The Joy of ABBA

Between 1974 and 1982,

four Viking invaders plundered the Anglo-Saxon pop charts.

'No-one cared if you were big in Austria,'

or Germany, or Sweden.

But if you were accepted in Britain, OK, that's fine.

Now you're a real pop group.

Combining European musical influences,

perfect production, and lyrics of love and loss,

ABBA were unique.

# Half past 12

# And I'm watching the late show... #

A lot of their songs have dealt with the mundaneness of, you know,

watching TV, going to work, falling in love a bit,

having your heart broken. That was their talent,

of making something very normal seem otherworldly.

ABBA made us fall in love with the sound of Swedish melancholy.

'You have this incredible cheerfulness.'

At the same time, you have this real darkness,

and this real sadness within the songs.

# Ooh, you can dance... #

'ABBA sort of really gouged out this sense of...

'of the kind of sadness, the difficulty, of the human condition.'

You can't know true joy without knowing true pain.

# Digging the dancing queen... #

But they would create a critical storm.

'ABBA were the black riders,'

the musicians of evil!

I'm going to quote TS Eliot,

'"Human beings can't bear too much reality."

'Obviously, you knew that ABBA were going to sell

'a shed-load of singles as a result.'

It's hard to sort of trust, or to really even know,

what someone means when they say, "ABBA don't really do it for me."

If you don't like ABBA, you don't like pop.

ABBA's eight-year career was a battle for the legitimacy

of pop music.

ABBA works for one reason and one reason only - it's complicated.

TRADITIONAL FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

We all know the four things that Sweden is famous for abroad...

..glass, free sex, drunkenness and suicide.

Now, how does all this fit together?

THEY PLAY 'SUPER TROUPER' IN FOLK STYLE

# Tonight the super trouper beams are going to blind me... #

As Swedish as meatballs, smorgasbord,

and flat-pack furniture, ABBA were outsiders looking in,

four pop dreamers whose formative years

offered a distinctly European take on American and British rock'n'roll.

# Shining like the sun

# Smiling, having fun... #

RADIO STATIC

# ..so dimmed I couldn't see

# Walking to the glory land... #

'I grew up in a small town south of Stockholm,'

and I had a cousin who was one year older than me,

and he was sent to England for a holiday,

'summer of '59, '60, or thereabouts.'

And then...he came across the latest fad,

which was skiffle.

# Over in the glory land... #

'There were skiffle groups everywhere in clubs.'

The idea was that anyone should be able to do it,

'and he was all-consumed by this

'when he came back from his summer holiday.'

And he said, "We must start one of those groups."

And this is when my parents bought me my first guitar.

Hootenanny Singers!

APPLAUSE

THEY SING A FOLK SONG

'They did sound, actually, quite...'

not that dissimilar to Mumford & Sons now,

sort of slick, a little bit posh folk music.

'And they had big hits.'

SONG CONTINUES

'Benny was completely in another group at that time,

'but we both listened to The Beatles.'

The first time I heard She Loves You...

Ohh!

I thought, "They are gods! How can they create something like this?"

'Until then, if you were in a folk group, like I was,

'you would play other people's songs.

'You realise, "What is this? They're writing their own stuff.

'"They have their own songs.'

"Maybe we can do that too."

As Bjorn tasted his first success with folk-pop,

future writing partner Benny Andersson

was playing keyboards in the Hep Stars.

Lead singer Svenne Hedlund was Sweden's first true pop star.

# My baby drove off

# In a brand-new Cadillac

# My baby drove off

# In a brand-new Cadillac... #

Well, this is from the charts

in 1965, in May.

Top ten, when we were number one,

number two, and number four.

And, as you can see here, there's The Beatles.

Yeah, I'm very proud of this list!

# Your heart's so cold that it's going to freeze... #

MUSIC: "Cadillac" by Hep Stars

The Hep Stars were originally a covers band

whose biggest hit was a version of The Renegades' Cadillac.

'What happened was that we had letters from the fans who said,

'"When are you going to start to write your own songs?"'

It was like a demand from the public!

So...Benny, he wrote his first song,

'called No Response, and it became a top-ten hit.'

The second one he did was a beautiful song called Sunny Girl,

and that was a number one for weeks, for months.

# She's a sunny girl A real girl

# And no-one can declare... #

I started writing, my group, and Benny and his,

and...then we met in '65 or '66

and started to write songs together, and the rest...

Most of you probably know what happened.

# She's domestic She is property

# She's slim like a reed... #

50 years of the Hep Stars,

and we're still...working,

still going strong.

