The story of ABBA

Four roads to Stockholm

Benny Andersson was born in Stockholm on the sixteenth of December 1946. His father and grandfather both played the accordion, and when he was six they bought him one too, along with a diet of Swedish folk tunes and schlager. At ten he got a piano and taught himself to play. One of his first records was Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock, but it was the flip side, Treat Me Nice, that grabbed him, because it had a piano on it. He left school at fifteen, was a young father of two before he turned nineteen, and in October 1964 he joined the Hep Stars, soon the biggest pop group in Sweden. They were nicknamed the Swedish Beatles, and Benny became their songwriter, with number one hits like Sunny Girl, Wedding and Consolation in 1966.[1] [2] [3]

Björn Ulvaeus was born in Gothenburg on the twenty fifth of April 1945, and moved with his family to the coastal town of Västervik when he was six. He loved the blues, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but his own first band was the Hootenanny Singers, a folk group from Västervik formed in 1961. They became huge in Scandinavia, and their manager and label boss was a sharp operator named Stig Anderson. In 1966, on the road in southern Sweden, the Hootenanny Singers crossed paths with the Hep Stars. Björn and Benny hit it off at once, both obsessed with writing songs. In June 1966 they wrote their first one together, Isn't It Easy to Say, which the Hep Stars recorded. It was the start of a partnership that would last the rest of their lives.[1] [2] [3]

Agnetha Fältskog was born in Jönköping on the fifth of April 1950, the daughter of a department store manager who loved show business. She wrote her first song at the age of six, a little tune called Two Small Trolls. By fifteen she was singing with a local dance band and had left school to work as a telephonist. When she broke up with a boyfriend, she poured it into a song called Jag var så kär, I Was So in Love. The band leader sent a demo to a producer, who only wanted the girl and her song. Agnetha took the deal, and in January 1968, still a teenager, she had a Swedish number one with a song she had written herself. It sold more than eighty thousand copies, and she became one of Sweden's most popular young singers.[1] [2]

Anni-Frid Lyngstad, known as Frida, had the hardest start of all. She was born on the fifteenth of November 1945 in Bjørkåsen, a tiny village in northern Norway. Her mother was Synni Lyngstad, and her father was Alfred Haase, a German army sergeant who left with his unit when the occupation ended. In postwar Norway, a child fathered by a German soldier could bring shame and reprisals, so in 1947 Frida's grandmother Arntine took the baby across the border to Sweden. Synni followed, but soon died of kidney failure, aged just twenty one. Frida was raised by her grandmother, a seamstress, in the small town of Torshälla. She grew up believing her father had drowned when his ship sank on the way home to Germany.[1] [2]

Her grandmother sang old Norwegian songs to her, and Frida's voice was the one thing that set her apart at school. At thirteen she was singing with a dance band, sets that could run for five hours, and she fell in love with jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. At eighteen she married a salesman and musician named Ragnar Fredriksson, and they had two children. Then on the third of September 1967 she won a national talent contest in Stockholm. The prize included an appearance that same night on Sweden's most popular television show. By chance it was the day Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right, and people were told to stay off the roads, so almost the whole country was at home watching. The next morning, record company men drove to her house with a contract.[1]

Two couples become a group

In 1969 both couples found each other. At Melodifestivalen, the Swedish contest that chooses the Eurovision entry, Benny's song Hej, Clown tied for first place and then lost on a revote. Frida was also competing, and came fourth. They met backstage, met again a week later on tour in southern Sweden, and became a couple. That May, while filming a television special, Björn met a nineteen year old Agnetha. They married on the sixth of July 1971 in the village of Verum, with Benny playing the organ at the wedding. By then Björn and Benny were writing and producing together for Stig Anderson's label, Polar Music, and the two women were singing backing vocals on their records. The four were becoming a unit long before anyone gave them a name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first time the four sang together in public was an accident. In April 1970 the two couples went on holiday to Cyprus, and what started as singing for fun on the beach turned into an improvised show for United Nations soldiers stationed on the island. Back home they tried it properly. On the first of November 1970 they launched a cabaret act in Gothenburg called Festfolket, a pun meaning both party people and engaged couples. It flopped. Reviews were poor, the restaurants were close to empty, and the four went back to their separate careers. Still, one song from the show, Hej, gamle man, about an old Salvation Army soldier, was the first record to feature all four voices. Credited to Björn and Benny, it went to number one on Sweden's radio chart.[1] [2]

