The Book Of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover
Jan Gradvall
★★★★
FABER
After ABBA Gold, Mamma Mia! and the “ABBAtars”of ABBA Voyage, you might be forgiven for thinking that the band has always been universally adored. After all, even Sid Vicious was a fan, chasing after them through an airport in his vomit-stained leather jacket to declare his love (he did not get close). Yet as Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall stresses in Melancholy Undercover, the quartet were by no means championed by all in their homeland. In 1975, the year after the band won The Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with Waterloo, Swedish broadcaster TV2 screened an “alternative” Eurovision. As well as Kevin Coyne playing with future Police guitarist Andy Summers, there was an appearance from a character called Sillstryparen, or “the Herring Strangler”, who sang a song attacking Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid: “Here comes ABBA in plastic clothes/ As dead as a can of pickled herring.”
As a Swedish writer, Gradvall is well-placed to fill out the political and cultural context around ABBA’s success. He can offer a thorough explanation of Swedish “dansband” culture, a vital phase in the band’s evolution; explore their relationship with English language lyrics or herring, and outline how the leftist “Swedish Music Movement” disowned them as symbols of capitalism. That’s not his only advantage: Gradvall has interviewed all of the elusive band members over the past decade, allowing him to add curious and telling details about the quartet, such as Björn Ulvaeus’s adventures in hypnosis, or Agnetha Fältskog’s habit of boosting her self-confidence by playing The Winner Takes It All.
Despite this access, Gradvall admits in the acknowledgements that this (translated) book was influenced by the episodic form of Craig Brown’s hit compendium One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time. It’s not quite as larky as Giles Smith’s similarly inspired My My! ABBA Through The Ages, but nor does Melancholy Undercover promise the heavyweight biography of Carl Magnus Palm’s Bright Lights, Dark Shadows. Instead, Gradvall understands that the most fascinating insights often lurk in tangents and digressions: a few lines on Swedish surname conventions, or the importance of the reference to Dallas in the lyrics of The Day Before You Came.
“Much has been written about ABBA but remarkably little about the music itself,” says Benny Andersson, yet Gradvall does return to the songs repeatedly, offering in-depth studies of Dancing Queen (working title: Boogaloo) or ABBA’s connection to disco. There’s also gentle insight from the band themselves: Anni-Frid Lyngstad believes that the band’s inherent melancholy comes from Andersson’s childhood immersion in accordion music, while Andersson discusses the unique span of “the girls’” voices – “low D to high D”. Ignore the Herring Strangler: with this book, Gradvall has found fresh life in the ABBA story.
The Book Of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover is published by Faber on October 10.
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Main picture: Getty