Agnetha and the crippling fear that means Abba will never reunite
TO Be fair, it wasn’t exactly the billiondollar reunion fans had been dreaming of. Last Sunday night, at a private party in a function room at a Stockholm hotel, all four members of Abba took to the stage and created a moment in musical history.
They’d intended to share a few stories and anecdotes with their audience, on the 50th anniversary of when the two male songwriters met.
At one point, Agnetha (the blonde one) and Anni-Frid (the brunette) started to read out some lyrics to one of their rather lesser-known songs. Then Benny and Bjorn surprised everyone by starting to sing along.
In the end all four sang, albeit briefly. It was a moment Abba devotees had been waiting many, many years for.
There was no band, no publicity and, crucially, no recording. Just a few fuzzy photos confirmed this most unlikely event had occurred. But even the idea of it was enough to send social media into a frenzy.
‘I would sell my house to see Abba sing together again!’ gasped one fan.
Afterwards, Anni-Frid Lyngstad said the experience had been ‘emotional’ and added: ‘It’s been very nostalgic.’ So does this mean Abba could get back together? Absolutely not. Any thoughts of a full reunion remain firmly off the table.
But why? It is a question that has troubled Abba fans for 34 years, since the band split in 1982.
It’s true they don’t need the money: Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus are worth £210 million and £159 million respectively, while the girls are each worth £55 million.
But more than any other factor, it is the wishes of Agnetha Faltskog, one of pop music’s most iconic sex symbols, which have held them back.
She lives a reclusive existence on a huge farm in rural ekero, an island near Stockholm, preferring the company of dogs to humans. She is said to find any kind of travel extremely stressful.
She is single, and her grown-up daughter Linda, 43, Linda’s partner and three grandchildren live on the estate. A three-year affair with wealthy socialite Bertil Nordstrom is over and she is barely seen at the beach house she bought reportedly as their love nest.
Her pleasures are simple: a glass of ice cold Chablis, the company of her two dogs and the sound of the sea, which she says is ‘essential’ to her well-being. And music? An employee at her manager’s office said there was no plan for further solo material and all talk of an Abba reunion was met with ‘No comment’.
So, how did Agnetha turn from an impossibly desirable global star into a virtual recluse, who singlehandedly is holding back the most eagerly anticipated regrouping in music history?
She and Bjorn met on a TV show — she had a solo career and a No1 single in Sweden aged 17 — and married in 1971, the year before Abba was formed.
All four members knew each other from the music scene.
Benny and Bjorn began writing and performing together, with the girls adding their voices later. Benny and Anni-Frid became a couple in 1970 and married eight years later.
Family life, for all four, had to be conducted in tandem with global success. By the time of the eurovision Song Contest in 1974 — which propelled them to international stardom — Agnetha and Bjorn had Linda, who was a year old. Their son Christian was born three years later.
It can’t have been easy. When the couple announced their split in 1979, Abba fans were shocked. While both insisted the divorce was pretty amicable, tellingly, Bjorn had a new girlfriend within ‘days’ of the separation.
Agnetha later confessed she’d felt ‘mangled’ by the split and had needed counselling.
The band continued for three more years, with Benny and Anni-Frid’s marriage imploding in 1981. After a tour, they returned to the studio in 1982, but realised that with both couples divorced, it was no longer any fun being Abba.
And Agnetha was the most miserable of them all. A single mother, she felt guilty at being apart from her children.
Her anxiety also started to overwhelm her. Her fear of flying, prompted by a terrifying experience on a private jet when the band was caught in a storm, began to intensify, and she was soon phobic about all forms of travel.
And she found the fans terrifying, believing their ‘shouting, boiling, hysterical’ screaming was born of hate rather than admiration.
She would have terrible daydreams in which they set upon her and consumed her.
After Abba broke up, Agnetha retreated. For years afterwards she didn’t even listen to music.
Decades passed, and she remained closeted. After Bjorn came a succession of lovers, including psychiatrist Hakan Lonnback, who she had employed during the death throes of her marriage.
Inappropriate couplings became a bit of a theme: Agnetha also had an affair with Stockholm detective Thorbjorn Brander, who had been assigned to her case after kidnap threats towards her children. In 1990, Agnetha married secretly for a second time — to divorced surgeon Tomas Sonnenfeld. She only admitted she had been married three years later — as they were getting divorced.
At this time Agnetha also had to cope with the suicide of her mother Birgit, who threw herself from the sixth-floor flat she shared with Agnetha’s father, Ingvar.
A year later, her father died, too. Secretive to the last, Agnetha told her biographer that her mother had died in an accident.
The oddest chapter of her life then followed: an affair with her stalker. Dutch forklift driver Gert van der Graaf had stalked her for two years, frequently turning up at her house.
She complained to the police but, in 1997, they started a relationship.
‘It was a very intense attention from him and after a while I felt I could not resist any more. I wanted to know him,’ Agnetha said. Two years later, they split up and by 2000 Agnetha was seeking an exclusion order again.
Van der Graaf was deported from Sweden, but returned several times. He was arrested in April 2006 just yards from her home.
UNeXPeCTeDLY, in 2004, Agnetha released a record — a collection of Sixties covers — and embarked on some limited publicity for it. The album spent 25 weeks in the charts in Sweden, and then she dropped out of view again.
The following year she was seen smooching with Bertil Nordstrom, a seriously wealthy friend of the king of Sweden.
She tried to join in with some of the Mamma Mia! publicity attending the Swedish premiere of the Abba musical in 2006. When a fan tried to take a picture of her, though, she threw up her hands in horror.
She and Bertil continued to see each other, but the romance eventually sputtered out.
And as for any future hopes of a band reunion, as Agnetha explained in 2013: ‘I’m not interested in being in magazines, TV and newspapers at all.
‘A lot of people think it’s just an attitude, that I want to create this air of mystery. But I genuinely don’t want it. I had an overdose.’ She added, Garboesque: ‘I want to be left alone.’
She lives, then, as if the remarkable story of Abba never happened. The only thing that sets her apart is that since the band split she has never had to work — which only means that her isolation can be more complete.
‘I have the privilege of being able to take each day as it comes. I go on different rounds with the dogs, and sometimes we run away somewhere and walk,’ she said.
‘The dogs give humans so much love and companionship. They are 100 per cent honest and in their company you can just be yourself. They know if you are sad or sick, sometimes by just looking at you, and then they come to comfort you.’
It’s all very cosy, if a little solitary, and a thousand miles from the superstardom life she once had.
Which is sad news for Abba fans, who — with every passing year, it seems — will never get the reunion they crave.