that had governed the way records were made for years. And like them, he wanted their records to appeal to an international audience.

        Ever on the hunt for anything that might help his endeavours, Michael found what he wanted in a bookshop. “He found the book he’d been dreaming about,” wrote Magnus in Bright Lights Dark Shadows. “Just published, Out Of His Head: The Sound Of Phil Spector was written by Richard Williams, the assistant editor of the British music paper Melody Maker who’d been present at the recording of John Lennon’s Spector-produced ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ and seen the legend at work. Michael headed straight for the cashier with this find, eager to secure his copy before anyone else snapped it up.

        “Björn, Benny and Michael were… big fans of the records made by Phil Spector in the early Sixties [but] what Michael wanted to know was how Spector achieved that enormous sound. Although he wasn’t entirely sure, he thought he had a hunch – and now Out Of His Head revealed all the secrets. ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals had used ‘a whole gang of guitars’, the book established. On the following page, a section about The Ronettes’ classic ‘Be My Baby’ went into even greater detail. ‘The orchestra, outrageously gigantic, had pianos and basses arrayed in ranks in the studios,’ wrote Williams, ‘and everyone joining in to play the percussion which Spector had arranged with almost militaristic precision.

        “Michael nodded to himself. ‘That explained why it sounded like five guitars,’ he recalled, ‘it was because Spector really did use five guitars.’ But having several guitarists, pianists, bassists and so on in the studio at the same time would have been far too expensive for comparatively low-key Swedish productions. If a similar effect was to be achieved, they would have to do several overdubs of each of the instruments. Michael knew he simply had to try it sometime.

        “Similarly, Björn and Benny were thrilled to be working with an enthusiastic engineer. ‘Right from the first time I met Michael in the studio, I felt that here was a guy who thought this was just as exciting as we did,’ recalled Benny. It didn’t hurt that the engineer wasn’t just a technical boffin, but understood and shared their dream of achieving success outside Scandinavia.”

        The first Abba recording that Michael engineered was ‘People Need Love’, followed by ‘Ring Ring’, initially intended as the group’s entry for the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest but which failed to win sufficient votes. Nevertheless, by Swedish standards it was a breakthrough recording in terms of studio technique, the first song that Abba recorded that didn’t sound clumsy against UK and US recordings. A year later, of course, Abba won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, another Tretow engineering job and one clearly influenced by Spector. 

        In 2008 I was asked to write an introduction to a matching folio for Gold, Abba's multimillion-selling hits album. “It was Michael Tretow who discovered Abba’s ‘third’ voice,” I wrote. “This was the sound of Frida and Agnetha singing together, layer upon layer of overdubbed backing vocals creating the rich, all-enveloping choral landscape that became one of Abba’s most distinctive trademarks. Coupled with exemplary musicianship from Björn and Benny and the best Swedish session players available, the result was pop perfection.” 

        Michael worked closely with Abba throughout their entire career, eight studio albums, two live sets and the 4-CD retrospective Thank You For The Music, his final recording ‘The Day Before You Came’, the atmospheric track with a nod towards minimalism and electronica that became Abba’s glorious swan song in 1982. 

        As Magnus’ book makes clear, in the late 1970s, Björn and Benny rewarded Michael generously. From the Voulez-Vous album onwards Tretow received a 0.5 per cent royalty on all Abba recordings as a reward for his loyalty and contributions over the years. “It was kind of unprecedented,” says Michael with some understatement. “And it wasn’t because I asked for it, they were the ones who said, ‘You should have that’. I’ve never heard of anything like it.” This gesture meant that when the three per cent royalty rate allotted to the stars – the Abba members – was split four ways, it amounted to only 0.75 per cent, marginally more than the 0.5 per cent allotted to their recording engineer.

Michael suffered a stroke in 2001, and although he recovered well, he retired from the music business and as a result Abba’s 2021 album Voyage is the only one in their catalogue not to feature a Tretow credit. 

        The last word must go to Abba’s formidable vocal duo: 

        Anni-Frid: “You were the security in our little studio bubble with your never-ending creativity, warmth and joy and no one fit the bill as well as you! For us, you are forever part of the ABBA sound and you will never be forgotten!” 

        Agnetha: “So many memories are preserved, your encouraging words during the recordings meant so much. We are sad now, a talented and unique person has left us. Sleep well Micke, you are in our hearts forever.”

ABBA VOYAGE

“I can’t believe it,” sang The Who in A Quick One. “Do my eyes deceive me?”

        It’s like a dream to see Abba again, but the truth is I didn’t see them. I saw a virtual reality Abba show that recreated them on a stage as if they were flesh and blood, achieved through the mystery of modern technology, smoke and mirrors, a slightly weird adaptation of what special effects boffins do with pixels in movies like Star Wars, Toy Story and Avatar. For most of the show I was fooled, captivated, compelled like everyone else to join in the charade, and when it was over I stood and cheered, not quite sure whether I was cheering Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida or the skill of those whose expertise brought them to life again. 