Stig Anderson had big plans. He told Björn and Benny that one day they would write a song that became a worldwide hit. The first sign came from an unexpected place. In 1972 their single She's My Kind of Girl, originally written for a Swedish erotic film that went nowhere, became a top ten hit in Japan. Then in June 1972 they released People Need Love, with Agnetha and Frida now out front. It was credited to Björn and Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid, and it reached number seventeen in Sweden, enough to convince them they were on to something. In America it came out on Playboy Records, credited to Björn and Benny with Svenska Flicka, meaning Swedish girl. Stig believed it could have been far bigger if the tiny label had been able to press enough copies.[1] [2] [3]

In 1973 they tried Melodifestivalen themselves, with a song called Ring Ring. Their engineer Michael B. Tretow had just read a book about Phil Spector, and he started layering instrument on instrument to build a wall of sound, a technique that became part of the ABBA sound from then on. Stig even arranged an English lyric written by Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody. On the tenth of February 1973 Ring Ring came third, so it never went to Eurovision. It was still a hit across much of Europe. Thirteen days later, on the twenty third of February, Agnetha and Björn's daughter Linda was born, and for a short promotional trip to West Germany a singer named Inger Brundin stood in for Agnetha.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stig was tired of saying Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid, so he started calling them ABBA, from their initials. There was a snag. Abba was also the name of a well known Swedish fish canning company. A Gothenburg newspaper ran a competition to name the group, and in the summer of 1973 ABBA became official. They asked the canners for permission, and Agnetha later recalled the reply: fine, as long as you don't make us ashamed of you. The earliest known ABBA on paper is a studio sheet from the sixteenth of October 1973, where the four names were crossed out and ABBA written over them in big letters. The famous logo with the backwards B came later, after Benny held his letter the wrong way round at a magazine photo shoot.[1]

Waterloo and the fight to be more than one hit

For 1974 they wrote a song aimed straight at Eurovision. Stig wrote the words, borrowing the Battle of Waterloo as a metaphor for surrendering to love, and Björn and Benny wrote a stomping tune inspired by British glam rock, especially Wizzard's See My Baby Jive. Guitarist Janne Schaffer came up with the main guitar and bass parts. They also considered a ballad called Hasta Mañana, but it was mostly Agnetha's song, while Waterloo gave both women an equal share. On the ninth of February 1974 Waterloo won Melodifestivalen with three hundred and two points to the runner up's two hundred and eleven. ABBA were going to Eurovision at the third attempt.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of April 1974 the Eurovision Song Contest was held at the Dome in Brighton. For a few years the rule forcing acts to sing in their own language had been lifted, so ABBA sang in English. They came on eighth, in glitter and silver platform boots, and the Swedish conductor, Sven-Olof Walldoff, led the orchestra dressed as Napoleon. Waterloo won with twenty four points, six ahead of Italy's Gigliola Cinquetti. The British jury gave it nothing at all. That night the group celebrated in the Napoleon suite of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. It was Sweden's first ever Eurovision win, and in 2005, at the contest's fiftieth anniversary, Waterloo was voted the best Eurovision song of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Waterloo went to number one in the United Kingdom, West Germany and several other countries, and reached number six in the United States. Then things stalled. In Britain their label put out a remixed Ring Ring, which missed the top thirty. The next single, So Long, got no airplay on BBC Radio 1 and did not chart. People began to call ABBA a Eurovision one hit wonder. Their first European tour, in November 1974, played to half empty halls, and several dates were cancelled, including their only concert in Switzerland. Björn later admitted they had been trying to sound like the Sweet, a semi glam rock band, which he called stupid, because they had always been a pop group.[1] [2]

The song that rescued them was SOS, recorded in August 1974 under the working title Turn Me On. Stig came up with the title, and Björn rewrote the lyric. Agnetha's tearful lead, over a piano intro that explodes into a rock chorus, gave ABBA their identity at last. Released in 1975, it went to number six in Britain, the start of eighteen consecutive top ten hits there, and topped the charts in West Germany and Australia. On the fifteenth of November 1975 ABBA played it on American Bandstand and on the brand new Saturday Night Live on the same day. Pete Townshend of the Who called it the best pop song ever written.[1] [2]

Australia went crazy first. Director Lasse Hallström made four promo films in just two days, for about fifty thousand kronor, and the pop show Countdown played them again and again. Viewers fell for the clip of Mamma Mia, a song that had never been meant as a single. The Australian label begged to release it, Polar eventually agreed, and it sat at number one there for ten weeks. That finally made ABBA's British label take them seriously, and in January 1976 Mamma Mia became their first British number one since Waterloo. In Australia, ABBA fever grew so intense that the group's album held the top spot for months.[1] [2] [3]

