How the Sex Pistols were inspired by... ABBA!

Räkna De Lyckliga Stunderna Blott doesn’t sound romantic but it’s the title of the Swedish TV show on which Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus met, fell in love, and became one pair of the As and Bs in ABBA.

As for the other half, Anni-Frid Lyngstad met Benny Andersson at the Swedish entry finals for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest. Neither of them got anywhere at that contest – but five years later ABBA stormed to victory with Waterloo, for many people the only Eurovision winner worth remembering.

None of ABBA’s songs is easy to forget, of course. Benny and Bjorn, the foursome’s chief writers, had more hooks than a fishing tackle box.

The girls were key to the ABBA sound too. When the group was starting out, Agnetha tells Jan Gradvall in this sumptuously illustrated, authorised book, she was the only member who could actually read music.

But it is for their singing that she and Frida will be remembered. Their close harmonies were crucial to ABBA’s sound.

As Benny recalls, ‘it’s a wonderful privilege to write for two voices instead of one.

‘The fact that

Agnetha was a soprano and

Frida a mezzo soprano gives you a broad span, over two and a half octaves’.

ABBA’s dream year, Gradvall reminds you, was 1976. They topped the charts for pretty much the whole 12 months – kicking things off with Fernando, followed by Dancing Queen, moving on to darker, almost Bergman-style terrain with the eternallyheartbreaking Knowing Me, Knowing You, and ending things on a bang with Money, Money, Money.

All these songs and more were on Arrival, an LP that was sniffed at by critics but which became the bestseller of 1977 and regularly takes a high spot in best album of all time polls.

ABBA were hugely influential too. Elvis Costello based his album Armed Forces on the ABBA sound.

Even The Sex Pistols are in their debt. Bassist Glen Matlock says he stole the riff for Pretty Vacant from SOS.

Indeed, 50 years on from their first triumph, ABBA are still doing it – in avatar form – every night at the specially built ABBA Arena in London.

Their ‘productivity was unbelievable’, writes Gradvall.

Yes, and everything else about them too.