ABBA: truth about the lives, loves & heartbreaks of world's fave band

The band which fans thought was so irretrievably broken - so at each other’s throats - that they’d never speak again, reunited for Gradvall.

Sweden’s leading music journalist pulled off a world scoop in 2014, when he sat down with Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad, Agneta Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus. It was the first time the four had come together to speak since Abba imploded in 1982.

Today, after ten years spent in their company, Gradvall - who has just brought out his biography of band The Book of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover - is telling me about the role Heinrich Himmler played in Frida’s life; the toll that being the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’ took on Agnetha; and how Benny and Björn nearly destroyed themselves through years of alcoholism.

The biography is “approved” by ABBA, but it’s no cosy read. A masterpiece of music journalism, Gradvall goes deep into the dark-side of pop’s most beloved band. The four allowed him unprecedented access to their private lives.

Gradvall makes no pretence of being “an objective journalist” when it comes to ABBA. Like millions, he’s a ‘super-fan’. Though his love of ABBA seems a little unusual at first, given Gradvall began his career publishing his own punk fanzine in Sweden, aged just 16, writing about bands like The Clash and The Sex Pistols.

ABBA (Image: free) But as he explains, ABBA crosses all musical boundaries. You can be a fan of thrash metal, or a devotee of medieval Gregorian chants, and still love ABBA - that’s how deep they’re embedded in global culture.

By his early 20s, Gradvall was writing for Swedish daily papers - and back then, there was only one story in town: ABBA.

“No Swedish artist even comes close to ABBA,” he says. However, Gradvall has a distinctly different take on the band to most of his fellow Swedish journalists.

Just as the Scottish media is repeatedly accused of undue cynicism towards home-grown superstars like Billy Connolly, Swedish journalists are dismissive of ABBA - despite the adulation across the rest of the world.

Gradvall’s punk background might have saved him from becoming just another sneering Stockholm writer, though. As he explains, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious both loved ABBA. “When ABBA played London, they were visited backstage by Joe Strummer [of The Clash] and Ian Dury. Punks have great respect for ABBA. I mean, the Pistols took part of the riff from SOS and used it in Pretty Vacant - so there’s definitely influences.”

1970s Gradvall catches perfectly GenerationX nostalgia for ABBA. For kids who were born in the late 60s or early 70s, the band defines their childhood, and ABBA is burned into the memory banks of anyone over 45. Now that GenXers are aged between their late 40s and early 60s, ABBA is like a favourite childhood treat: granny’s home-cooking.

Youngsters who remember punk in the 1970s, became teens listening to ska and New Romantics in the 1980s, and turned into adults amid the indie music and rap of the 1990s, never forgot their first love ABBA.

“It doesn’t matter if you were punk, heavy metal, a soul boy, or whatever - you appreciate ABBA songs,” Gradvall says.

One of the reasons why everyone adores ABBA lies in the title of his book: Melancholy Undercover. “It’s from something Benny said to me,” Gradvall explains. “He said that even their happiest songs were melancholy at the core. He told me ‘we did melancholy undercover’ - they put in the melancholy without telling anyone. It makes sense. When you hear an ABBA song you get very uplifted, energetic and happy, but there’s also something quite sad.”

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Even Waterloo - their 1974 Eurovision hit - tells the story of someone so completely overwhelmed by love that they equate it to one of the greatest military defeats in history.

Super Trouper - inspired by an exhausting tour in Scotland - tells of the agonies of life on the road. “I was sick and tired of everything,” the first verse goes, “when I called you last night from Glasgow.”

Gradvall won the trust of the band, and earned the right to tell their story, because as a music journalist he wanted to write as much - if not more - about their artistry, not simply their private lives and painful love affairs.

The melancholy in ABBA, though, was always there, he says. It wasn’t merely a response to their divorces. Agnetha was married to Björn, and Benny was married to Frida. Both marriages broke down around the same time in the early 80s leading to the band imploding, and vanishing from the public eye.

The sadness of their songs stems from Scandinavian culture. “It’s melancholic”, Gradvall explains. Swedish folks songs are “tragic”, and were a big influence on Benny. Then there’s brooding playwrights and filmmakers like August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman; or painters like Norway’s Edvard Munch famous for The Scream. “It’s also very cold and very dark,” Gradvall jokes.