Most of the sell-out crowd – 3,000 but it somehow seemed more due to the scrum in the dancing pit – were no doubt cheering Abba’s legacy, “the songs I’m singing”, or simply expressing their genuine love for the group’s evergreen music. For 90 minutes it was performed, with precision alongside giant screens and a spectacular light show, at enormous volume by a live band accompanying the same vocal tracks, perhaps enhanced, recorded by Abba in their prime. Meanwhile, in the centre of the enormous stage, the four of them, Björn with his guitar on the left, Benny on his keyboards to the right, Agnetha and Frida in the middle, delivered 20 of their songs, mostly well known ones, including a couple from last year’s Voyage album. Extraordinary! 

Let’s begin at the beginning. We were searched with airport-style scanners as we entered the specially constructed Abba Arena. There’s lots of staff in matching outfits, all of them smiling and wishing us a good time, and plenty of opportunity to spend our hard earned on food and drink, which isn’t cheap, not to mention memorabilia, especially the £15 programmes, in shops, one of which, believe it or not, is located in the Pudding Mill Lane DLR station opposite the venue. The tickets weren’t cheap either. The promoters of this extravaganza, not least Abba themselves, clearly want a good return on their massive investment. 

Inside, the audience was as broad a demographic as you could imagine, mums and dads with children, teenagers, groups of women in their twenties sipping Prosecco, middle aged parents, right the way up to a handful that looked even older than myself. The vast majority, however, weren’t even born when Abba quietly called it a day at the end of 1982, let alone when they won Eurovision in 1974. Many had dressed for the occasion, glitter tops and pants, vague recreations of the ice-blue costumes that Abba once wore, a sprinkling of lookalikes. 

        There was a palpable sense of anticipation in the air as the lights dimmed. After a stern warning that photography was not permitted and miscreants would be “asked to leave”, a fanfare struck up. The mesh curtain across the front, a depiction of Scandinavian pine trees, snowflakes gently falling, was drawn back and four slim, dark figures rose from trapdoors beneath the stage. One stepped forward, the signal for lift off: the recreated Frida singing ‘The Visitors’, the title track from their final album, an ominous, synth-driven song about paranoia, not the most obvious opener but reflective of the more mature, late-period Abba; an indication of the way the group prefers to be perceived in the 21st Century. The volume was deafening, as loud as any band I’d ever heard, with a booming bass and sharp, piercing vocals. 

        Thereafter the songs came thick and fast. “Hello London,” screamed the Benny hologram (henceforth in this review the members of Abba will be referred to as if they were real) before ‘Hole In Your Soul’, not one of Abba’s better-known songs, followed by a couple of belters, ‘SOS’ and ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. The dance floor took on a life of its own, like a turbulent ocean, twisting and churning, the first few bars of these songs eliciting warm ripples of recognition. The tempo slowed for two more crowd favourites, ‘Chiquitita’ and ‘Fernando’, played back to back, the former backlit with a glorious golden sun, eclipsed slowly by the moon, and enlivened by singers from the house band dancing in the aisles, their arms waving, encouraging everyone to do the same, which they did. The latter was performed before a twinkling sky, bright stars shining for liberty, for ‘Fernando’. Agnetha and Frida sang their parts as per the records, stepping forward on cue. Someone had taken a lot of trouble over presentation, and it worked. Then it was back to energetic dancing for ‘Mamma Mia’. 

        It was heady, non-stop stuff. Abbatars – or whatever we choose to call them – don’t need to pause for breath, neither do they perspire. They blink like humans, though, their hair bounces realistically and they smile at one another encouragingly, looking as though they are enjoying themselves. The girls dance and occasionally embrace. The one with the guitar appeared to play it, mostly a blue semi-acoustic 12-string, and there was even a lead connected to one of those radio boxes attached to his belt. The one on piano appeared to play too, his fingers sliding down the keys for a characteristic glissando right on cue. By now these two had both addressed the audience. “Who’d have thought it?” was the tone of Benny’s droll comments, while Björn thanked everyone for coming and explained that he needed to get changed while the band and their on-stage singers took over during ‘Does You Mother Know’. 

        With the Abbatars taking an extended break ‘Eagle’ accompanied an animated film, a pilgrim progressing through desolate landscapes, the Voyage of the show’s title no doubt, hints of Lord Of The Rings or a Nordic folk tale of some sort. Then the foursome reappeared in those tight black outfits with neon trims, a bit like Kraftwerk, for ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’, ‘Summer Night City’ and the disco throb of ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’, a triple dose of deafening dance delirium for the mosh pit. 

        There was more animated film footage while ‘Voulez Vous’ rang out – I’d have preferred to see the group – before Frida stepped forward to talk about female empowerment, quite apt in view of her particular journey. To my delight she sang a favourite of mine, ‘When All Is Said And Done’, the rousing song of heartfelt regret from their final LP that somehow, undeservedly, went largely unnoticed at the time.

        Agnetha introduced the two songs from their recent Voyage LP, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ and ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, the former sounding like a throwback to their glory years, the latter suggestively autobiographical. (The much-watched video for ‘... Faith in You’ is extracted from the Voyage show.) ‘Thank You For The Music’ triggered a mass singalong, albeit largely unheard above the booming PA, before Björn took us back to Brighton and ‘Waterloo’, accompanied by the only old film footage of the night, the Eurovision look, the big cat dresses and outfits that no doubt still bring on nightmares for Benny and Björn. 