Fernando, Dancing Queen and superstardom

Fernando started life as a Swedish song for Frida's solo album, with a Stig Anderson lyric about comforting a heartbroken man named Fernando. The name came from a bartender at a Stockholm club the band liked, and the working title had been simply Tango. For ABBA's version, Björn wrote completely new words. He said the idea came to him lying outside one summer night looking at the stars, picturing two old, scarred revolutionaries in Mexico talking about the past. Released in March 1976, Fernando went to number one in at least thirteen countries and sold more than ten million copies. In Australia it stayed at the top for fourteen weeks, a record that stood for over forty years until Ed Sheeran's Shape of You beat it in 2017.[1] [2]

The biggest song of all began as a demo called Boogaloo on the fourth of August 1975. Björn and Benny were inspired by the disco rhythm of George McCrae's Rock Your Baby and the drumming on a Dr. John album. When Benny played Frida the backing track at home, she cried, because she found it so beautiful. Agnetha said later that it was hard to know what would be a hit, except this one, which they all knew would be massive. Benny wanted it out right away, but Stig insisted on releasing Fernando first. So Dancing Queen had its public premiere on the eighteenth of June 1976, at a royal gala in Stockholm for King Carl Gustaf and Silvia Sommerlath, the night before their wedding.[1] [2]

The album Arrival came out in October 1976, and it was ABBA at full strength. Dancing Queen went to number one in Britain, Germany, Australia and, for the only time, in the United States, where it topped the Billboard chart in April 1977. It also reached number one in the Soviet Union and Japan. Money, Money, Money followed, with Frida singing about a woman who works all day and dreams of a rich man, and then Knowing Me, Knowing You, a breakup song sung by Frida that Benny called one of their five best recordings. Arrival was the best selling album of 1977 in Britain, and in 2024 the United States Library of Congress added it to its National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1977 ABBA finally went on a proper tour, opening in Oslo on the twenty eighth. The show included a mini musical they had written called The Girl with the Golden Hair, with Agnetha and Frida in matching blonde wigs. For two nights at London's Royal Albert Hall, which held a little over eleven thousand people, there were more than three and a half million postal applications for tickets. Then came Australia, and something close to hysteria. The opening show in Sydney on the third of March was hit by torrential rain and Frida slipped on the wet stage, yet all four later named it the most memorable concert of their careers. In Perth, a bomb scare forced everyone out of the venue. One paper ran the headline Agnetha's bottom tops dull show, and she replied, don't they have bottoms in Australia?[1]

Lasse Hallström turned the Australian tour into ABBA: The Movie, a comedy about a hapless radio DJ chasing the band for an interview. It opened in December 1977 alongside ABBA: The Album, and demand was so high that British pressing plants could not make enough copies before Christmas. The album gave them two more British number ones, The Name of the Game and Take a Chance on Me, which became their best selling single in America, outselling even Dancing Queen. Tucked away on a B side was Thank You for the Music, which would become one of their best loved songs without ever being a single during their career. On the fourth of December 1977, Agnetha and Björn had a son, Peter Christian.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Polar Studios, a divorce and the last tours

In 1977 the German teen magazine Bravo printed a full biography of Frida, naming both her parents. A man in Germany named Peter Haase read it and asked his father whether he had ever been stationed in Ballangen in Norway during the war. He had. A few months later, encouraged by Benny, Frida met Alfred Haase in Stockholm, the father she had grown up believing was dead. The next year, on the sixth of October 1978, at the height of ABBA's fame, Frida and Benny married, after nearly a decade together. It meant ABBA were now two married couples, a fact that fascinated the press and would soon become a burden.[1] [2] [3]

By 1978 ABBA were rich enough to build their own studio. They turned an empty cinema in Stockholm into Polar Music Studio, one of the most advanced in the world, and other bands followed them in. Led Zeppelin made In Through the Out Door there, and Genesis recorded Duke. But the new album came slowly. Agnetha said she could tell from Björn's eyes how the day had gone, because some days the two men worked ten hours without a single note. On the ninth of January 1979 they sang Chiquitita at a UNICEF concert at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and gave the song to UNICEF. It went to number one in ten countries.[1] [2]

A week or so after that concert, in mid January 1979, Björn and Agnetha announced their divorce. They had separated late in 1978. They told the press that ABBA would carry on and that their split would not affect the group, but reporters kept asking. To escape, Björn and Benny slipped away to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas to write. The album Voulez-Vous, released in April 1979, had ABBA fully embracing disco, with the title track partly recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami. Then came Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight, inspired by Donna Summer's Hot Stuff. In America the disco backlash was so strong that its release there was cancelled, though promo copies had already been pressed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1979 ABBA played North America for the first time, opening in Edmonton, Canada, on the thirteenth. On the flight from New York to Boston, their private plane hit extreme weather and could not land for a long time. Agnetha, already afraid of flying, was badly shaken, the Boston show started ninety minutes late, and the concert in Washington was cancelled. She later said she needed therapy to deal with her fear. The tour moved on to Europe, including six sold out nights at Wembley Arena in London, and in March 1980 the band played eleven concerts in Japan, six of them at Tokyo's Budokan. It turned out to be the last tour ABBA would ever play.[1] [2]