The darkness in ABBA is why, he says, you can listen to songs like Dancing Queen “200 times and never get tired”. It seems like upbeat “disco” but the more you listen you realise it’s about that fleeting moment in youth when you’re young and beautiful; a time that will quickly disappear. There’s an English language phrase which sums up ABBA, Gradvall says: happy-sad.

Pete Townsend of The Who, Gradvall adds, noted that ABBA were the only band to sing of “middle-aged problems”: children, divorce, and the rigours of going to work.

SEXIST

If there’s one “sexist” myth which Gradvall wants to pop it’s this notion that ABBA was two brilliant male songwriters, and two women who just happened to do the singing and prettied up the stage.

“They really were a band, where four members were equally important. They created those songs together,” he says. “When I asked all four of them what was the secret behind ABBA’s sound - the secret sauce - they all said ‘it’s the voices’, that combination of Agnetha and Frida.”

Agnetha is a soprano, so Frida, a mezzo, “has to struggle to reach those high notes that Agnetha hits naturally”. That graft which Frida has to put in gives her voice exceptional power. “You hear her soul influences, you hear the sweat, the muscles working. The combination of those two voices is unique.”

Jan Gradvall, Swedish journalist and author of Melancholy Undercover: The Book of Abba - Credit Rickard L Eriksson (Image: free) The music is also one-off - identifiable from “kilometres” away once you hear it, Gradvall says. Benny and Björn pulled on a huge variety of influences. Born in the mid-40s, when the pair were teenagers, there was basically no pop music played on Swedish radio.

So they listened to records by American bands like The Beach Boys and British bands like The Beatles, along with the eclectic mix of “Italian arias, German marching music, French chanson, and Swedish folk music” that came over the airwaves. Frida was a big soul fan, into Stevie Wonder and Motown. Agnetha loved 60s singers like Cilla Black and Connie Francis.

That wide mix gives ABBA a timeless quality, Gradvall believes. Some of their greatest songs could have been written today, he says, which is why kids who weren’t even born when ABBA dominated the charts fall in love with them so easily.

“They’re part of the mainstream, but also outside the mainstream. Benny is the master behind the melodies, and his production and arrangements are so good you can listen to songs over and over, and still discover something new.”

Just as important as ‘who influenced ABBA’ is the matter of who they influenced. European pop music barely existed before ABBA. The four all had successful musical careers in Sweden before hooking up - both as couples and a band.

Yet when they sent early ABBA singles to American and British record producers “they didn’t even listen to the songs, they just dropped them in the wastepaper basket”. The notion of European pop simply seemed absurd to music moguls. Winning Eurovision changed all that.

ABBA helped usher in a wave of Euro pop from Boney M to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, written by Italy’s Giorgio Moroder, the so-called ‘Father of Disco’, and recorded in Germany.

WATERLOO

But what really gave ABBA a leg up internationally, and certainly helped them win Eurovision with Waterloo, was what Gradvall calls ‘tourist English’.

ABBA’s lyrics were written “in the English most Europeans speak in bars in Greece and Spain, a reduced English”. It was a trick picked up by subsequent generations of Swedish super-producers and song-writers like Max Martin who created Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time. Martin - another ABBA super-fan - is one of the most successful songwriters in history behind hits like Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl and Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off.

The key to Swedish hits, says Gradvall, is making sure the melody comes first and the lyrics are written to fit the music. “It helps if you’re not a native English speaker, as it’s all about how the words sound. It makes for incredibly infective songs which stay with you.”

When the band fell apart amid divorce and exhaustion, Agnetha - who had become the focus of media hysteria, and struggled with the intense and invasive scrutiny of her life - effectively disappeared from sight.

“She became seen as this Greta Garbo figure,” Gradvall explains. “But when you meet her she’s really down to earth. She loves talking about music, but people never ask her those questions, they only want divorces, money and her private life. That’s why they all stopped doing interviews.”