        Freshly attired while nostalgia ruled, with Agnetha now in a flouncy white gown, they gave us the inevitable ‘Dancing Queen’, which brought the house down, and returned for one encore, the equally inevitable ‘The Winner Takes It All’, nowadays their most admired song, sensibly saved for the very end. It was a superb, well considered, conclusion. Finally, unexpectedly, after the Abbatars had left the stage waving, the real Abba, or at least Abba as they look now, returned for a quick curtain call, or was it simply aged Abbatars? By this time, I didn't care. 

As they appeared at the end

        It wasn’t flawless. Close scrutiny of the screens revealed tiny imperfections in the lip-synching. The superb light show, scores of illuminated discs and ribbons ascending and descending from the ceiling, may have been designed to distract from this. Either way, at a distance they looked far more real than on the screens. And I’ve have preferred ‘One Of Us’ and/or ‘Take A Chance On Me’ to some of the selections, also maybe ‘The Day Before You Came’, their wondrous swansong. 

        There will come a time when all rock and pop musicians born in the 20th Century will no longer be with us, but thanks to the technology pioneered by Abba, of all people, in this extraordinary show, they can, if they choose so to do, perform forever. Don’t ask me to explain how they did it but for most of the 90 minutes, while the four members of Abba appeared to perform at their custom-built East London arena, I was fooled into thinking it really was them up there on that stage. It was fabulous, emotionally charged and utterly captivating. 

ABBA AT 50 by Carl Magnus Palm

Illustrated Abba books have never been in short supply. Publishers long ago assumed that what their fans wanted was a large format book with plenty of photographs, preferably of Agnetha and Frida in clingy costumes that showed off their figures, and a minimum of text that skipped through their glorious career without much detail and certainly nothing negative. Slap it all together and you might have a decent seller on your hands, especially if publication happens to coincide with an anniversary or anything else that raises the Swedish group’s profile for a few months.

        Magnus Palm – he loses the Carl among friends – acknowledges this in a reference to the paucity of serious Abba books in the introduction to Bright Lights Dark Shadows, his definitive, text-led, 250,000+ word biography of Abba first published in 2001 and since fully revised. You could be forgiven, therefore, for assuming that Abba At 50 is a frothy confection just like all the rest. Indeed, it’s not even the only picture book published to celebrate their 50th anniversary, as a glimpse at Amazon’s Abba page reveals another called 50 Years of Abba: The Unofficial Illustrated Book For The Anniversary, and about half a dozen older books whose publishers no doubt hope will get a bounce this autumn.

        In stark terms, Abba At 50 is a summary of the 2014 edition of Bright Lights Dark Shadows, drastically but skilfully reduced to 13 concise chapters, with a new overview as an introduction and a 14th chapter, newly written to cover Abba’s 2021 Voyage album and the concurrent Abba avatars show, ongoing in its own arena at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park at Stratford in East London. The book’s 240 pages contain 168 photographs, mostly in colour, and a running LP discography, with track listings, personnel and incidental notes, that separates each chapter once Björn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha are up and running.

        Magnus, of course, is now recognised as the world’s leading Abba historian, as Mark Lewisohn is to The Beatles and Dave Lewis to Led Zeppelin. His book isn’t authorised – it doesn’t have Abba’s official logo, with the first B inverted, on its cover – and he doesn’t thank the four members of the group in the brief acknowledgements at the back, aside from noting that Benny Andersson helped him write a book about the Hep Stars, Benny’s first group. He also notes, dryly, that he has ‘somehow ended up being my main source of information’. 

        He’s not exaggerating. By my reckoning, Abba At 50 is Magnus’ seventh Abba book with an eighth a work in progress* but what differentiates it from all the other illustrated Abba books on the market is the precise attention to detail and the certain knowledge that every scintilla of information he offers is 100% accurate. Almost all the photographs are captioned precisely, time, place and circumstance duly noted, which is more than can be said about most illustrated books on pop bands, but no less than I would expect from their most erudite and diligent biographer.  

        Similarly, while there can be no question that Magnus is on Abba’s side – he’s long been the group’s go-to man for sleeve notes on reissues – he is far from slavishly sycophantic. He covers the ups and the downs, the fall outs and periods when Abba’s star wasn’t shining quite as brightly as it does today. The inclusion of three damning review quotes from early in their career at the start of Chapter 2 epitomises his impartial approach, even if the foursome nowadays ruefully admit they weren’t far from the truth. The divorces, fall out with manager Stikkan ‘Stig’ Anderson and overindulgence in alcohol – Björn and Benny have both been obliged to become teetotal – aren’t glossed over either.

        With a £30 cover price (£24.17 on Amazon) Abba At 50 is not the cheapest illustrated Abba book on the market. However, although I haven’t read them all, I’ll put good money on it being the best.

