THE GREAT ABBA BACKLASH
Today they may be global icons but the Swedish superstars suffered a mid-career nosedive almost overnight when their spangly outfits and upbeat pop suddenly became unfashionable. A brilliant new BBC documentary reveals how the ultimate Super Troupers surv
THANKS to the stratospheric success of Mamma Mia! the musical and film, the stage show ABBA Voyage and their endlessly popular records, millions of fans all over the world these days only want to say to ABBA: “Thank you for the music.” But that was not always the case. BBC documentary ABBA: Against the Odds reveals that after their victory at the Eurovision Song Contest 50 years ago with Waterloo, the group were engulfed by torrents of unwarranted criticism. For many years, it was agony being ABBA.
Deemed irredeemably naff, the Swedish quartet – Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (known as Frida) – were sneered at by vitriolic, trendy critics in the 1970s. Björn recalls: “There was a progressive movement that looked upon ABBA as the Antichrist.”
The success of the group in Brighton in 1974 was disdained in their homeland. Sweden prides itself on its serious folk music, a tradition from which Benny and Björn both sprang, and people there saw ABBA’s upbeat, cheerful pop music as a betrayal of those earnest roots.
In 1975, a campaign was mounted for Sweden to withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest altogether. Protesters thronged the streets with banners proclaiming, “Stop the Music Festival.”
The campaigners even organised an alternative festival on the same night as Eurovision. At that concert, a Swedish folk band performed a song mocking the supergroup: “Here come ABBA in clothes made from plastic, as dead as tinned herring. They don’t care about anything except making quick cash.” Say what you think, folkies.
The fashionable music press was, if anything, even more cruel.
James Rogan, the director of ABBA: Against the Odds, showing in the runup to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden on Saturday, says: “We think of ABBA as ABBA Gold, ABBA Voyage, Mamma Mia!, these hugely commercial juggernauts of cultural history.
“The group were hugely commercial in the 1970s, too, but they were also derided. They were fighting against a level of condescension that few bands had to deal with quite as directly.”
JAMES continues: “The band were routinely eviscerated. The stuff that the music press wrote about the group was just mind-blowingly nasty. They wrote, ‘ABBA are the enemy and we have met them’.
“Interviewers asked them the rudest questions. They asked them why their lyrics were so poor. When they were on tour in America, an interviewer said, ‘So you write and record and formulate your songs. Doesn’t that make them a bit samey?’ Talk about taking a positive and spinning it into a negative.”
As another example: “The first thing a Swedish journalist asked the group after they had won the Eurovision Song Contest was, ‘You’ve written a song about 40,000 people being killed at the Battle ofWaterloo. Do you think that’s appropriate?’”
Agnetha and Frida, who were married to Björn and Benny respectively, also fell victim to the most appalling sexism. Journalists were never interested in their music.
In archive footage, an Australian reporter asks Agnetha what she thinks about winning the award for Best Bottom in theWorld.
To her immense credit, the singer keeps her cool and replies by joking: “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it!”
But behind the scenes, the band and their
entourage were seething about such misogynistic comments.
Ingmarie Halling, who was responsible for ABBA’s costumes and make-up, says: “I think that it was unworthy for any person to be talked about just as a body part.”
The group, which was managed by the exceedingly capable Stig Anderson, also had to put up with numerous crass questions about the money they were making.
Ingmarie says: “Everyone thought Anderson was just a manager who decided, ‘Let’s take two good-looking women, two skilled musicians, put them together and make a group that will make hits, just doing it for the money’.”
Naturally enough, the band felt slighted by the suggestion that they were merely a kind of musical ATM. Björn says: “They thought ABBA was this commercial hit machine.That’s like telling the audience that buys the records that they’re not mature enough to know what they’re buying and that they’re simply buying something coming out of a calculated hit machine. I think that’s terrible.”
Agnetha said at the time: “We have feelings and we get hurt if we get jumped on every time, and there is only talk about money. We’re proud of what we do. That’s what we want to talk about, not money.”
Many critics took against ABBA as well because of the sheer cheesiness of the Eurovision Song Contest. According to James, who also directed the award-winning documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, ABBA broke out of Eurovision, and Eurovision wasn’t – and still isn’t – considered to be edgy or cool. They were boxed by the music press as novelty songwriters.”
The outlandish costumes that ABBA sported – spangly silver jumpsuits, anyone? – did not endear them to the critics, either.
Björn recollects: “We weren’t taken seriously because we were wearing such strange clothes. We thought we had to be more outrageous than anyone else to be seen. We thought it was great fun, too. It was never a plan that this was going to be our image, this kitsch. But we really suffered for that.”