And, of course, we're still the greatest!

HE LAUGHS

APPLAUSE

Stars within their respective bands,

Bjorn and Benny would pen their first number together,

Isn't It Easy To Say, in 1966.

But what about Agnetha and Anni-Frid?

THEY SING "UP, UP AND AWAY" IN SWEDISH

There's a very Swedish culture called dance bands.

'They're not playing dance music in the James Brown sort of way,

'more like polka and oompa-poompa style of music.'

And both Frida and Agnetha started out as singers in dance bands.

SONG: "Up, Up And Away"

To British audiences, it seemed like ABBA came from nowhere,

but, in their homeland, they were a super-group,

each member having served a pop apprenticeship.

'Agnetha Faltskog was maybe one of the most popular singers in Sweden

'and had several number-one hits.'

Frida also was a big singer,

entering the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, for example.

SHE SINGS IN SWEDISH

We met these girls and fell in love, as you do,

and, eventually...

..you know... It was...

We, we got married, anyway,

and that's the way it started,

'and not by forming a group and thinking it was a great gimmick

'to be two married couples, which many people thought.'

MUSIC: "Hej Gamle Man" by Benny & Bjorn

So this is Lycka, I think that's how you say it,

and this was the album released by Bjorn and Benny,

erm, in 1970, I think,

and it features the big Swedish hit Hej Gamle Man!,

which I think translates as Hey, Old Man!

And the significance of Hej Gamle Man! as well

is it's the first recorded song

that features the voices of Anni-Frid and Agnetha.

'Bjorn and Benny appeared as a duo,'

they were called "Bjorn & Benny" on an album,

and they started using their girlfriends as backup singers,

'realising they sang much better than they did!'

There are lots of different reasons why ABBA melted the hearts

of millions and millions of people

all over the world.

'The beautiful alchemy that happened between Frida and Agnetha's voices

'is just one of them.'

Agnetha was a true soprano, or is, and Frida a mezzo.

'We were actually working with...

'If you say one singer with an incredible range,'

I mean, it just happened, everything came together like that.

People Need Love.

# People need hope People need loving

# People need trust from a fellow man

# People need love to make a good living... #

Billed as Bjorn and Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid,

ABBA released their first single in 1972.

People Need Love had a distinctly European flavour.

# Women always knew that it takes a man

# To get matrimonial harmony... #

'Schlager was a style of music that was very popular'

in central, eastern and northern Europe.

Very, very sentimental songs,

almost reminiscent of very simple folk song melodies.

It's kind of strongly associated with Germany, west Germany.

'There was kind of schlager music, there were also, as it were,

'schlager films, or heimatfilme and they're set in these kind of...

'Nordic, rural, idyllic retreats

'where things like World War II never happened,

'in which there's no sense of a sort of recent past,

'there's no particular sense of a future,

'they're just set in this kind of...fictional sort of present day.'

Almost about a kind of amnesia, in a sense,

erm, and certainly a flight from reality.

YODELLING

There was the German schlager, schmaltz,

was on the radio in Sweden, and the French and Italian palates,

all of it, mixed with, er...Swedish folk music and stuff,

'so we were exposed to all of that growing up,'

which I think you can feel, you can hear in our writing...

# People need hope People need loving

# People need trust from a fellow man... #

..which made us kind of strange in the '70s

in comparison with, you know, most other stuff.

There's a conspicuous yodelling at the end of People Need Love,

which you didn't hear too much of,

at least not until Morrissey had a hit with Suedehead.

-# La-la-la la

-People need love

# La-la-la la La-la-la... #

YODELLING

People Need Love broke ABBA as a top-20 band in their home country.

But, in 1972, was this schlager-influenced pop group

in tune with the times?

-REPORTER:

-'All the fun of the fair on May Day in Stockholm,

'and, of course, the traditional labour processions and demonstrations.

'And the only serious incidents occurred as extreme leftists

'tried to interrupt the main procession.'

Sweden was ruled very much by a sort of left-wing movement.

'There was an opinion that pop music should be very political,'

and you should have a left-wing stance in everything you did.

There was no glamour, nothing else.

'The Swedish youth, in the '70s, should be listening to prog music.'

Unlike its British namesake, Swedish prog was a music movement

based around an anyone-can-play ethos, married to socialist lyrics.

The Hoola Bandoola Band were prog's pin-ups,

and, in the early '70s, they were more important than ABBA.