_________

*The others are: The Complete Recording Sessions (1994, 2017), Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba (2001, 2002, 2008, 2014), Benny’s Road To Abba (2004), The Complete Guide To The Music Of Abba (2005), From Abba To Mamma Mia (1999, 2000, 2010), Abba: The Backstage Stories (2014, co-author) & Abba On Record (scheduled for publication 2023). 

ABBA VOYAGE

Long waits invariably heighten expectations, whether it’s the traditional late arrival on stage by The Rolling Stones or the delay between albums one and two from The Stone Roses. The Stones usually make up for their tardiness, at least by the end of the show, but the Roses’ second album was a bit of a disappointment, give or take a couple of tracks. Which brings me to Abba and the far longer wait, 39 years to be precise, between the release of ‘The Day Before You Came’, their last recording in 1982, and ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, the taster from Voyage, the new, much-heralded album that was released on November 5, accompanied by all the fireworks you would expect on Bonfire Night.

Early reviews were mixed and a bit sketchy, which leads me to believe they were written in haste, the fevered anticipation having triggered a rush to make up for lost time. Nevertheless, the sense of expectation surrounding Abba’s Voyage prompted a marketing campaign orchestrated with extreme finesse by Universal Music who no doubt instructed all their production plants to manufacture Abba CDs by the skip load. Only six weeks to Christmas too.

As well as manufacturing Voyage they probably knocked out another million or two of Gold, which has already sold umpteen million copies and stands as the jewel in Abba’s crown, one of the greatest of greatest hits albums, showcasing all Abba’s strengths, from the beloved ‘Dancing Queen’ to that Pacific Ocean of heartbreak, ‘The Winner Takes It All’. I’d hazard a bet that Gold’s universal charms have raised the bar so high that many fans, especially newer ones, will expect Voyage to boast similar virtues. Some probably saw no reason to reach deeper into Abba’s catalogue and, in this respect, those umpteen million sales might therefore be a poisoned chalice: is Voyage as good as Gold?

Well, it’s not, nor would any sane person expect it to be. Voyage is not an unqualified triumph yet at the same time it holds up well against any of the eight LPs Abba recorded between 1972 and 1981. Like all those albums, it’s a mixed bag, 10 tracks in all, not that generous in the CD age that Abba just preceded, a few superb songs, a few on the mediocre side and one stinker. It’s produced with all the care you would expect from experienced studio craftsmen like Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, and the heavenly choir of Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad has lost none of its charm in the intervening years. Agnetha sounds the same, Frida a tad lower. Björn’s lyrics are sometimes slightly odd, as they always were, and there are hooks galore alongside three cheeky quotes from their past, though you have to listen carefully to catch them. Perhaps more importantly, Abba as a unit has done absolutely nothing in the way of updating their sound or style, with the result that Voyage could have been recorded at any time during their heyday. So, the Voyage might have lasted a long time but it didn't go very far.

The album opens with ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, the lovely ballad that was released in early September as a taster. Frida leads a song that is gloriously melodic, chiming and poignant insofar as the lyrics seem to relate to the group itself, the ‘memories we share’, and when Agnetha joins in, there’s that unmistakable Abba sound, the lush choral wash that only they can produce. Lasting just over five minutes, it gathers momentum, soaring into a blend of overdubbed verse and chorus that ultimately drops away to leave Frida alone to bring it back to where it began. It’s up there with the best of Abba. 

There’s an abrupt change of mood for ‘When You Danced With Me’, its Gaelic flavour contrasting sharply with Abba’s regular arsenal of snappy pop, disco workouts and woeful, melancholic balladry. Still, it’s lively and fun, with a trace of synthesised bagpipes, even if the girls are lamenting the loss of a childhood sweetheart. 

So far so good but track three, ‘Little Things’, is the kind of thing for which the fast forward facility was invented, at least on my device. It’s a Christmas song, twee in the extreme, and for the final verse Frida is joined by a children’s choir, as in ‘I Have A Dream’, except even more excruciatingly saccharine. Furthermore, in among the doses of syrup, there’s a mild suggestion that on Christmas morning mum and dad indulge in a bit of festive rumpy-pumpy before the kids open their presents. I just hope they don’t release it as a single on the feint chance it'll become this year’s Christmas number one.  

It’s something a relief to reach ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’, which may have been sequenced here for its opening line, ‘A while ago I heard the sound of children’s laughter’. The second of the two songs previewed prior to the album’s release, and the first track here to feature Agnetha singing lead, it’s catchy, cheery and danceable, even though the poor girl’s fragile heart has been broken yet again. Nowadays, though, she can cope – ‘I’m not the one you knew’ – for which we can all be thankful. This is pop Abba in the manner of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Take A Chance On Me’, complete with Benny’s tinkly piano and a ‘Dancing Queen’-style sliding glissando across the keys, a snappy snare and Björn, quirky as ever, rhyming ‘frustration’ with ‘transformation’. It makes up for ‘Little Things’, faint praise I know but the more I hear it the more I warm to it. 

