The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’m lucky I fell in love with a girl who could sing…’
Mamma mia! Björn Ulvaeus tells Helen Brown about the latest twist in the Abba tale – and the night it all began
Anyone planning to stock up on artificial bougainvillea this week is bang out of luck. The designers of Mamma Mia! The Party have bought all the hot pink blooms in Europe (and sent to the US for more) in their quest to transform a former nightclub space at the O2 Arena in London into the courtyard of a Greek taverna.
“It was really a terrible sight in here,” says Björn Ulvaeus, a founder member of Abba and the brains behind this latest extension of the band’s legacy, as he leads me into the venue.
“Dark, ugly, horrible sticky floor… But now look!” He wafts an arm up from the stone-tiled floor, past a fountain, ferns and frescoes towards two tiers of balconies, all lined with prettily set blue-clothed tables.
This surprisingly convincing Mediterranean scene will be instantly recognisable to the millions who’ve seen Mamma Mia! the musical. Or Mamma Mia! the movie. Or, indeed, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. You would think even the most diehard Abba fans would have filled their platform boots by now. But this “immersive theatre” event – during which audience members are served a four-course meal while actors move among them performing an original love story set to Abba songs, before being invited to join in a post-show disco – has been running in Stockholm for two years with great success. Now it looks set to take London by storm, even though ticket prices (starting at £165, minus drinks) have seen some “outraged” fans tweeting “Gimme, gimme, gimme a bank loan!”
Ulvaeus is unruffled by the gripes. He points out that you couldn’t get a meal, a West End show and a disco for any less: “Here you just pay for all three in one.”
More shocking to me is his ongoing commitment to promoting Abba – the third bestselling pop group in history – around the world. Now 74, he has an estimated net worth of £240million. He tells me he is at his happiest when spending time with his family: he has four grown-up children – two from his 1970-80 marriage to bandmate Agnetha Fältskog and two from his second marriage to Lena Källersjö, his wife since 1981 – and eight grandchildren. But he also enjoys other business interests, including part ownership of a spa and a theatre, and is keen on both reading and running (on a treadmill, while watching action movies).
A quiet, compact presence, with twinkling eyes and a dry wit, he doesn’t strike me as a man who needs the constant ego boost of our attention. So why is he still out front of house, producing and promoting a show packed with songs he co-wrote more than 40 years ago? Songs he thought “would be forgotten, despite the hard work and emotion we put into them at the time,” as he puts it?
“Ohhhh!” he sighs. “Sure. I could stop. I say no to so many things. We have all said no to the commotion and stress of reunion tours. But I come across an idea, I see how it might work and I have to do it.
“Also, although the songs are old, fitting them into new stories like this is a fresh challenge – I find