RE-ARRIVAL
Abba authority Carl Magnus Palm examines their shock reformation. Plus! Benny on the tape archive.
On June 5, 2016, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad took the stage at a private party at Stockholm’s Berns Hotel and performed Abba’s poignant 1980 song The Way Old Friends Do. It was to celebrate 50 years since their former bandmates Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus first met, and was the first time Abba’s lead singers had sung together at anything even resembling a public event since the band split in 1982. Most of us who were there were certain that we had heard Fältskog and Lyngstad’s voices together for the last time. Small wonder, then, that the world’s media exploded at the news last month that Abba had been back in the studio in June 2017 to record two new songs. “[It was] like no time had passed at all,” Ulvaeus told CNN of the session at Andersson’s Riksmixningsverket Studio in Stockholm, adding that Fältskog and Lyngstad “are in very good voice. Slightly, slightly lower perhaps, but they sound very much Abba.” The reason for the reunion is a forthcoming live concert project, where the group will appear as they did in 1979 as digital avatars, accompanied by live musicians. The group felt it might be more valid if they could contribute at least one new song to the setlist. Work went so well they came up with a second. The two songs are described by band representative Görel Hanser as a 2018 version of the vintage Abba sound. The ballad I Still Have Faith In You, as performed by the avatars, will be previewed in an Abba tribute television special in December, co-produced by the BBC and NBC. Andersson revealed that it’s “in 6/8, so you can’t disco dance to it.” The second tune, Don’t Shut Me Down, is “more of an uptempo song”, according to Hanser, and will probably be unveiled when the avatar concert premieres in April 2019. Judging by more recent Andersson/Ulvaeus songs, such as the dramatic mid-tempo Bara, Bara Du (Only, Only You) from a 2016 album by the Benny Andersson Band, the songs will pick up where Abba left off: dignified yet catchy, like The Winner Takes It All and One Of Us, rather than the early carefree hits, Waterloo and Mamma Mia. Certainly, it isn’t hard to imagine the female half of Abba singing those tunes. Last year, a revised edition of my book, ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions, was published, and I have since then gained access to a cache of tapes with more unreleased songs and alternate versions. These have mainly been culled from the on-the-side studio tapes that original Abba engineer Michael B. Tretow kept running throughout recording sessions. Around the same time as Abba recorded their new songs, I was sat in Andersson’s office, listening to Monsieur, Monsieur, an early take of the Arrival album’s My Love, My Life with Fältskog on vocals, as well as early song demos. More detail on these tapes will be published in a companion volume to be published in 2019. As Andersson told me in 2016, “There’s a lot of junk on [the tapes], but it’s pretty fun to have them, because you can hear us talking and laughing. The interesting thing, when you listen, is that it seems like we had a lot of fun all the time, the girls as well; like it was all pleasurable.”