'We were the white knights,'

we fought for the right ideals,

we said the right things, we played the right music,

and we looked the way you should look,

'like the bad looked, with big beards and long hair,

'and, erm, military outfits.'

And then, we had this ABBA group, who were the black riders.

The musicians of evil!

HE LAUGHS

With commercial music.

# Let's go, girl

# It's a beautiful place this world... #

'To them, ABBA was a symbol of everything evil in this world,'

'and Bjorn has himself said they were considered the anti-Christ.'

ABBA's music was not considered challenging enough,

musically, er, which was quite unfair

because the music movement's music was based on the concept

that anyone can play, and many times they couldn't play!

We were the upset generation.

We were upset about the apartheid system,

we were upset about the dictatorships in Europe,

we were upset about the military coups in Latin America,

we were upset about the wars in south-east Asia.

And we were upset that ABBA weren't upset.

# I am just a girl

# One among the others

# Nothing much to say... #

What they didn't do, they didn't make political statements.

They made statements about normal things, about being hurt,

about falling in love, about falling out of love,

about the agony of being a teenager. That's as important.

ABBA didn't fit in

in all this Swedish cultural climate,

but I think Sweden's audience loved ABBA

but they were very controversial during that time

among other musicians in Sweden.

By 1973, ABBA had reached a plateau in Sweden.

Popular with the record-buying public, yet dismissed by the media,

it was time for a new direction.

'No-one cared if you were big in Austria,'

or Germany, or Sweden.

But if you were accepted in Britain, OK, that's fine.

Now you're a real pop group.

HE CHUCKLES

'The Anglo-Saxon countries were self-sufficient

'when it came to their groups and their music.'

Every time we, you know, would send the publisher a song,

they would just throw it away.

"What is this? Sweden? I don't think so."

So Eurovision was really the only vehicle.

One evening, Anni-Frid came to me and she said,

"Owe, I've seen you make so many funny costumes,"

especially 1973, when they were competing in Eurovision Song Contest

'with Ring Ring, so I said, "I will make something extraordinary.

"Something you really want special,

"or something you don't want to have?"

And then, Bjorn said these, for me, famous words,

and he did regret it later on, but, anyhow,

"Owe, listen to me, nothing is too wild, really.

"Nothing is too wild."

# And I sit all alone impatiently

# Won't you please understand the need in me?

# So ring, ring

# Why don't you give me a call? #

Replete with new glam look,

Ring Ring was ABBA's Phil Spector-influenced attempt

to win the Swedish Eurovision heats in '73.

# You were here and now you're gone

# Hey, did I do something wrong? #

If the Swedish people had been allowed to vote,

that song would have won by far,

but there was a sort of a jury of experts voting

and they didn't like that song

so ABBA didn't make it onto the Eurovision Song Contest that year.

It was the next year, 1974, they did it with Waterloo.

'A very good evening to you and from me, David Vine,

'welcome to the Eurovision Song Contest of 1974

'and welcome to a Saturday night out in Brighton.'

The competition was formidable.

Widely tipped to win were Dutch favourites Mouth & MacNeal.

# I see a face

# A happy face

# It's like a mirror of my mind. #

And it looked like we'd recruited a ringer with

British-born Australian Olivia Newton-John representing the UK.

We had this song, Waterloo, it was totally,

completely not Eurovision Song Contest stuff.

But nevertheless, we thought, this is how we want to present ourselves.

'And we move now across into Sweden,

'the largest of the Scandinavian countries.

'Although we're looking at streets, it is a country full of mountains,

'lakes and forests. And, of course, it's full of blonde Vikings

'and this is one of the reasons why it's good for pictures.

'These are the ABBA group.'

We might not win, we might end up nine or 14 or whatever,

but people would probably remember us

because we are different from the rest.

-APPLAUSE

-'Oh, and it is Napoleon!

'Napoleon, no wonder their song is called Waterloo.

'This is Sven-Olof Walldoff

'who's really entered into the spirit of it all,

'dressed as Napoleon.

'Waiting for Waterloo, by ABBA for Sweden.

'Watch this one.'

# My, my

# At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender

# Oh, yeah

# And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way... #

I remember vividly seeing Agnetha in her blue satin culottes

and her platform boots and her little skullcap and...

Her image was very, very striking.

But it was the song that really...

Everyone loved the song and it had a great tune to it

and it had a lot of energy but there was something about Agnetha I really

thought, "Wow, that's great, I'd like to look...I'd like to look...

"I want to BE her."

# Waterloo

# Promise you'll love me for evermore. #

They were very canny that they had to make themselves stand out

visually in an extraordinary way.