        ‘Just A Notion’, which follows, opens with a slice of boogie piano a la Mac Rebennack, but soon settles into a shuffle with hints of German shlager, one of Abba’s early default positions but, to be fair, this song would have won Eurovision hands down at any time in the last 30 years. It’s as catchy as they come, with Benny tinkling away like Steve Naïve on ‘Oliver’s Army’, and in the background, especially towards the end, the girls murmur ‘A-ha-ha’, a bit further down in the mix to the similar vocal trick on ‘Angeleyes’, the first of the three nostalgic quotes I refer to above. It’s no surprise that this has become the third track to have been released as a single. (Since writing this I have learned that ‘Just A Notion’ was recorded in 1978 but held back. This would suggest that the girls’ ‘A-ha-ha’ was a vocal idea hatched before ‘Angeleyes’ was recorded and not after.)

        No Abba album would be complete without a dramatic ballad sung by Agnetha and on Voyage we have ‘I Can Be That Woman’, another meditation on a failing relationship, more in the style of the show tunes that were Frida’s forte in the past. Oddly, the surprise here is that her husband seems to prefer the company of the family dog to herself, a dilemma that only a quirky lyricist like Björn could have devised. In a similar vein is ‘Keep An Eye On Dan’, again sung by Agnetha who this time appears to regret separating from her man, more rhythmic that the preceding track with a sparkling chorus, and as the song fades Benny injects the keyboard figure that opens ‘S.O.S.’, a nice touch.

        ‘Bumblebee’, a richly melodic but rather vague comment on climate change, opens with a few bars on recorder that bring to mind the opening bars of ‘Fernando’, no doubt deliberately. Frida intones about the glories of her garden, mentioning a few flowers by name and mourning the day when the bees will no longer visit. It’s quite charming if slightly clumsy in the lyric department.

        The penultimate track, ‘No Doubt About It’, opens with a sprightly banjo and is an absolute cracker in Abba’s pop style, fast and catchy, up there with the best from their past. Although there are neat variations, the recurrent melody and tempo reminded me slightly of ‘Scorpio Rising’, the 10,000 Maniacs song from The Wishing Chair, but is no worse for that. I like the way the backing drops away for Frida to take a melodic line or two before both girls jump in on the breezy, full-tilt chorus. Another dose of Abba at their best. 

        Finally, we have the grand, stately closer, ‘Ode To Freedom’, which I read somewhere is based on a waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The only bit of Swan Lake that I know is the memorable ascending phrase I played years ago in a band myself, an instrumental that The Cougars had mutated into ‘Saturday Night At The Duck Pond’, but Abba’s take on the eminent Russian composer’s work is far more reverent, and accompanies a beautifully sung hymn, slightly let down by unconvincing lyrics. Still, the choral panorama is pure and, I’m sure, heartfelt, and it brings the album to a suitably memorable close. 

        As good as Gold? Not quite but at least four tracks would have made it on to that CD, and most of the rest on to More Gold. 

THE RETURN OF ABBA

The miracle is that they don’t sound any different. Frida will be 76 in November and Agnetha turned 71 in April but their voices, especially when they sing together, sound exactly the same as they did during the seventies, as does, bar a bit of 21st Century upgrade, the musical backdrop of keyboards, synthesised strings, tuned drums and occasional electric guitar. More importantly, they still don’t sound like anyone else; nor, for that matter, has anyone else been able to sound like them since Abba disbanded 40 years ago. 

        The YouTube video for Abba’s new and characteristically epic ballad ‘I Still Have Faith In You’ has, as of an hour ago, had over four and a half million views since it appeared on the internet last night. The video for their other new song, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’, while slightly less impressive, has had over one and a half million. That’s all occurred in the first 24 hours since they were made available. 

        Packed with the sweeping surges of emotion and traces of autobiography that was the hallmark of all their best work, ‘I Still Have Faith In You’ opens with a few grand notes that put me in mind of Elgar’s patriotic works before one of the girls, in this case Frida, sings solo. There’s an unmistakable delicacy, even hesitancy, to her voice, as if the words conjure up a well of sentiment she finds difficult to express or, even now, it’s still a challenge for her to sing in the English language. On the third line – ‘There was a union’ – Agnetha unsurprisingly joins in, before Frida closes the verse: ‘Of heart and mind, the likes of which are, oh so hard to find.’ Thereafter, although Frida leads, they are regularly reunited in that familiar choral landscape only Abba could produce. 

        We’re less than a minute into the song and it is unmistakably Abba, gloriously melodic, chiming and poignant. Are they singing about themselves? Is the ‘bittersweet song’ they mention one of their melancholy old hits? Are the ‘memories we share’ a commemoration of their marriages, or of the group, or the long history of the relationships that Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida have shared? Of course, lyricist Björn will never confirm this – the best songs are always enigmatic – but in this way ‘I Still Have Faith In You’ perfectly recreates the magic of Abba, that none too subtle blend of reality and fantasy, all folded neatly into a bravura performance that was, is and remains an inimitable Abba trait.  

        The song lasts just over five minutes and gradually gathers momentum, ebbing and flowing in much the same way as ‘Our Last Summer’, ‘Slipping Though My Fingers’ and ‘Winner Takes It All’, all of which share a similarity in tempo and sentiment. As it progresses, footage from Abba – The Movie, the Abba In Concert DVD and individual song videos are shown, cleverly edited at various points to suggest they are actually performing the new song. It follows a chronological sequence, from pre-Abba to The Visitors, and there’s a nod to their massive popularity in Australia with shots of the huge crowds that gathered to greet them in Melbourne. 