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When ABBA began, Agnetha “was the only one who could read music”, Gradvall goes on. Her talents were cruelly overlooked by the press and public due to her striking beauty. “She’s a great piano player,” he adds. When Agnetha was a solo star in the 1960s in Sweden - one of the biggest acts in the country, in fact - “she wrote all her own hits”.

Once ABBA got together, Benny and Björn encouraged her to continue writing, but she soon had two children, and with recording and touring found herself struggling to find time to write herself. “Her confidence sank.” Gradvall explains.

Before ABBA, Benny was in a ‘raggare’ band called the Hep Stars. ‘Raggare’ is a Swedish genre similar to rockabilly. Frida had been a star of ‘dansbands’ and sang schlager music, or sentimental ballads. She became “the brains behind how ABBA presented themselves on stage, the visual mastermind”.

Frida’s life is “very complex”, Gradvall explains. She was born in Norway at the end of the Second World War. “Her mother was a teenage Norwegian who fell in love with a German soldier. At the time, Germany encouraged its soldiers to have children with women in occupied Europe. It was part of Himmler’s Lebensborn plan.” Lebensborn was the Nazi Party’s programme to increase the ‘Master Race’.

After the war, women who had been in relationships with German soldiers were hated, and their children were considered “outcasts”, Gradvall explains. “So Frida’s grandmother took her to Sweden to avoid getting lynched. She grew up there.”

Björn also had painful connections to the Nazi era. As a young man he’d been in a folk-rock band called the Hootenanny Singers. Founding member Hansi Schwarz had been saved from the concentration camps as a child by the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte who rescued thousands.

After the war, Sweden was a neutral country - a fact which helped propel ABBA to international success. Communist nations were opposed to all English and American pop music, but neutral Sweden with its socially-democratic government was seen as ideologically acceptable. “They realised they needed some pop music to keep citizens happy so they opened up to ABBA.”

SOVIETS

The band was huge behind the Iron Curtain. In 1976, Poland “spent its entire import music budget on buying just one album: Arrival”. The album has tracks like Dancing Queen, Knowing Me Knowing You, and Money Money Money. It’s included in the US Library of Congress as a notable cultural artefact.

Gradvall adds: “They’re still huge in all the eastern countries.” In truth, then, ABBA did as much for east-west Cold War relations as The Beatles.

However, Cold War Swedish politics was a problem for ABBA. The heads of local radio stations were very left-wing and “they hated ABBA because they thought artists should sing in Swedish with lyrics about a better socialist society. ABBA were sort of seen as the capitalist enemy, while being celebrated as almost socialist in the eastern world”.

And being European meant they were considered something of a joke in Britain. The UK awarded the band ‘nul points’ when they swept the board at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. It wasn’t until ABBA released SOS the following year that Britain started to take them seriously - by which time, they’d already conquered Australia, a country which still adores the band, with ‘I Do, I Do, I Do’, and “the rest of Europe”.

While Sweden’s guardians of culture hated ABBA, the people loved them. In Sweden, Eurovision is “like the Super Bowl”, Gradvall says. Swedish fans bought cassettes of the band by the bucket-load as they got so little airplay.

Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Annifrid Lyngstad of Abba congratulating each other in Brighton after their song 'Waterloo' won the Eurovision Song Contest (Image: free) However, although hated, the Swedish media wouldn’t leave them in peace. As the first - and still only - band to become a global hit on the back of a Eurovision win, Sweden’s press pored over their every move.

Given they were also married, the love angle just increased attention. Although it took ABBA a while to break America, Dancing Queen became a US number one. American success only upped the endless press coverage at home.

The band, Gradvall says, “grew out of the marriages”. They were already relatively famous performers individually in Sweden before ABBA formed, so when they fell in love, got hitched, created a band and became international superstars, the ground was laid for a mega-story in the Stockholm press.

“They were all grown-ups when ABBA became big.” Björn was the band’s effective “CEO”, looking after business deals and royalties; Benny was ABBA’s “Yoda” - the spirit of the music. “He’s a very quiet person but he lives and breathes music, and still plays piano two hours every day,” says Gradvall.