Agnetha with her ridiculous blue moulded glam rock pantaloons,

Frida wearing, you know, some kind of weird post folk-rock get-up

and the boys just channelling the spirit of Marc Bolan

and taking it to somewhere that was a little bit wrong,

a little bit absurd but it really worked.

# Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa

# Waterloo

# Finally facing my Waterloo. #

APPLAUSE

Now is the moment when we find out

who voted for which song.

Hello, Brighton, Helsinki calling.

Here are the results

of the Finnish jury.

Sweden five votes.

APPLAUSE

Sweden, one vote.

United Kingdom, one vote.

Italy, quatre vote.

Well, it looks quite exciting between Sweden, Belgium

and Italy, with the Netherlands coming up.

Of course, beyond my wildest dreams, we won.

No doubt about it,

it is Sweden - Waterloo, ABBA!

Overnight that changed everything.

HE SPEAKS IN SWEDISH

To the left-wing music movement,

ABBA's success in bringing Eurovision to Sweden was a stain

on the country's reputation.

And in 1975, they would do something about it.

This competing in music,

one melody better than the other,

one artist better than the other was also the exact opposite

of what this music movement stood for.

So we made an alternative song festival.

HE SINGS IN SWEDISH

And, in Sweden at that time,

we had two channels on the TV.

So Channel One broadcasted the song contest

and Channel Two broadcasted, at the same time,

the alternative song contest.

HE SINGS IN SWEDISH

# Jenny, Jenny... #

HE SINGS IN SWEDISH

# Jenny, Jenny... #

HE SINGS IN SWEDISH

ABBA was actually rebels.

They did what you weren't supposed to do and the rebel thing

was to present yourself in a sort of a glamorous way,

as they did in Waterloo with all this glitter on the costumes.

That was exactly what you couldn't do in Sweden at that time.

ABBA were Swedish punks in the '70s Sweden.

Hello, everybody.

I am Bjorn of the Swedish group ABBA and I'm reminding you

that this is Countdown throughout Australia on ABC TV.

And isn't Countdown a great, great show?

And what about Stockholm, isn't that a great city?

MUSIC: "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do" by ABBA

Waterloo hit number one in the UK

but it was Australia who would be the first to contract ABBA mania.

And ensuing album barely made the British top 30

as ABBA went in search of a signature sound.

# I do, I do, I do, I do, I do... #

ABBA grew dynamically

and even after winning with Waterloo,

we were trying to find our identity.

Were we a rock group or a pop group or something in between?

MUSIC: "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do" by ABBA

It took like a year after Waterloo before critics...

Oh, the critics never took us seriously, but anyway!

..before people took us seriously and understood that, yes,

after SOS I think it was, this is something different.

Well, for a start,

SOS is in D minor, which is,

if you believe Spinal Tap, the saddest of all keys.

So, here you've got...

PLAYS OPENING CHORDS OF "SOS"

And then, oh...

MUSIC: "SOS" by ABBA

This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever made.

# Where are those happy days?

# They seem so hard to find

# I tried to reach for you

# But you have closed your mind... #

Agnetha

has that perfect, you know,

understanding of the content of the song.

You know, so she's expressing it in her voice.

You know, the sadness in her voice.

It's just really, a beautiful thing.

# So when you need me

# Darling, can't you hear me?

# SOS

# The love you gave me

# Nothing else can save me

# SOS... #

If you just drop the needle on any point in the song

and you just, hook - you know.

Drop it there. Hook.

And that's...

SOS, in many ways, I think is probably the first ABBA single

that you can truly say that about.

# When you're gone

# How can I even try to go on? #

That shift...

To there, to there, to there...

Is absolutely genius.

Do you remember that there is a, a distorted guitar going...

MUSIC: "SOS" by ABBA

# You seem so far away Though you are standing near... #

There's like a jet plane, supersonic kind of spaceship taking off.

MUSIC: "SOS" by ABBA

# So when you're near me

# Darling, can't you hear me?

# SOS... #

With the album where SOS was on and Mamma Mia,

we found - we're a pop group.

We found our identity.

MUSIC: "Mamma Mia" by ABBA

Mamma Mia became ABBA's second UK number one in December 1975.

The Swedish invasion had begun

and an image was being perfected.

Another very important era in my costume design,

concerning ABBA, of course were the Mamma Mia outfits for the girls.

# I've been cheated by you Since I don't know when

# So I made up my mind It must come to an end... #

This is truly mother of pearl,

sliced into thin, thin, thin slices.