        At the 3.45 mark, theatrically accompanied by background audience cheers, we leave the familiar footage and are introduced to the much-heralded four digital Abba avatars, on stage as they soar into the uplifting final chorus of ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, this time with a underlying vocal counterpoint that blends chorus and verse, a crescendo that closes – again like other Abba epics – with the backing track dropping away for one of the girls, again Frida here, to bring it all back to where it began by soloing on a final line or two. 

        Less dramatic, but still unmistakably Abba, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ features Agnetha singing an extended prologue before the song kicks in, lively, danceable and cheery even though Agnetha has clearly had her fragile heart broken yet again. Nowadays, though, she can cope – ‘I’m not the one you knew’ – for which we can all be thankful. This is pop Abba in the manner of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘Mama Mia’ and ‘Take A Chance On Me’, complete with Benny’s tinkly piano and a ‘Dancing Queen’-style sliding glissando across the keys, a snappy snare and Björn, quirky as ever, rhyming ‘frustration’ with ‘transformation’. Unfortunately, the video features the lyrics only. 

        These two tracks are a taster for a new Abba album called ABBA: The Voyage which will be released in November. In May 2022 a series of Abba concerts featuring the avatars – or ‘Abbatars’ as Björn calls them – are scheduled for London’s Olympic Park which will be renamed the Abba Arena. The virtual Abba, which will be accompanied by a live band, will ‘perform’ songs old and new.

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN

Love or loathe Abba – and the longer we live the fewer there are who need to be won over – it’s impossible not to like this great big, warm-hearted, funny, touching and occasionally silly movie. Like the clothes Abba once wore it’s OTT and, like the original film, it’s a feast of colour and attractive people, all of them cavorting about in sunny, picturesque locations where everyone has a habit of joyously bursting into song and waving their arms about as another Abba classic is performed by cast members, not always with the same skill as Agnetha and Frida but with enthusiasm and knowing smiles that more than make up for any shortcomings in their vocal attributes.

         Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is, like Godfather II, a shifting prequel and sequel to the 2008 film but unlike Godfather II no one avenges family honour by arranging a violent death. Tears and heartbreak, misfortune and indignity are smoothed away with an Abba song, 16 in total, a few of which are reprised from the earlier film – how could you not include 'Dancing Queen'? – though many are album tracks uncollected on either Gold or More Gold and therefore not quite so well known. Part of the fun, as before, is guessing when they’re about to arrive through slightly oblique turns in the story and appropriate bits of dialogue.

         It has to be said that those unfamiliar with the plot of the original film – a girl’s quest to identify her father from among her mother’s three boyfriends – might take a while to cotton on to what’s happening here. Lily James plays young Donna, the role played by Meryl Streep in the original film, and her story not only takes up most of the screen time but also packs the emotional punch. We meet her at her graduation ceremony – cue for ‘When I Kissed The Teacher’ – after which for reasons unexplained she heads for Greece via Paris where she meets the first of her three lovers, to be followed in quick succession by two more on the island of Kalokairi.

         The scenarios in which Donna falls into bed with these three personable young men – all of whom appear youthful in the past and mature in the present – are developed and explained at some length, and while it might not be unreasonable to assume that a girl who shags three blokes, one after the other within what is probably no more than a month at most, is asking for stern censure from moralists, Lilly plays Donna as so damned kind-hearted and lovely, with a smile that could rouse the dead, that we just accept it and forgive such unseemly indiscretions, completely reasonable behaviour in fact. 

         Intercut between the scenes of young Donna’s dalliances is the present day story of how Sophie, her daughter, now in her twenties, is refurbishing the holiday hotel on Kalokairi that she has inherited from her mother, presumed dead. She is joined there by her mother’s two best pals, played, as before, by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski, both of whom we meet as their younger selves in the Lily James scenes, and who between them contribute the lion’s share of the film’s laughs. A grand re-opening is planned and all looks to be going well until a fierce storm ravages the island, wrecking all the preparations, just as, coincidentally, a fierce storm on the island long ago complicated Donna’s plans. Still, help is on hand when two of her three fathers decide to fly there despite having previously declined to attend – the third already lives nearby – and along the way pick up a retinue of local guests who all arrive by boat and give us a rousing performance of ‘Dancing Queen’, Abba's masterpiece, which actually seemed to me less important than the pleasantly ambient Abba music heard in the background throughout the entire film. The surprise guest at the grand party is Sophie’s grandmother, played imperiously by Cher, who resembles an alabaster statue with her flawless skin and blonde wig.

