Mitch Therieau reviews “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” by Jan Gradvall, a book that traces how ABBA brought a new form of Swedish pop to the world.
Such is the afterlife in pop Valhalla. ABBA , made up of the songwriter-producers Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and the singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, is bigger today than it ever was during the group’s active years, between 1972 and 1982—a dense stretch that saw the two couples that made up the band splitting up but continuing to make music together.
Not that ABBA didn’t enjoy plenty of adulation in its day, beginning with a breakthrough victory in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, with “Waterloo,” and continuing with a series of albums that dominated pop charts around the world. Scenes from “ABBA: The Movie,” which follows the band on its 1977 Australian tour, show “ABBAmania” in full sweaty force, with fans thronging and reporters needling. Still, unlike the Beatles, ABBA was never able to shake a faint odor of the unhip in its time. At best, the band members were seen by rock critics and listeners as craftsmen rather than artists. At worst, especially in their native Sweden, they were seen as peddlers of lowest-common-denominator pop: “as dead as a can of pickled herring,” in the words of a diss track by another artist, a nod to the Swedish canned-fish company that shares ABBA’s name. A long nineteen-eighties spent in the wilderness, with the group’s alumni pursuing lacklustre solo albums and unwieldy projects, such as a musical about chess, did not give the critics much cause to change their assessment. In 1989, seven years after the band split, Sweden Music, the publisher of ABBA’s songs, was sold to PolyGram, with the expectation that the back catalogue would sell dependably but modestly. The nineties saw the beginnings of a reversal of ABBA’s fortunes—commercially, with the enormous success of the 1992 greatest-hits compilation, “ABBA Gold,” but also in the arena of cool. That same year, U2 brought out Andersson and Ulvaeus for a sing-along rendition of “Dancing Queen”; the British synth-pop duo Erasure released an EP of ABBA covers; and Kurt Cobain improbably selected Björn Again, the tribute act, to appear alongside Nirvana at the Reading Festival. It was around this time that a number of English-language books about the band began to appear: first the scurrilous “ABBA: The Name of the Game,” bizarrely co-written by the former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, then a translation of Fältskog’s autobiography, then Carl Magnus Palm’s definitive biography, “Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA.” The flow of books has continued to this day, with fan memoirs, song-by-song breakdowns, and no fewer than two academic monographs on the song “Fernando.” Into this crowded field steps Jan Gradvall’s “The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover,” a book that does not, in fact, tell the story of ABBA. Gradvall forgoes the standard band-bio form and opts instead for a rangy study of the group’s origins and legacy. It is a wise choice, and not just because there isn’t much to add to Palm’s seven-hundred-page opus. A band composed of two couples who got divorced and then chronicled the fallout in their music may seem like a piquant subject for a biography, but the group members’ consummate professionalism and fierce protectiveness of their private lives have made it hard to fit their story into any of our received genres. There is surprisingly little melodrama or tragedy to draw on: just four co-workers. Gradvall, who has been on the ABBA beat for many years and has interviewed its members extensively over the past decade-plus, has realized that the most interesting thing about the band isn’t its story but its penumbra: the wider musical world that birthed it, and the one it will leave behind. His method is digressive and episodic. Vignettes about events such as the genesis of “Mamma Mia!” and capsule profiles of each member—Andersson the fountain of melodies, Ulvaeus the introspective searcher, Fältskog the reluctant star, Lyngstad the tragic child with a perfect voice—are interposed with bits of chatty musical sociology, all given a pleasant breeziness in Sarah Clyne Sundberg’s translation. We learn about raggare, Sweden’s distinctive rocker culture, and about dansbands, the typically horn-driven groups that play an eclectic mix of styles at open-air dances. Fältskog and Lyngstad both started their musical careers singing in dansbands; as Gradvall writes, ABBA would occasionally draw on this tradition, as in “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” with its metallic swarm of saxophones. In the wake of the nineties revival, ABBA’s music has come to seem so universal—pure, uncut, lab-grade pop, purified of any particularizing influences—that it can be hard to remember that it originated in a particular milieu, and a marginal one at that. From the vantage of the early seventies, it seemed improbable that these four Swedes, with their guileless voices and sequinned stage outfits, could reach the highest level of the global pop empyrean. Sweden was not known as an exporter of music. Domestically, folksong and German-style schlager ballads dominated the charts well into the sixties, while rock and roll and R. & B. filtered in slowly, often through Britain. As in the U.K., the first Swedish groups to play a particular brand of American-style music often enjoyed success. Before ABBA, Andersson played keyboards in the Hep Stars, a garage-rock outfit whose signature song, “Cadillac,” was adapted from the Renegades’ version of Vince Taylor’s 1959 “Brand New Cadillac”—a game of musical telephone that transformed Taylor’s upbeat rock number into a brooding minor-key stomp. It was a smash in Sweden, but it