And it was just like the rooftop of a carousel

and I asked her, "Frida, don't move too much,"

because they would be just stretching out and,

well, expose perhaps a little bit too much.

I can tell you, she was spinning like a spinning wheel,

definitely, all the time!

# Yes, I've been broken-hearted

# Blue since the day we parted... #

We had the polyester up the kazoo at that point.

I mean, polyester's gone barmy.

Polyesters must have been driving the synthesisers at one point.

# Look at me now

# Will I ever learn?

# I don't know how... #

This was probably the first or second video we made,

or clip we made. Very simple.

Not my choreography.

This is the way they did it.

It was all about trying to support the rhythm of the song.

This has a simplicity that you can still live with.

And I like this because it had this percussive feel to it,

the lips. Mamma Mia, ba, ba, ba, ba.

And the focus shifts back and forth,

connecting those lips in a kind of sensual way almost.

# Mamma Mia

# Here I go again

# My, my

# How can I resist you? #

When I go home, look at the costumes and think how people

were laughing at me, I go home singing The Winner Takes It All.

# Money, money, money

# Must be funny

# In a rich man's world

# Money, money, money

# Always sunny

# In a rich man's world... #

With the release of their first number-one album in '76,

ABBA had arrived in Britain.

They were the only continental band to enjoy sustained

chart success throughout the late '70s.

But could popularity in the UK deliver credibility?

At the time, it seemed like the bands or the artists

that you followed was a kind of sign of the person that you were

and where you stood in terms of, politically and culturally,

in terms of your attitude.

# Get up, stand up

# Stand up for your rights

# Get up, stand up... #

If you bought in just to the mainstream pop music of the time,

what it was saying was that you were unwilling to be challenged.

So mainstream pop was seen as being kind of the complacent consensus.

MAN SPEAKS IN SWEDISH

-Tell me what's it's like.

-That was fantastic.

Fantastic, marvellous, brilliant!

In addition you had the violence and you had the conflict and

you had the Cold War and you had the constant threat of a nuclear bomb

going off, you had the National Front, you had racism.

# I can dance with you, honey

# If you think it's funny.

# Does your mother know that you're out... #

So what do you choose to soundtrack that? You know?

"I'll dance with you, honey, if you think it's funny." ABBA?

I don't think so.

-# Take it easy

-Take it easy

# Try to cool it down

# Take it nice and slow

# Does your mother know... #

There was this perception of them at the time,

especially in serious music circles,

who, in many ways, should have known better,

because, you know, we see pop as being frivolous

and somehow easier to do than serious chin-stroking rock music.

And this headline here, you know, sums it up well.

"How to make a million without really trying."

HE LAUGHS

They're the band you could least level that accusation about to

because they were so perfectionist.

You know, the review inside, it's a review of ABBA, the album.

It's not a bad review, actually, but again, these attitudes...

"Never mind the buttocks," which was sort of Agnetha's bete noire.

Butt noire! Sorry.

# Does your mother know that you're out... #

There wasn't a great deal of respect initially, I don't think, for ABBA,

certainly the respect they have now. There was...

You know, everyone thought they were fun, it was bubblegum pop,

something that lost its taste kind of quickly maybe,

and then you'd spit it out.

That's, I think, how they were perceived initially,

for all their success.

And time's had a different story to tell.

THEY HUM TO "DANCING QUEEN"

ABBA were most at home in their studio,

where they could keep the critical world at bay.

The only time that cameras were allowed in

happened to coincide with the recording of a dance floor masterpiece.

THEY SPEAK IN SWEDISH

THEY HUM ALONG

We were kind of inspired by a huge hit in America

called Rock You Baby.

# Woman

# Take me in your arms

# Rock you, baby... #

The cool, soft rhythm of that song,

we sort of felt, oh, we would like to do one of those.

# You're a teaser, you turn them on

# Leave them burning and then you're gone

# Looking out for another

# Anyone will do

# You're in the mood for a dance

# And when you get the chance

# You are the dancing queen

# Young and sweet

# Only 17

# Dancing queen

# Feel the beat from the tambourine

# Oh, yeah... #

Dancing Queen is kind of one of the most radical pop songs ever

that carries the inbuilt kind of tragedy and poignancy of disco

which is the kind of realisation that the peak of your high

is a peak and it is transitory and it's going.

The moment described in Dancing Queen is possibly, might be,

the best moment you're ever going to have in your life.

Dancing Queen is such a wonderful, uplifting song.

'When you see people dancing to that song, they're looking at each other

'and almost recognising that there are lots of different emotions going on.'