But their breakthrough might never have happened. They only chose Waterloo as their Eurovision entry “at the last minute”, initially opting for Hasta Mañana, then a more typically Eurovision ballad. Until ABBA, Eurovision was “all women in elegant dresses”, says Gradvall. ABBA became the first “loud pop group” to win and sparked a wave of copycats like Britain’s The Brotherhood of Man. “ABBA changed the whole concept of Eurovision.”

Agnetha suffered most from fame. “She hated touring, she wanted to be at home with her two kids. So they stopped touring in 1980, and that’s when they fell apart.”

DIVORCE

The divorces were so bitter that when Benny and Frida split he told Gradvall that all he took with him was a few paintings and an ashtray. Benny later rang Gradvall to correct himself saying he’d actually taken “two ashtrays”.

Gradvall notes that’s hardly the sign of “an amicable divorce”. Frida would later marry a real-life prince. “She comes from this tragic background, but she’s an elegant, sophisticated woman, though she remains very humble, a nice Swedish person.”

Benny and Björn kept working together after the split, writing the musical Chess in 1984, with Tim Rice. Frida went on to record an album with Phil Collins. Although Agnetha also kept recording, she was more happy surrounded by her dogs, horses and children - who live beside her in the countryside. She remains a lover of the quiet life today. She and Gradvall spend time looking at pictures of each other’s pets on their iPhones when they meet.

After fame and divorce took their toll and the marriages broke down, ABBA drifted from the spotlight. Pop music had changed.

Benny and Björn had “serious drinking problems”, and their manager Stig Andersson “drank himself to death. The 80s were a dark decade for ABBA”.

Today, Benny and Björn “consider themselves sober alcoholics”. Björn also had a “very complicated” relationship with his father - “they didn’t get on”, Gravall says - which he “tried to block out”.

“Their last song was The Day Before You Came in 1982. It’s very depressing, six minutes of synthesisers with no chorus. Fame brought them sadness,” says Gradvall.

They had a good run, though Gradvall explains - ten years, which is as long as The Beatles - but come the mid-80s it looked like it was all over and they’d simply end up another half-remembered band.

“Nobody really cared about ABBA during the rest of the 1980s. They were seen as kitschy. They thought people had forgot about them.” But GenerationX, which had seen them win Eurovision and watched their mums dance to their hits, was about to grow up and rediscover the delights of childhood. And it was the figurehead of GenX who led the revival: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

Cobain hated “the macho” side of grunge. “He loved ABBA as they were the opposite,” Gradvall says. Cobain insisted that the ABBA cover band Björn Again play with Nirvana at the Reading Festival in 1992. Then “the gay world took ABBA under its wing”, as the Australian movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert showcased their music. Soon ABBA songs were playing in every gay club in Sydney.

'U2 brought coolness to ABBA' (Image: REUTERS) U2 invited Benny and Björn on stage during the Zoo TV tour in Stockholm. Gradvall was there. “You could feel the audience for two seconds think ‘wait, how can ABBA be cool’ but then they played Dancing Queen and everyone lost it. U2 brought coolness to ABBA.”

Finally, the ABBA Gold compilation album was released and became one of the best-selling albums in music history. By the mid-90s, ABBA were back and maybe bigger than before.

However, the couples were no closer than when it all imploded in bitterness and tears in 1982. One tension that was bogus, however, was the much-talked of rivalry between Frida and Agnetha.

BEAUTY

There’d been persistent claims that Frida - if not the whole band - felt overshadowed by Agnetha. Gradvall compared it to Blondie and the notion in the press that the band was “just Debbie Harry and these four other guys”.

“I asked Frida and Agnetha about this,” says Gradvall. “They didn’t feel any rivalry. They totally supported each other. Frida is a much more confident person on stage, more a ‘show person’, than Agnetha. But of course everyone focused on Agnetha’s looks. She became an icon.”

The 90s revival climaxed in 1999 when the musical Mamma Mia! arrived. “It was mostly Björn’s idea,” says Gradvall. He began talking with London theatre producers, telling them they had creative freedom as long as they only used ABBA songs and didn’t make the story about the band. The play was women-dominated - produced and written by women. That pleased the band.

