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Abba were “hurt” by how they were treated in their native Sweden by both the public and the media, a leading music expert and biographer of the pop group has said.
The “Waterloo” stars were famously divisive following their Eurovision triumph in 1974, most of all in their home country, where critics derided what they viewed as vapid and commercially driven songs.
Swedish journalist Jan Gradvall is the author of The Book of Abba: Melancholy Undercover, an authorised biography that features exclusive band interviews and a decade’s worth of research into the band.
Speaking to The Independent, he suggested that the way Sweden treated Abba might have contributed to the fact that they rarely gave interviews or appear together in public.
“Abba’s [status] in Sweden is odd, because when their breakthrough happened in the Seventies, they were so disliked and distrusted by the mainstream media, which was very left-wing at the time,” he explained.
“Abba for a long time weren’t considered a serious band. They slipped in between, and it wasn’t until quite recently that people started taking them seriously, not just as a huge pop band, but for the music itself.
“In the Seventies, no one wanted to ask them about music, they only wanted to hear about the money, the politics, their private lives.”
Before forming Abba, the group’s four members were successful in their own right, with both Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Anderson in popular folk groups.
In the documentary Abba: Against the Odds, Ulvaeus acknowledged that they were “not popular” in Sweden, where they came under scrutiny from a “different mass-media climate [at] that time”.
“People [in Sweden] thought that more progressive music should be played on radio and TV,” Gradvall said. “And that their lyrics should be more socialist, and about making society better.
“Abba never took the fight to the media, they just carried on making better and better music. But their manager [the late Stig Anderson] did – he appeared in debates on TV and radio, hitting back against the labelling of them as a capitalist band.”
That the band appeared to be apolitical also riled some of their peers: “We were the upset generation,” Michael Wiehe, singer with Swedish group the Hoola Bandoola Band, explained in the BBC documentary.
“We were upset about the apartheid system, 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.”
There was further uproar due to Sweden taking on the role of Eurovision host in 1975, prompting the left-wing movement Progg to organise a 200,000 strong march on the streets of Stockholm in protest against the commercialisation of music.
“Were they hurt? Yes, I think definitely,” Gradvall said. “While they didn’t confess it, I think that created a [longterm] distrust of the media.”
Ulvaeus has previously denied being affected by the backlash towards the band, tellingThe Guardian in 2014: “Personally I didn’t pay attention to all that, it didn’t mean s*** to me, even if they hated us, because we got so much response from the whole world.
“Right from the start, we had contemporary colleagues, musicians, who liked what we were doing.”
Gradvall also suggested there was an element of misogyny surrounding the band, where singers Anni-Frid Lyngstad (Frida) and Agnetha Fältskog were not properly credited for their contributions.
“I’ve been watching TV shows, especially Swedish ones, with male interviews in the Eighties when they had solo careers, and they only get questions about their private lives, never about the music,” he said.
“They really were a group with four equal members. When I asked them, what is the secret sauce, the unique thing with Abba’s sound, they will all say individually, it’s the combination of Agnetha and Frida’s voices.
“Agnetha has a soprano voice, Frida a mezzo voice, and when they sing in unison, you get the sound that no one else has. And they were very much involved in creating that. They didn’t like to tour, but they loved being in the studio, so they’d spend hours and weeks creating those perfect harmonies. They really were a proper band.”
The Book of Abba: Melancholy Undercover is being released by Faber on 10 October in hardback and ebook formats.