# Oh, see that girl

# Watch that scene

# Digging the dancing queen... #

"Feel the beat of the tambourine."

The tambourine? They've obviously kind of

come up with that because it rhymes with "queen".

Who'd dance to a tambourine?

Dancing Queen to me is one of our best songs, but it's ONE of...

you know, all the songs.

People are very, very disappointed when I say this,

cos they have all kinds of memories with - "The first time I heard

Dancing Queen, I kissed my...", you know, whatever.

But, really... It's a strange thing.

I mean, those, the '70s was us

writing, writing, writing, recording, recording, recording,

out doing promotion, the occasional tour and then back to writing.

It was like that.

THEY SPEAK IN SWEDISH

The pop market of the mid-'70s may have been skewed towards the young,

but what made ABBA stand out

was the increasingly mature nature of their material.

ABBA, they already had their teen years behind them.

They had already had that in the '60s when they were sort of

teen stars in Sweden so when they became well-known with ABBA,

they were really two couples, two married couples.

The men had beards and were ten years older than all the English bands

and that, I think, reflected in the music.

# I've seen you twice

# In a short time

# Only a week since we started... #

It's a really, really, really adult band

and that's adult in terms of before that became a kind of

quite self-conscious kind of idea of what adult music could be.

The love that kind of ABBA talk about is love that's been accrued

over years, so when love songs come apart in ABBA,

it's a really huge, huge deal.

# There's a lot you can teach me

# So I want to know

# What's the name of the game?

# Does it mean anything to you? #

They weren't talking about things that it was very popular

to talk about and they kept talking about it throughout their career.

Heartbreak, you know, the loss of your great love.

I call it pop music

or maybe Goth pop!

MUSIC: "Knowing Me, Knowing You" by ABBA

Bjorn had this almost sadistic genius for giving Agnetha

lyrics that somehow seemed to chime with

the sort of anxieties of their home life.

On Knowing Me, Knowing You, it's a portent of what's to come.

# In these old familiar rooms

# Children would play... #

The children that used to play in these old familiar rooms

in Knowing Me, Knowing You - oh, my God, you sort of like...

That's the worst thing.

When you're that age, especially, you see it through a child's eyes,

the worst thing that could happen to you is if your mum and dad split up.

# Breaking up is never easy, I know

-# But I have to go

-This time I have to go... #

Released in February '77, the video to Knowing Me, Knowing You,

would become ABBA's most iconic.

It featured the two couples intimately framed

to enhance the lyrical melodrama.

In those days, I guess there was a lot of observations

on Ingmar Bergman's interest for faces and close-up of faces.

Maybe I was influenced by that.

I doubt it though.

# Knowing me, knowing you

# Aha

# There is nothing we can do

# Knowing me, knowing you... #

This is my cloth. Look at that, there.

I should have ironed it.

Look at this! Fascinating.

I got away with it.

Maybe that has more of a sort of a mountainous quality, I don't know.

This choreography is a Hallstrom original.

It embarrasses me a little today, because no...

MUSIC: "Knowing Me, Knowing You" by ABBA

Today, I blush little bit.

This is the two of them standing in my flowerpot with four wheels.

And then, an electrician turning the flowerpot.

This is so wonderfully silly, isn't it?

# Knowing me, knowing you... #

Look at him!

Jesus!

MUSIC: "Summer Night City" by ABBA

# Summer night city... #

There was a sense in the '70s that Sweden and these people

and the settings of the videos,

they were better than us somehow, you know,

and they represented something quite gorgeous,

that we could only aspire to.

We allowed ourselves to kind of buy into this idea

and that's why something like punk was so important.

It kind of turned it all around and said,

culture isn't about something gorgeous

that comes from overseas and makes us feel good.

It's about something much closer to home,

our own streets and our own hearts and our own desires.

MUSIC: "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello

In the late '70s, it was Britain's turn to develop

an anyone-can-play music movement.

But would ABBA suffer the same fate at the hands of punk

as they had with Swedish prog?

You would have thought that, with things like punk happening,

that there would be this kind of tremendous anti-ABBA mood,

but they are a curious case.

Everybody seemed to sort of very quickly get their

post-modern wits about them and you had people like Ian McCulloch

and Elvis Costello declaring a fondness for ABBA.

# Oliver's army is here to stay

# Oliver's army on their way

# And I would rather be... #

If you listen to Oliver's Army

and the keyboard fills on that song, then that's Dancing Queen.