“ABBA - though especially Benny - have always been very hardcore feminists,” says Gradvall.

The musical was initially called Summer Night City and opened with that number, but the team realised it didn’t work so renamed it Mamma Mia! at the last minute. The movie version is now the best-selling DVD in UK history - which marks quite a journey given Britain shunned ABBA initially.

Such is ABBA’s hold over Britain that when the English Lionesses played Sweden at the Euros, the team’s dressing room warm-up song was Does Your Mother Know.

It was Mamma Mia! which brought the four back close together again. Most contact had been limited to the kind of interaction divorced couples have over their children. “They became friends again, it reunited them,” Gradvall says. “But there was definitely 15 years when they didn’t really have any contact.”

That’s why Gradvall’s later interview with them in 2014 caused such a sensation. “It was an ‘ABBA talks’ sort of thing,” he says. “But they’re very friendly now.”

Wherever Gradvall travels on Earth there are three acts everyone knows: Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and ABBA. He’s been to remote places where, unlikely as it may sound, nobody has heard of Elvis, and they don’t really care much about The Rolling Stones. But everyone knows and loves ABBA.

Although the band put a lot of their success down to the voices of Frida and Agnetha, Benny and Björn still struggle to understand why the music works so well. In universities all round the world, musicologists have subjected ABBA’s songs to forensic examination in order to unlock its success. But to no real avail.

Mamma Mia! Pictured: Christine Baranski, Meryl Streep and Julie Walters (Image: free) “Björn said quite recently that he still doesn’t understand why they’re so big. I don’t get it, he said. Benny can’t explain it as he doesn’t read music.” That may shock many. Gradvall has sat beside Benny while he plays piano and says: “The word ‘genius' is used too much, but he’s a genius.” His chords are notable for their complexity and sophistication.

Nearly all artists since ABBA have been influenced by the band in some way, Gradvall says. Kylie is the most obvious example, but you’ll hear ABBA everywhere from the Pet Shop Boys and Human League to Harry Styles.

VOYAGE

Once the band reconnected in 2014, their next big project was ABBA Voyage: a virtual concert in a purpose-built venue in London where the foursome appear as holograms. It opened in 2022, and over one million people came in the first year alone. The idea took shape after the murdered rapper Tupac was turned into a hologram at the Coachella festival in America.

ABBA hired George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to create the effects. “So the same people who created Gollum created ABBA Voyage.”

The four met up “in secrecy” in Sweden, and donned hi-tech bodysuits to capture their movements which were then mixed with their voices and how they looked in the late 70s “when all four agree they were at their best”. Voyage was an entertainment one-off, hailed around the world as a critical success, though once again sneered at by the Swedish media which remains “suspicious of ABBA” and refuses to “take them seriously”.

A company owned by Björn later bought the rights to “everything Kiss-related”. Soon there will be a Voyage-like experienced in Las Vegas starring the avatars of Gene Simmons and his band.

Gradvall doubts ABBA will ever appear on stage in real-life again. They’re now in their mid-70s, and in pretty good health, though Frida walks with a cane. Some lucky fans have met Frida at the Voyage experience. She loves watching the show, Gradvall says. She’s been at least four times.

GenerationX will be distraught when the first ABBA members dies, Gradvall adds. “That’s why I wrote the book - they won’t be around forever. It will be huge when one of them goes.”

ABBA Voyage (Image: free) Despite the band saying little about their political opinions - as they don’t want to garner divisive headlines - Gradvall says they love the connection with LGBT fans around the world. “Although they were definitely not aware at the time that a song like Dancing Queen could be a perfect future gay anthem, they’re very grateful for being embraced by the LGBT world.”

Benny still performs with a full orchestra. The people of Sweden - if not the press - see him as their national composer. “Norway has Grieg, Finland has Sibelius and we have Benny Andersson,” Gradvall adds.

Surprisingly, they don’t keep “up-to-date with new pop music”. All four mostly listen to classical music these days. What you won’t find, though, is a member of ABBA flying around in a helicopter or living in a big mansion.

“Being Swedish they live lowkey lives,” Gradvall says. “You can even see them at the local grocery store. They’re very happy living that kind of life.”