In the summer of 1979, in a cottage on the island of Viggsö, Björn and Benny began a song first called The Story of My Life. Benny gave it a French chanson feel with a falling piano line. Björn said he wrote the lyric in about an hour, fuelled by whisky and a rush of emotion, and that when Agnetha read it, a tear or two welled up in her eyes. The Winner Takes It All came out in July 1980, and its video was filmed ten days after their divorce became final. It was ABBA's eighth British number one. The album Super Trouper followed in November, with a million advance orders in Britain, and its title track became their ninth and last British number one single.[1] [2] [3]

The Visitors and the quiet ending

In January 1981 Björn married the music journalist Lena Källersjö. That same month Stig Anderson turned fifty, and ABBA recorded a joke tribute for his party, pressed on just two hundred red vinyl copies. Then in mid February, Benny and Frida announced they were divorcing too. Their marriage had been a struggle for years, and Benny had already met the television presenter Mona Nörklit, whom he married in November 1981. Now both of ABBA's couples had split, and the group carried on as two exes working alongside two other exes. Björn and Benny both became fathers again in January 1982, and Frida later said she and the others were growing tired of working together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Recording for the eighth album began on the sixteenth of March 1981, and the mood was tense. Björn later said it could be frosty sometimes. The Visitors, released at the end of November 1981, was darker and more grown up than anything before. It was one of the first albums recorded digitally, and one of the earliest pressed on compact disc. The title track, Björn later revealed, was about dissidents meeting in secret under Soviet backed governments. One of Us, about the end of a love affair, was their last number one in Germany, and When All Is Said and Done, sung by Frida, was widely heard as the story of her own divorce from Benny.[1] [2]

By 1982 the four were drifting. Frida made her first English solo album, Something's Going On, produced by Phil Collins, and its single I Know There's Something Going On became a top twenty hit in America. Björn and Benny, meanwhile, had met the lyricist Tim Rice in Stockholm in December 1981 to talk about a musical. When ABBA regrouped in May and June 1982, the sessions were a struggle. Three songs were recorded, You Owe Me One, I Am the City and Just Like That, and Björn and Benny were unhappy with all of them. The tapes were shelved, a new album was dropped, and they settled for a double album of their greatest singles instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In early August 1982, with studio time left over, Benny played Björn a single melodic phrase that climbed and fell through several key changes. Within an hour they had the whole tune, working title The Suffering Bird. It became The Day Before You Came, with Agnetha alone on lead, singing an ordinary list of daily routines that somehow sounds like a tragedy. It was a top five hit in Germany and the Netherlands but missed the British top twenty. Björn later reflected that they might have kept going a little longer if it had been a number one. Their very last single was Under Attack, released in December 1982.[1] [2]

ABBA never announced a split. They simply stopped. On the nineteenth of November 1982 they made their last appearance on Swedish television, and on the eleventh of December they performed for the last time, beamed live from a Stockholm studio into Noel Edmonds' Late, Late Breakfast Show on British TV. For years afterwards they denied they had broken up. Björn and Benny joked, who are we without our ladies, the initials of Brigitte Bardot? Agnetha and Frida kept saying a new album would come. But in 1983 the members sold their shares in Polar Music as tension with Stig grew, and apart from a birthday video for Stig in 1986, the four would not appear together in public again for over twenty years.[1] [2]

Separate lives, grief and money

Björn and Benny went straight into theatre. With Tim Rice they wrote Chess, a Cold War love story set around a world chess championship. As with Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, it came out first as a concept album in 1984, and it produced a British number one, I Know Him So Well, sung by Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson, and an American number three, Murray Head's One Night in Bangkok. Chess opened in London's West End in May 1986 and ran for about three years, but a rewritten Broadway version in 1988 lasted only two months. Benny then turned to his roots, making an accordion album with folk fiddlers, and in 1995 the pair premiered Kristina från Duvemåla, an epic Swedish musical about emigrants to America, which ran for almost five years.[1] [2] [3]

Agnetha had solo hits in the eighties, with Wrap Your Arms Around Me in 1983, produced by Mike Chapman, and later albums with Eric Stewart of 10cc and Peter Cetera of Chicago. She refused to fly, travelled by bus, and was in a bus crash on a Swedish motorway in 1983. After 1988 she stepped away almost completely, retreating to her country home on the island of Ekerö, with horses, yoga and astrology. She married a surgeon, Tomas Sonnenfeld, in 1990, and they divorced in 1993. In 1994 her mother took her own life by jumping from the balcony of her flat in Jönköping, and her father died the following year. Agnetha's depression deepened. In 1996 she published an autobiography called As I Am.[1]