If you listen to Spanish Bombs,

which is sort of basically an ABBA track, but by the Clash,

and later they admitted to that - they were quite big ABBA fans.

# Spanish bombs

# Yo te quiero infinito

# Yo te quiero, oh, mi corazon... #

Glen Matlock admits that he stole the riff from SOS in Pretty Vacant.

MUSIC: "Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols

MUSIC: "SOS" by ABBA

MUSIC: "Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols

MUSIC: "SOS" by ABBA

MUSIC: "Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols

It was almost like a kind of, you know, like a kind of

deliciously contrarian thing to be pro-ABBA.

So much so that it almost became a consensus.

Even Sid Vicious was a fan of ABBA

and apparently, he saw them in an airport

and came kind of bowling after them

and the two girls in ABBA naturally fled in terror.

They had more top-three singles than Iggy Pop,

Patti Smith, Joy Division put together.

But I would argue that their cultural significance is nothing

compared to any of those groups

because all those groups went deep

and all those groups knocked the world off its axis

and all those groups discovered new things,

new ways of articulating how we feel.

They didn't say anything about bloody life?

The Winner Takes It All?!

How many people have been divorced?

By God, they said more about everything than any other band!

PLAYS THE INTRO TO "THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL" BY ABBA

# I don't want to talk

# About things we've gone through

# Though it's hurting me

# Now it's history... #

I don't want to talk about things we've gone through.

There it is.

In a sentence. That's it.

That's it.

That one line says it all.

That's what pop music's about.

That it hits you, whack.

# The winner takes it all

# The loser's standing small

# Beside the victory

# That's our destiny... #

Them are lines that come from somewhere

where nobody knows they come from.

They ain't easy.

They are lines that go straight to everybody's psyche.

Their soul gets moved by pop lyrics.

# The winner takes it all

# The loser has to fall... #

It seemed to me that it was the beginning of the end.

I'm slightly welling up even remembering that, actually.

I can't listen to that without crying. It's just so upsetting.

It's one of the most painful songs to listen to.

If you're in the wrong kind of mood or something's just happened and

I'm sure many people relate to it for very real and very sad reasons.

Bjorn wrote the lyrics, basically.

He wrote the lyrics to The Winner Takes It All

about his divorce with Agnetha.

But then, Agnetha sings the song so you turn the perspective.

# Tell me, does she kiss

# Like I used to kiss you?

# Does it feel the same

# When she calls your name? #

What does your mum look like when she's had a row with your dad?

She looks like Agnetha in the video to The Winner Takes It All.

# The judges will decide

# The likes of me abide... #

Is there something spiritual about a great pop song?

Oh, yes.

It is when you hear it and, "Oh, my God, this is so good."

This is...

Benny and I had that feeling many times,

coming up with The Winner Takes It All or something like that.

We felt, both of us, my God, this is good.

ABBA are but a small part of a darkness peculiar

to the Swedish soul.

Swedes have not been mucking about,

not in cinema and not in music, not in the arts.

ABBA is very much part of this whole melancholic tradition in Sweden.

You can take Ingmar Bergman or go back to August Strindberg.

You think of Bergman,

you think of so many of the great Swedish writers,

even Nordic noir stuff that is all around us today,

there is a darkness, there is melancholy.

You reflect a lot when you're not comfy

and when you don't have the warmth of the sun

and that gives you time to think and ponder a bit too much.

It's very interesting that ABBA sort of really gouged out

this senses of, of the kind of sadness,

the difficulty of the human condition.

You can't know true joy without knowing true pain.

And I really like Volvos too.

By 1981, both couples were divorced, but ABBA continued,

releasing what will be their final and darkest hour.

This is ABBA who had these wonderful kind of perky, glossy album covers

and suddenly, they're in a dark room with a really doomy painting,

surrounded by dim lights.

Something's up, clearly. You only need to look at the sleeve.

They're in this big, sort of imposing,

dwarfed by all of these paintings and stuff in this big drawing-room

and they're all sat there, looking very small

and looking in different directions.

Frida's had her post divorce kind of "screw you" haircut.

It's funny because I remember thinking,

"Hmm, what has she done to her hair?

"What is Agnetha doing with her hair?

"And what's more, what has Frida done to her hair?" You know!

You put the record on and then, of course,

the first song is The Visitors

and it's a song about a Russian dissident

who is just waiting for the knock on the door

to come and take him away and then God knows what.

# I hear the doorbell ring

# And suddenly the panic takes me

# The sound so ominously

# Tearing through the silence... #

As a Swede, you can really understand

that John le Carre era of the Cold War

because Sweden was in the middle of it.