The extravagant outfits added to the idea that ABBA were simply not political enough
for the “upset generation” of young hipsters who were protesting about apartheid, the Vietnam war and coups in South America.
MIKAEL Wiehe, the singer with ABBA’s contemporaries, the leftwing Swedish prog rock group, The Hoola Bandoola Band, says: “We were upset that ABBA weren’t upset.” The credibility of ABBA, who were always polite and never indulged in such scandalous rock ’n’ roll behaviour as throwing televisions out of hotel windows, was further undermined when punk rock exploded, snarling and spitting, into the world in 1977.
James says: “The arrival of punk was seen as the arrival of an authenticity that burst the bubble of the commercial pop ABBA represented. There’s a paradox in that, which is that The Sex Pistols were, of course, manufactured as a band by their manager Malcolm McLaren.
“The other thing we reveal in the film is that when they went on tour to Scandinavia,The Sex Pistols took with them a cassette player with one cassette and one cassette only. The only thing they fought over was that cassette. And guess what it was? ABBA’s Greatest Hits!” Inevitably, the remorseless criticism ground the band down.They were wounded by the argument that ABBA were totally soulless. Björn told Rolling Stone magazine: “It may be pop to you, but to us it’s soul.” Agnetha agreed: “They criticised us on the grounds that we don’t have feelings. It’s quite unpleasant.”
The other aspect that wore ABBA down was the fact that all four of the band members, but Agnetha in particular, really struggled to cope with their fame. As they relentlessly toured the world in the second half of the 1970s and the frenzy surrounding them was compared with Beatlemania, the quartet became increasingly troubled and fractured. As Frida remarked at the time: “It’s been very draining many times. I felt very overwhelmed.” James adds: “In terms of their personal lives, eventually that must have been exhausting. They had created a musical express train, and at a certain point you can see that they all looked like they wanted to get off it.”
Another extremely difficult element for ABBA was that they had to live in an unforgiving global spotlight when both couples in the band very painfully and very publicly broke up.Agnetha pleaded with the press to stop telling lies about the group, while Björn told a newspaper that: “Success spoiled our private lives.”
The irony for the quartet is that their divorces inspired some of their greatest work, including such classic heartbreak songs as SOS and Knowing Me, Knowing You.
Björn recalls that when he was in the process of splitting up from Agnetha, he asked her to sing The Winner Takes It All, the song he had written about the implosion of their relationship.
When he handed her the lyrics to read for the first time, he recollects: “A tear or two welled up in her eyes because the words really affected her.” It is now seen as one of the most poignant break-up songs ever composed.
Judd Lander, who worked for ABBA’s label, Epic Records in London, remembers the first time he heard The Winner Takes It All. “Our business is a very cynical business,” he said. “All some executives are interested in is the next dollar. But when we were listening to that track, there was silence.We all knew what it was about.”
James adds: “If the charge is that ABBA were manufactured and had no soul, then The Winner Takes It All is the ultimate response. There’s nothing manufactured about the feelings in it. That lyric means something to everyone. Everyone has an emotional connection to the song.”
Such timeless songs are the legacy that ABBA have left us.
F‘If the charge is ABBA had no soul, The Winner Takes It All is the ultimate response’
ORGET about the negative coverage, the sneering critics, the misogynistic and intrusive press. What remains is the lasting and irrefutable brilliance of one of the world’s all-time great pop bands.
It’s not just me who thinks so. Before he went on stage every night, George Harrison used to listen to SOS. And Pete Townshend once told Björn: “Do you know SOS is the best pop song ever written?”
Björn says now: “It’s one of the most flattering things I’ve heard in my life. I was so proud.”
Indeed, when your music is adored and constantly played by millions of fans across the globe and you have sold 385 million records, it doesn’t matter what snarky reviewers write because, as Ingmarie says: “No one can touch you.”
The release of greatest hits album ABBA Gold in the early Nineties signalled a change in their fortunes. It was the first full, international compilation of their hits.
Gone were tacky covers featuring band members, replaced by a clean gold logo. It revived interest almost single-handedly.
Three decades later and ABBA Gold lies only second to Queen’s Greatest Hits as the biggest-selling UK album ever – having shifted some 5.5 million copies over a record-breaking 1,000 chart weeks.
Today, we only remember ABBA’s eternally wonderful music, not their tiresome, wrong-headed critics.
James adds: “ABBA transcended the odds that bedevilled them at the beginning. They definitely had the last laugh.”
In the bitter battle between ABBA and their critics, ultimately it was absolutely a case of the winner takes it all.