Agnetha's search for privacy then took a frightening turn. In 1997 she began a relationship with Gert van der Graaf, a Dutch forklift driver who had been an obsessive fan. When she ended it in 1999, he kept watching her home. In 2000 a Swedish court issued a restraining order and he was deported to the Netherlands. He came back near her house in 2003, was arrested, and was banned from Sweden. Within months of that ban expiring in 2005, he was seen near her estate again. For years Agnetha was the member most often called reclusive, and the one fans assumed would never agree to a reunion.[1]

Frida left Sweden in 1982, first for London and then, in 1986, for Switzerland, where she lived with Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss von Plauen, a landscape architect. They married on the twenty sixth of August 1992, and she became close friends with Sweden's Queen Silvia. She threw herself into environmental causes and made a Swedish album, Djupa andetag, which went to number one in 1996. Then came terrible losses. On the thirteenth of January 1998 her daughter, Ann Lise-Lotte, died at thirty after a car accident in Livonia, New York. The following year her husband Ruzzo died of lymphoma. A planned follow up album was abandoned, and Frida later spoke of a long recovery.[1]

The money story soured too. Stig Anderson had built Polar into a business empire, but in the mid eighties much of ABBA's fortune was lost to bad investments, heavy taxes and rising interest rates. By 1989 Stig had sold Polar, including the ABBA trademark and most of the rights, to PolyGram, and used some of the money to found the Polar Music Prize. In June 1990 companies belonging to Agnetha, Benny and Björn sued him, claiming he had used a standard contract to take a share worth about four and a half million euros over the years. Frida stayed out of it. The case was settled privately in July 1991. Stig died of a heart attack on the twelfth of September 1997, aged sixty six, and his funeral was broadcast live on Swedish television.[1] [2]

Gold, Mamma Mia and the refusal to reunite

By the early nineties ABBA had become deeply uncool, and then suddenly they weren't. In 1992 the synth pop duo Erasure topped the British chart with Abba-esque, four ABBA covers. That June, U2 invited Björn and Benny on stage in Stockholm to play Dancing Queen. In September 1992 came ABBA Gold, a new greatest hits album. It has sold some thirty million copies worldwide and more than five and a half million in Britain, second only to Queen's Greatest Hits. In 1994 two Australian films, Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, put ABBA at the heart of their stories. As the critic Chuck Klosterman put it, by the end of the century it was more contrarian to hate ABBA than to love them.[1] [2] [3]

The producer Judy Craymer had met Björn and Benny in 1983 while working on Chess, and hearing The Winner Takes It All, she saw a theatre show in their songs. The pair were not keen, but not completely against it. In 1997 she hired the playwright Catherine Johnson to write a story, about a young bride on a Greek island trying to work out which of three men is her father. Mamma Mia! opened at the Prince Edward Theatre in London on the sixth of April 1999, twenty five years to the day after Waterloo won Eurovision. It reached Broadway in October 2001 and played there until September 2015, more than five thousand seven hundred performances. As of 2024, more than seventy million people had seen it around the world.[1] [2]

Everyone wanted a reunion. In 2000 ABBA reportedly turned down about one billion dollars for a hundred concert tour. Björn explained that there was simply no motivation, and that they wanted to be remembered as they were, young and full of energy. He quoted Robert Plant's joke that a reformed Led Zeppelin was just a covers band. Benny, meanwhile, was fighting a private battle. He had been a heavy drinker for much of his adult life, and in 2001 he stopped, and stayed sober. He later said that sobriety made everything easier and was one of the best choices of his life. In 2005 Madonna sampled Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! on Hung Up, and it went to number one around the world.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2008 Mamma Mia! became a film, shot on the Greek island of Skopelos, starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth. It grossed more than seven hundred million dollars, and in Britain it was the biggest film of the year. At the Swedish premiere on the fourth of July 2008, all four members of ABBA posed together for their first joint photograph in twenty two years. The soundtrack became ABBA's first album to top the American chart. That year also brought loss. In March 2008 Ola Brunkert, who drummed on almost every ABBA record, died at his home on Mallorca at sixty one, after an accidental fall in which glass cut his neck. And in October, a Swedish court cleared Björn of owing ninety million kronor in back taxes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the fifteenth of March 2010 ABBA were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York by Barry and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. Frida and Benny collected the award. In his speech, Benny tied ABBA's sound to the long, dark Swedish winters, saying you could hear that melancholy in Swedish folk music, in Sibelius and Grieg, and in the voices of Frida and Agnetha. In May 2013 ABBA The Museum opened in Stockholm, cash free from the start because Björn had become a campaigner against cash after his son was robbed. Agnetha returned with a new album, simply called A, in 2013. Bass player Rutger Gunnarsson, who had played on all their albums, died in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Voyage, the ABBAtars and the legacy