didn’t exactly take over the world. These kinds of lossy translations would become a secret source of power for ABBA. “Waterloo,” which gets its own chapter, sounds a bit like someone trying to draw rock and roll from memory after getting a partial glimpse of it. The peppy shuffle rhythm and the bright chords ground the verse in familiar territory, but Andersson’s martial piano flourishes on the minor chord in the pre-chorus briefly pull the song somewhere older and darker. With its Phil Spector-by-way-of-schlager sound and its winning E.S.L. lyrics—“My, my! / At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender / Oh, yeah! / And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way”—the song is a spirited exercise in trying on musical styles, even as a resigned ambivalence bubbles just below its surface. The quality that ABBA’s detractors criticized as inauthenticity was always something else: a playful theatricality, a delight in assuming roles and guises. ABBA albums are full of genre exercises—a chanson on “Ring Ring”; glam and prog-rock excursions on the mid-seventies records; a more sustained interest in disco toward the end of the decade; no shortage of tropical-flavored numbers like “Sitting in the Palmtree” and “Happy Hawaii.” Before they settled on a name and a group identity, the members briefly toured together in a cabaret-style variety act; this spirit is carried forward in their music. From the start, ABBA’s ambition was to make genuinely global pop music. Stig Anderson, the band’s manager, explained that “Waterloo” came out of a desire to find a song title that would be universally intelligible to Eurovision’s viewers. The band decided to sing in English, the international language of pop, for much the same reason. The best chapter in “The Story of ABBA” contextualizes this choice. “The de facto lingua franca on Planet Earth today,” Gradvall writes, “is tourist English: English reduced to its bare essence, a stock cube containing the language’s most commonly used phrases. . . . Pop music was one of the first cultural expressions to harness the inherent potential of tourist English.” The book reconstructs the history of European pop sung in corrupted Englishes, from Adriano Celentano’s 1972 faux-English novelty hit “Prisencolinensinainciusol” to the micro-genre Gradvall terms “charter disco,” in which Euro artists made such tourist-English pronouncements as “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” over the sorts of grooves a Swede was likely to hear on holiday in the Mediterranean. ABBA continued in this tradition, with what A. O. Scott has called “those lyrics in a language uncannily like English,” filled with stilted diction and curious malapropisms. In lines like “Money, money, money / Must be funny / In the rich man’s world,” meaning takes a back seat to prosody. As Gradvall shows at length, music and happenstance worked together to make ABBA a global phenomenon. One is surprised to learn about the group’s popularity in the Communist world. The presence of Swedish aid workers in Vietnam after the war allowed ABBA’s music to spread throughout that country; “Happy New Year” is now a ubiquitous feature of Tết, the Lunar New Year festival. A promotional visit to Poland “led the . . . communist regime to spend the entire 1976 budget for Western pop music on pressing one single album edition: 800,000 copies of Arrival,” ABBA’s hit record that year. Meanwhile, in rightward-drifting Australia, a tenth-anniversary celebration of the 1977 “ABBAmania” moment led to gay bars hosting regular ABBA nights; at the same time, New York d.j.s were remixing songs such as “Lay All Your Love on Me.” Gradvall identifies these parallel developments in global queer night life as the germ of the nineteen-nineties revival. The over-all impression is of a band simultaneously subcultural, taken up in marginal scenes, and supercultural, soundtracking life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Later, as the way opened, Swedish producers and artists, from Denniz Pop to Max Martin, would follow, bringing glossy, meticulous pop to the global marketplace. An overlooked element of ABBA’s genius is its skill in making music not just for export but for perennial reactivation. Part of this comes down to the songs, with their alchemical fusion of pathos and infectiousness. “S.O.S.” is a plea to a distant lover in the form of a cathartic dance party; “Dancing Queen” is both a good-time anthem and a dispatch from the lost world of late childhood, glowing with borrowed warmth from a bygone “time of your life.” Perhaps this built-in quality of displacement is what gives ABBA its uncanny effectiveness at long range, across space and time. In the nineteen-seventies, faced with tremendous demand and insufficient time or will for a world tour, the band worked with the film director Lasse Hallström to produce simple promotional clips for their songs—proto-music videos that would keep audiences happy and engaged in countries where they would not be performing. “Mamma Mia!” has functioned in much the same way. “The Story of ABBA” describes the latest of these innovations: “ABBA Voyage,” a mixed-reality live show, playing regularly in London since 2022, that conjures holographic avatars of the group’s members to sing their greatest hits. The bandmates, now in their seventies and eighties, tell Gradvall how they put on “space suits and helmets”—motion-capture equipment—to sing and mime their routines from the seventies. It would be easy to dismiss this as self-karaoke. But, in Gradvall’s telling, we can see it as proof that ABBA has managed to construct a pop-music perpetual-motion machine. One suspects that it will continue to broadcast its delicious, ambivalent songs in one form or another, for as long as there are human ears to listen. ♦
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