We were as close to Moscow as London,

so the Cold War was very apparent in Sweden.

During the time ABBA did The Visitors, we had problems in

the Swedish archipelago with Russian submarines suddenly turning up.

People were quite scared, actually. The Cold War was going on.

# Now I hear them moving

# Muffled voices coming through the door

# I feel I'm cracking up... #

The opening track, which has been compared to Joy Division

and I think is a completely fitting comparison. You know, it is...

It's obviously Joy Division from a completely different sensibility,

but you have got these huge European glacial synths.

MUSIC: "The Visitors" by ABBA

The whole album is a very bleak affair.

This is middle-aged angst at its most acute.

# Slipping through my fingers all the time

# I try to capture every minute

# The feeling in it... #

Slipping Through My Fingers, which is a no-holds-barred

meditation about just seeing your child getting ready to go to school,

and, Christ, she's going to school already!

This is, where is the time going? Can it not go slower?

We're dying.

It's a troubling record.

You would listen to it and you'd think, "I wonder if they're OK."

# I must've left my house at eight because I always do... #

With the very last song they recorded,

ABBA succumbed to the darkness at the edge of town.

The Day Before You Came - Oh, my God!

# I must have read the morning paper... #

The complication of that song, it just is staggering.

# I must have gone to lunch

# At half past 12 or so

# The usual place, the usual bunch

# And still, on top of this

# I'm pretty sure it must have rained

# The day before you came... #

It's like a puzzle and all the pieces come together

and then, you have a song which you ideally should say to yourself,

"Can I improve on this? No."

If I do, I would probably ruin it.

Christ!

You sell millions and millions and millions of records

and then you play The Day Before You Came.

You think, I might as well go back to being a bloody janitor!

# The day before you came... #

They're kind of falling apart by this point.

Who do they go to in Britain when they talk about their new record?

Noel Edmonds.

APPLAUSE

'If you look and see the footage now, they look...'

The body language is excruciating.

They are there to promote The Day Before You Came and, you know,

there's a lot of, they are kind of bored of this

and they are bored of Noel's line of questioning.

The papers recently have been full of stories that

-you're going to split eventually. You're not?

-No.

LAUGHTER

You can cut the atmosphere with a knife.

-Benny and Bjorn have written so many good songs.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Yes, but you should know about that by now!

-Well, you never said that!

OK, so it's the first time.

It's a fairly joyless sort of interview.

Could we possibly have a little bit of music from you?

Don't look like that as if it is a surprise! Please don't walk out!

We'd like you to play us out of the programme.

Kevin, do come in. Come over here.

CHEERING

The Day Before You Came failed to break the top 30,

but Noel and lucky superfan Kevin would witness the group's

last ever live studio performance in the UK.

# I'm nothing special

# In fact I'm a bit of a bore... #

ABBA never called it a day.

They've simply been on hold ever since.

# But I have a talent

# A wonderful thing

# Cos everyone listens When I start to sing

# I'm so grateful and proud

# All I want is to sing it out loud

# So I say...

# Thank you for the music

# The songs I'm singing

# Thanks for all the joy... #

We were writing the best songs we could,

the songs that we loved ourselves.

Just a fluke that also

so many people around the globe liked it as well.

Luck! Pure luck.

# So I say thank you for the music

# For giving it to me. #

ABBA may have hit the pause button,

but the music recorded between '72 and '82

has enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife.

# If you change your mind... #

Today, ABBA have the critical respect

that, for so long, eluded them.

Nowadays, finally, you can say that you actually like ABBA

without having an excuse for liking ABBA.

CROWD SINGS "TAKE A CHANCE ON ME" BY ABBA

It was not my music.

It was not my lyrics.

And it was certainly not my way of dressing...

..but I admired their melodies.

They are great, European pop music.

We want ABBA! We want ABBA!

They didn't really care what everyone else thought.

They wanted to make great records and they did.

That was their mission and they succeeded.

I always found it sort of confusing that it wasn't cool to like ABBA.

It was like, "What's not cool about a perfect arrangement

"or perfect harmonies or a pristine vocal?"

If you don't like ABBA, you've got a blank-blank,

two syllable intensifier...problem.

# The city is a nightmare A horrible dream

# Some of us will dream it for ever

# Look around the corner And try not to scream

# It's me

# I am behind you

# I always find you

# I am the tiger

# People who fear me

# Never go near me

# I am the tiger

# Tiger, tiger. #

Thank you!