On the sixth of June 2016, at a private party in Stockholm to mark fifty years since Björn and Benny first met, Agnetha and Frida sang The Way Old Friends Do, and then the two men joined them on stage. Around the same time, the British manager Simon Fuller brought them an idea: a concert with digital versions of the band. In April 2018 the four announced something nobody expected. They had recorded two new songs, I Still Have Faith in You and Don't Shut Me Down. A planned television special was scrapped, Fuller's version of the project fell away, and Björn and Benny teamed up with the visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic instead. Then the pandemic pushed everything back.[1] [2] [3]

On the second of September 2021 ABBA announced Voyage, their first album of new songs in forty years. Released on the fifth of November 2021, it went to number one in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Australia and many other countries, and reached number two in America, their highest placing ever there. Benny produced it alone, and for the first time Björn played no instruments on an ABBA record. One song, Just a Notion, used vocals the group had recorded back in 1978. Don't Shut Me Down became their first Swedish number one single since 1978, and I Still Have Faith in You earned ABBA their first ever Grammy nomination, for Record of the Year.[1] [2]

ABBA Voyage opened on the twenty seventh of May 2022 in the ABBA Arena, a venue built for it in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London. On stage are digital avatars of the four as they looked in 1979, singing with their original voices, alongside a ten piece live band. To make them, the real ABBA wore motion capture suits and performed the whole set over five weeks in front of about a hundred and sixty cameras, with younger body doubles helping on the dance moves. Media reports put the budget at around one hundred and seventy five million dollars. On opening night the King and Queen of Sweden were in the audience, and at the end the real ABBA walked out for a curtain call.[1] [2]

The years since have mixed honours and goodbyes. Benny said after the premiere that nothing more would happen after this. Longtime guitarist Lasse Wellander, who played on every studio album from 1975 to Voyage, died in April 2023, aged seventy. That same year Frida's grandson Jonathan died of stomach cancer. On the twenty first of March 2024, all four were made Commanders of the Royal Order of Vasa by King Carl Gustaf, the first time in almost fifty years that Sweden had given the honour to its citizens. They declined to perform at Eurovision in Malmö that spring. In August 2024 they demanded that Donald Trump stop using their music at his rallies. And in September 2024 Björn married Christina Sas in Copenhagen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ABBA are among the best selling acts in history, with sales estimated at over one hundred and fifty million records. In July 2021 ABBA Gold became the first album ever to spend a thousand weeks on the British albums chart, and Benny's verdict was, not bad for four old turnips. As of 2026 it has passed twelve hundred weeks. Waterloo was voted the greatest Eurovision song, Arrival sits in the Library of Congress, and as of 2026 Mamma Mia! still plays in London. ABBA Voyage, running seven times a week, passed four million visitors in April 2026 and, as of 2026, is booked into 2027. Not bad for four young Swedes whose first show together was a flop in a half empty Gothenburg restaurant.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around ABBA

Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog. They met in 1969 and married in July 1971, with Benny at the organ. They had two children, Linda and Peter Christian, and separated in late 1978, announcing it in January 1979. They promised ABBA would continue, and it did, but the split hurt Agnetha deeply and she needed therapy afterwards. Björn wrote The Winner Takes It All for her voice. In later years they remained friendly, attending Mamma Mia! openings together.[1] [2] [3]

Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They met backstage at Melodifestivalen in 1969 and were together for about eleven years. Benny produced Frida's early solo records and it was his song that gave her a first number one. They married only in October 1978, separated in November 1980 and divorced in 1981, by which time Benny had met Mona Nörklit. Years later they stood together to accept ABBA's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2010.[1] [2] [3]

Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. Two young stars from rival Swedish bands, the Hootenanny Singers and the Hep Stars, they met on tour in 1966 and wrote their first song together that June. They wrote every ABBA song, then Chess, Kristina från Duvemåla and Mamma Mia!. Their partnership has outlived both their marriages to ABBA's singers, and in 2016 the whole band gathered to celebrate fifty years since they first met.[1] [2] [3]

ABBA and Stig Anderson. Stig managed the Hootenanny Singers, founded Polar Music, co-wrote lyrics for hits like Waterloo, SOS and Dancing Queen, and named the band. Often called the fifth member, he struck their record deals and managed their money. The relationship collapsed in the eighties, and in 1990 three of the four sued him over royalties, settling in 1991. Frida never took part. He died in 1997.[1] [2]