         Despite a bit of will he, won’t he earlier, Sophie’s boyfriend also decides to come over for the party and, on the night or just before, Sophie discovers she is pregnant, much to his delight. The hotel opening is, naturally, a huge success, enlivened of course by song and dance. Cher discovers that the hotel’s manager is an old flame called – wait for it – Fernando, and serenades him appropriately. Finally, the film closes nine months later with the christening of Sophie’s baby, the scene intercut with – concentrate now – Donna, ie Lily, bringing her baby, ie Sophie, to the same chapel twenty-odd years earlier, their intermingling faces reflected poignantly in the font. With the tugging of the heart-strings now reaching breaking point who should arrive but the ghost of her mother, Meryl Streep making a brief cameo at the end, singing ‘My Love My Life’ though we are left to assume that only the cinema audience can actually see her. The whole wonderfully happy business ends with the christening party where Cher sings ‘Super Trooper’ in a key a few semitones lower than the original.

Lily James as Donna

         All of which sounds like a very frothy confection indeed but I expected no less and came away delighted with what I’d seen. There are many funny asides that I won’t dwell on here and Lily James, who sings and dances beautifully, walks away with the honours. Then again, everyone involved plays their parts to perfection and there’s even brief cameo appearances by Björn and Benny, the former as a university don and the latter as a pianist in a restaurant.

         I laughed a lot while the film was playing and even reached for my handkerchief once or twice, and as the credits rolled while Cher belted out ‘Super Trooper’ I was reminded of a paragraph that my friend Carl Magnus Palm wrote in Bright Lights Dark Shadows, the Abba biography that I commissioned for Omnibus Press in 2000 which went a long way towards sealing my admiration for Abba and their music.

         At the end of the chapter immediately before the one that deals with Abba’s revival in the Nineties, Magnus wrote: “Perhaps as a reaction to the cold chill that swept not just across Sweden but across the entire western world, there appeared on the horizon at the beginning of the Nineties a nostalgic yearning for the more colourful and carefree Seventies. Who better to spearhead this celebration than the most popular recording artists of that decade, the group whose wild costumes epitomised the fun and the fearlessness of Seventies fashion, and whose music reached out to absolutely everyone, majorities and minorities alike?”

         This week I read that the UK might have to bring in emergency food rations and medical supplies as a result of the disastrous Brexit vote, and a couple of weeks ago I was among the thousands who marched against the policies of America’s unspeakable President. Abba can’t stop all this but watching Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again this afternoon at least made me forgot about it all for two hours. Try it. 

ABBA: THE COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS by Carl Magnus Palm

On Wednesday, 16 February 2000, I sat down to dinner in the restaurant at the Grand Hotel in Saltsjöbaden, a suburb of south east Stockholm on an archipelago that faces out towards the Baltic Sea. It was freezing cold outside on this, my first visit to the Swedish capitol, and my dining companion was Carl Magnus Palm, whom I was meeting for the first time.

About a year before I had decided that Omnibus Press, of which I was Editor-in-Chief, ought to publish a substantial, warts-and-all biography of Abba and that its author had to be a Swede. Existing biographies, written by British writers, only skimmed the surface of their career and said very little about the real lives of those involved, so I did some research and somehow found Magnus. Or he found me, and he wrote to me as follows: “I was especially pleased to learn that you recognised the value of having a Swedish writer doing the book, since that would be necessary to be able to do interviews in Swedish, not to mention that such a writer would be better equipped to write knowledgeably about important aspects of Swedish history and culture.

        “I believe I would be the perfect writer for you,” he went on. “I have been occupied with in-depth research on ABBA and the careers of the individual members for a decade now. I have innumerable files in my computer that are chock-full with information about ABBA, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and hundreds of video items. I also have access to a large worldwide network of knowledgeable ABBA fans who [will be] happy to share their insights with me.

        “I write fluently in English, and would be able to provide you with a vivid, fair and wide-reaching portrait of the group. I would perhaps not be able to give you Albert Goldman or Kitty Kelley, but I could certainly strive for Johnny Rogan, whom I see as a role model for writing a book like this in terms of giving appropriate space for aspects of art and private and business matters.”

        Well, he’s certainly confident, I thought, and he wasn’t kidding about his Abba awareness, and in any case I wasn’t after a Goldman/Kelly hatchet job anyway, more of the Rogan-style approach exemplified in his Smiths book The Severed Alliance.

Carl Magnus Palm

So we shook hands, sat down at a table and ordered our food. I fancied drinking wine and, although horrified by the prices in a country that discouraged alcohol consumption by taxing it to the hilt, ordered a bottle. This might explain why, before we got to talking about Abba, Magnus launched into a conversation about The Beatles, most specifically John. It turned out he was a massive Beatles fan and to my surprise and delight he produced from his pocket a couple of pages from an old copy of Melody Maker, the interview with John that I conducted in Los Angeles in October 1973. Magnus had cut it out and saved it in the hope that one day he and I would meet. It was a lovely introduction, the beginning of a friendship that endures to this day and a good excuse to order a second bottle of red.

        So I told Magnus about my brief but memorable friendship with John and so keen was he to listen that it wasn’t until after we had finished our main course that we turned our attention to Abba. I soon realised he knew everything there was to know about Abba, or at least more than anyone else barring the group themselves and those that worked for them, and that I had found the ideal author for the Abba book I had in mind. The following day I met with his literary agent, did a deal and in 2001 Omnibus Press published the first of many editions of Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story Of Abba, still in print as a revised edition today, all 256,201 words of it in the latest edition, its sales now standing at well over 50,000.

