Palm - The real story of ABBA: bright lights, dark shadows

Copyright 2014 Omnibus Press
This edition 2014 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

EISBN: 978-1-78323-049-5

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon
Picture research by Carl Magnus Palm & Nikki Lloyd

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Lyrics to Knowing Me Knowing You, Summer Night City, One Man One Woman and The Winner Takes It All Union Songs AB, Stockholm, Sweden, for the world. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd.

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Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story Of Abba was first published as a hardback edition in 2001, with a trade paperback following 12 months later. A subsequent paperback edition, published in 2008, incorporated a supplementary Afterword that dealt with the individual activities of Bjrn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fltskog in the intervening years, as well as any other relevant information concerning Abba as a group.

In addition to bringing the story up to date again by incorporating material from the 2008 Afterword, together with new material that deals with the period between 2008 and the present day, this new edition of Bright Lights Dark Shadows has been substantially revised throughout. Alongside editorial amendments designed to improve the flow of the story, some new material concerning the early years of the individual members has been added, together with other Abba-related information that has come to light in the period since the book was first published.

The story of Abba is the story of how four musicians from a remote country in northern Europe and their industrious, headstrong manager took on the world and won. It is a personal story and a public story, with all the sweeping torrents of a great Nordic saga, encompassing triumph and tragedy, poverty and wealth, and romance and heartbreak, all accompanied by a soundtrack of brilliant pop music that is loved across the globe.

Of the two instrumentalists in Abba, one was a self-taught musician with a streak of determination that carried him and the group all the way, the other a gifted songwriter whose talent was inherited from his grandfather. Of the two singers, one was a reluctant sex-symbol for whom fame became a poisoned chalice, the other an orphan who carried on reinventing herself until she became, quite literally, a princess. Equally literally, his diligence in making them what they became had fatal consequences for their manager.

At the very highest levels of pop The Beatles are generally credited with having sold the most records worldwide, with Elvis Presley at number two. Thanks to an early Nineties revival that lifted Abba into the realm of all-time classic acts, including their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, they remain as one of the few contenders to third place. More than three decades after they last performed together, they have one of the strongest back catalogues in the history of popular music. As a group, they were active between 1972 and 1982 and broke sales records during that period. The compilation CD ABBA Gold, released in 1992, has become their biggest selling album ever with worldwide sales approaching 30 million. Their total sales are now said to exceed 380 million.

Abba remain huge in virtually every corner of the world, not least in countries where most other western rock and pop music has failed to penetrate. In the United States, which was considered Abbas weakest territory during their active days, they are today more popular than ever before, with the ABBA Gold album having now sold in excess of six million copies, far more than any of their previous albums. In Australia their popularity matches even that of The Beatles. Since it opened in London in 1999, the Abba musical Mamma Mia! has now been seen by more than 54 million people around the world, truly a global phenomenon. The 2008 film version repeated the juggernaut trajectory of the stage production in becoming the highest-grossing movie musical of all time.

Time has proven that Abbas popularity is not dependent on fluke revivals, but is constant at any given time. They are a consistently strong presence in the worlds gay communities. In the ongoing and almost certainly permanent absence of the real thing, Abba tribute bands are multiplying across the globe. New generations are constantly discovering Abbas music, and many of todays European hit factories cite Abba as one of their main inspirations.

In todays parlance, Abba are, indeed, mega.

When Bright Lights Dark Shadows The Real Story Of ABBA was first published in September 2001, it was, I believe, the first serious, comprehensively researched and objective biography on the group. Since then, the book seems to have become the primary source for journalists, radio and television producers and other Abba biographers when they need to research the groups story.

This is not to say that there has been an abundance of new Abba books in the 21st century. More recent books, most of them pictorial in style, have stemmed from the general acknowledgment of Abbas continuing powerful presence in the cultural landscape, though in their home-country of Sweden they are to a large extent still regarded as a familiar presence, like a comfortable old armchair rather than as a subject whose story might make an interesting and readable book. The countrys established music journalists as in Great Britain and America are generally more interested in the lives and work of Anglo/Saxon and African-American artists. Despite the elevated status they enjoy today, which was unthinkable during their years as an active group, Abba, with their middle-class suburban image and perceived cabaret cheesiness, will never be your average rock writers first choice of subject material.

However, Abbas story is as fascinating as any, offering several captivating plot elements: a fight to overcome abject poverty in rural, Depression-era Sweden, a child born out of wedlock in the shadow of the Second World War, fatal illness, suicide, teenage parenthood, record-breaking record sales, fan hysteria, disastrous business deals and all this before Abba even existed. When the world at large became aware of the group after they won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo in 1974, all four members had been recording artists for the best part of 10 years; some

reaching extraordinary domestic fame, others with almost no commercial success at all.

Theres also the crucially important historical and cultural context from which they sprang and within which they worked. If Abba were a product of the optimism and progress that swept across the Western world in the decades following the Second World War, their saga was also a particularly Swedish version of this development, running parallel with the nations rise from poverty and economic stagnation into a highly developed post-industrial society.