ABBA and Michael B. Tretow. Tretow was the engineer behind ABBA's sound. After reading a book about Phil Spector, he layered instruments into a wall of sound on Ring Ring, and he engineered their records through to The Visitors, when he had to master a new digital recorder. He was also a part owner of Polar. Benny called him the finest sound engineer the world has ever seen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

ABBA and Lasse Hallström. The Swedish director made most of ABBA's music videos, starting with Waterloo, and shot four of them in just two days in 1975 on a tiny budget. Those clips made ABBA stars in Australia. He also directed ABBA: The Movie in 1977, and said Money, Money, Money was the best ABBA video he ever made. He went on to direct Hollywood films such as The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Alfred Haase. Frida's father was a German sergeant stationed in northern Norway during the occupation. He left before she was born, and she grew up believing he had died at sea. In 1977 his son saw Frida's life story in the magazine Bravo and asked him about Norway. A few months later, at Benny's urging, father and daughter met for the first time in Stockholm.[1]

Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Prince Ruzzo Reuss. Frida moved to Switzerland in 1986 to live with Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss von Plauen, a German prince and landscape architect. They married in August 1992, and through him she became friends with Sweden's royal family. He died of lymphoma in 1999, a year after her daughter's death, and she later spoke of a long recovery. Since 2007 she has lived with the British peer Henry Smith.[1]

Agnetha Fältskog and Gert van der Graaf. The Dutch forklift driver began a relationship with Agnetha in 1997 after years as an obsessive fan. She ended it in 1999, but he kept watching her home. A court issued a restraining order and deported him in 2000. He returned in 2003, was arrested and banned from Sweden, and was spotted near her estate again in 2005.[1]

Björn and Benny and Tim Rice. Rice, lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, wanted a Cold War musical, and when Andrew Lloyd Webber was busy with Cats, a producer suggested the ABBA songwriters. A fan of the group, Rice met them in Stockholm in December 1981. The result was Chess, whose songs I Know Him So Well and One Night in Bangkok were hits in 1984 and 1985.[1]

Björn and Benny and Judy Craymer. Craymer met the pair in 1983 while working on Chess, and The Winner Takes It All convinced her their songs could tell a story on stage. They were lukewarm but did not say no. She spent years developing the idea, hired writer Catherine Johnson in 1997, and produced Mamma Mia!, which opened in 1999 and grossed billions worldwide.[1]

Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Phil Collins. Frida chose Phil Collins to produce her first English solo album in 1982, while ABBA were winding down. His big drum sound drove the single I Know There's Something Going On, which reached number thirteen in America and was one of the biggest selling singles there in 1983. The album sold about one and a half million copies.[1]