        Magnus went on to write other Abba books, including a guide to their music for Omnibus, and produce film documentaries on the group. He has since become recognised as the world’s leading authority on Abba in much the same way that Mark Lewisohn has made his name in a similar role for The Beatles. Magnus writes sleeve notes for Abba’s enhanced catalogue reissues and, like Mark with The Beatles, commands the respect of the members of Abba without becoming a part of their organisation and therefore beholden to them in what he writes about them. Through a deft blend of hard-earned knowledge and subtle diplomacy, he has earned their trust, an ideal situation for a writer and archivist. It almost goes without saying that he is as respected by Abba’s fans worldwide as he is by the group themselves.

Perhaps inspired by Mark Lewisohn’s books on The Beatles, most especially The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (1988) which I would bet my house on his having read word for word, Magnus has now excelled himself in terms of Abba scholarship by compiling Abba: The Complete Recording Sessions*. Crowd funded by contributions from fans, it is very classy but on the expensive side: a 448-page, magnificently produced, large format illustrated work chronicling in extraordinary detail the studio endeavours of Björn, Benny, Frida and Agnetha, from the earliest session in which Björn & Benny took part together, in November 1966, right the way through to the last, on 23 August 1982, when engineer Michael Tretow worked on final mixes of ‘Cassandra’, ‘Under Attack’ and Abba’s exquisite swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’.

Michael Tretow with the four members of Abba in the studio in 1978.

It is, of course, an astonishing labour of love and Magnus has been assisted in his endeavours by Björn and Benny and, to lesser extent, Frida and Agnetha. Perhaps most valuable, though, was Tretow himself, who was on hand to guide him through Abba’s tape archive and shed light on their recording process. Granted access to master tapes, rejected mixes, alternative versions, rough cuts and pretty much everything that was saved from every recording they ever made, Magnus has painstakingly set down precisely what happened and when, and is thus able to describe in precise terms how Abba’s music was assembled and how choices were made in regard to what was released and what remained in the can. Scans of tape boxes and other documents illustrate the chronological entries and along the way Magnus charts the group’s development in terms of their success, ambition and enterprise, giving an overview of each recording, singles and albums, as they were issued, setting all this in a frame of everything else that was happening elsewhere in the world of pop during the years when Abba was together.

So, as an example of what’s on offer, here we are on 10 September 1975, and the four members of Abba have assembled at Metronome Studios in Stockholm to record the vocals for a song with the working title of ‘Boogaloo’. Björn has finally come up with some lyrics: “The theme was pretty unambiguous,” writes Magnus. “A 17-year-old girl, going out on a Friday night to have a good time on the dance floor, flirting with guys who may or not be ‘kings’ to her ‘queen’,” and after a few paragraphs about the sequencing of different aspects of the backing track and, intriguingly, a verse that was later removed, he points out that the final line of the chorus was ‘Dig in the dancing queen’, “as in encouraging people to help themselves to food. The ambiguity was spotted not too long after the album’s release, although one assumes that Björn, Benny and Stig [manager Anderson] were relieved to realise that ‘dig in’ could be interpreted as ‘digging’ which is how Bjorn prefers it to be today.”

Such detail might addle the brain were it not for the pleasure this particular song has given the world. It seems pretty much everyone involved knew they were on to something special. “Frida has commented that Bjorn and Benny often wanted [her and Agnetha] to sing in registers that were beyond their vocal capabilities,” writes Magnus, “and certainly, on the ‘You can dance, you can jive’ section of the chorus, especially at 02:58 in the finished recording, there’s a palpable sense of the two vocalists only just managing to reach the notes, seemingly fuelled by nothing else than an extra boost of energy and pure willpower. No other pop band has ever been able to reproduce that particular sound and feeling. ‘When we recorded the vocals for “Dancing Queen”, I remember we both had the chills; the hair stood up on our arms,’ said Agnetha a few years later.”

Nevertheless, no amount of analysis and research in superb books like this can really explain the magic of Abba, any more than they can explain the magic of The Beatles. There was something in the air, of course, but it may have had something to do with what Agnetha describes elsewhere in this book as a ‘strong sense of competition between us [girls]’ while Frida goes as far as to admit: ‘We pushed each other. Anything you can do I can do better!’ And while the two boys, as the group’s writers, are often credited as the key members of Abba, Benny, the source of all those melodies, isn’t so sure. “When you talk about concepts like ‘the Abba sound’,” he tells Magnus, “you certainly have to mention the songs, the way we arranged them, Michael [Tretow’s] contribution and all that, but take away Frida and Agnetha and let two other girls sing their parts, and the ‘Abba sound’ goes out of the window immediately. Their voices were simply the most important ingredient of our overall sound structure.” I tend to agree.

ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions is available only through a dedicated website: abbathecompleterecordingsessions.com. Prices vary according to where it is to be shipped, but in the UK it is approximately £94.

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* To avoid any misunderstanding I should point out that this book is a massively upgraded and expanded edition of an earlier book by Magnus with the same title, published in 1994.