Rare facts about ABBA

• Frida's television debut happened on the day Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right. On the third of September 1967, she won a talent contest and sang that night on Sweden's biggest TV show. Driving was discouraged that day, so most of the country was home watching.[1]
• Agnetha wrote her first song at the age of six, called Two Small Trolls. Long before ABBA she was a songwriter. Most of her Swedish hits in the late sixties were her own compositions, including her first number one.[1]
• One of Björn and Benny's first hits was a Japanese top ten single written for a Swedish erotic film. She's My Kind of Girl came from their music for a film that flopped. In 1972 it surprised them by reaching the top ten in Japan.[1] [2]
• In America, their first single together was credited to Björn and Benny with Svenska Flicka. People Need Love came out in the United States on Playboy Records in 1972. Svenska flicka simply means Swedish girl.[1]
• Neil Sedaka co-wrote the English lyrics of ABBA's early single Ring Ring. Stig Anderson arranged an English translation by Neil Sedaka and Phil Cody, hoping to break the song internationally. It was a hit in Europe and South Africa.[1]
• ABBA's backwards B began as a mistake at a photo shoot. At a shoot for the German magazine Bravo, each member held a giant letter, and Benny held his B the wrong way round. The band liked it, and designer Rune Söderqvist built the logo around it.[1]
• The Eurovision conductor for Waterloo dressed as Napoleon. At Brighton in 1974, Sven-Olof Walldoff led the orchestra for Sweden's entry in a Napoleon costume, playing along with the song's theme.[1]
• Italian television refused to show the 1974 Eurovision for two months because of its own entry. Italy's song was called Sì, meaning yes, and a referendum on divorce was coming. RAI feared it might sway voters, so it waited until after the vote.[1]
• Waterloo was the first Eurovision winner sung in a language other than the country's own. The rule forcing entrants to use their national language was lifted from 1973 to 1976, which let ABBA sing in English.[1]
• ABBA shot four music videos in two days for about fifty thousand kronor. Lasse Hallström filmed SOS, Mamma Mia, Bang a Boomerang and I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do in one quick burst in 1975.[1]
• ABBA offered Mamma Mia to the British group Brotherhood of Man, who turned it down. The song was never meant as a single. It became one anyway, spending ten weeks at number one in Australia and topping the UK chart.[1]
• The tick tock sound at the start of Mamma Mia is a marimba Benny found in the studio. According to biographer Carl Magnus Palm, it was a last minute addition that Benny decided suited the song's rhythm perfectly.[1]
• Fernando was named after a bartender at a Stockholm club the band liked. The song's working title was Tango. It first appeared in Swedish on Frida's 1975 solo album, with entirely different lyrics.[1]
• Dancing Queen was the first song ever given an International Standard Musical Work Code. When the system launched in 1995, it was assigned the code T 000 000 001 0.[1]
• ABBA's two Royal Albert Hall shows in 1977 drew over three and a half million ticket applications. The hall held a little over eleven thousand people across the two nights, and applications came by post.[1]
• Benny sang lead on only one ABBA song, Suzy-Hang-Around. It appears on the Waterloo album. Björn sang lead more often, on songs such as Does Your Mother Know.[1] [2]
• ABBA's wild costumes were partly a tax move. Swedish tax rules let performers deduct the cost of clothes that could not be worn in everyday life. In the early days Frida designed and even sewed some outfits herself.[1] [2]
• Led Zeppelin and Genesis both recorded albums in ABBA's studio. Polar Music Studio, a converted Stockholm cinema, hosted Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, Genesis's Duke and Scorpions' Lovedrive.[1]
• ABBA made a tribute record for Stig Anderson's fiftieth birthday, pressed on only two hundred red vinyl copies. Called Hovas Vittne, a pun on Jehovah's Witnesses and Stig's birthplace Hova, it was handed to party guests in 1981 and is now a prized collectible.[1]
• An Argentine songwriter coached ABBA's Spanish pronunciation. Buddy McCluskey and his wife Mary wrote Spanish lyrics for Gracias por la Música in 1980, which helped ABBA break through in Latin America.[1]
• The Visitors was one of the first albums ever recorded digitally. It was also one of the earliest pressed on compact disc. Engineer Michael Tretow found the digital sound too clean and had to work around it.[1]
• The Money, Money, Money video was inspired by the film Cabaret. Frida wears a 1920s hat, and director Lasse Hallström later called it the best ABBA video he ever made.[1]
• Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! was cancelled in America even though promo copies had been pressed. Atlantic pulled the release amid the disco backlash of 1979. The song itself was inspired by Donna Summer's Hot Stuff.[1]
• Muriel's Wedding nearly used the Village People instead of ABBA. ABBA only gave permission for their songs two weeks before filming began. The film helped spark ABBA's revival in 1994.[1]
• The Easybeats guitarist Harry Vanda is Agnetha's second cousin. Vanda, who also co-wrote hits as half of Vanda and Young, is a relation on her family tree.[1]
• Björn became a leading campaigner against cash after his son was robbed. He has lived cash free for years, and ABBA The Museum in Stockholm has refused cash since it opened in 2013.[1] [2]
• Björn and Ian McKellen knitted stage wear for Kylie Minogue. Since 2021 the pair have posted videos of themselves knitting, and in 2023 they made pieces for Kylie's Las Vegas residency.[1]
• Benny reacted to ABBA Gold's thousand chart weeks by calling the band four old turnips. In July 2021 Gold became the first album to spend a thousand weeks on the UK chart. Benny said it was not bad for four old turnips.[1] [2] [3]
• Björn and Benny co-wrote the theme song for Eurovision 2013 with Avicii. The piece was performed for the first time at the final in Malmö on the eighteenth of May 2013.[1] [2]
• Agnetha's plane to Boston in 1979 was so delayed by storms that the band arrived ninety minutes late. The ordeal worsened her fear of flying. For years afterwards she preferred to travel by bus.[1] [2]
• Frida once performed Dancing Queen a cappella for Queen Silvia's fiftieth birthday. In 1993 she sang it with the Real Group at the Stockholm Opera, echoing ABBA's performance before the royal wedding in 1976.[1] [2]
• The ABBA Voyage avatars were built with about a hundred and sixty cameras over five weeks. The four wore motion capture suits to perform the full set, and younger body doubles helped capture the dance moves.[1]
• Mamma Mia! opened in London exactly twenty five years after Waterloo won Eurovision. Both happened on the sixth of April, in 1974 and 1999.[1] [2]
• Björn's second wedding in 2024 was conducted by the comedian Sandi Toksvig. He married Christina Sas, a Universal Music product manager he met while making Voyage, in Copenhagen in September 2024.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.