ABBA at 50

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In 2021, after a forty-year hiatus, the band released a new album Voyage, and announced an accompanying concert featuring their digital avatars, dubbed “ABBAtars. It was good, because I could just concentrate on finding the right tone for it – a different tone from what I’m usually writing, being a bit more free.

As far as I know … and for me – and I guess it’s the same for you, at least to an extent – I’ve been working from home for 30 years, so things just continued as they always had, largely. And not only is it now 50 years of ABBA, but soon you’ll be able to mark half a century of your own journey – your Voyage, I guess – with the band, in effect from that day as an eight-year-old you picked up your first ABBA single, ‘Ring Ring’. The book charts the band's meteoric rise to stardom, plus the high and low points both professionally and in their personal lives. In addition to revisiting the ABBA songs I also looked up and listened to many songs by artists I was barely or even unfamiliar with (mostly from their very early days before even becoming ABBA), and that was a lot of fun.With regard to listening to the back-catalogue, it’s great to wallow in nostalgia now and again, but I’m guessing that’s just a part of your life. Well, the problem when people ask me about this is that because of the nature of the work I do, people expect me to be super-excited about it.

One of the most commercially successful acts in the history of pop music, they topped charts worldwide from that breakthrough year until – initially – 1982, their nine UK No. This book charts the journey of ABBA from their separate beginnings in pop, forming the group, Eurovision 1974 (how embarrassing that the UK judges gave them zero points 😳), their rise to worldwide fame, personal relationships, the break up and right through to Mamma Mia the musical and ABBA voyage (which I’ve seem and is absolutely amazing! That’s always a thrill, you know, when you have a new book out, and it’s, ‘Oh, wow, it actually exists!

It was a bit of a challenge, because I’m used to writing these really detailed books, but I only had 45,000 words, because that’s what they asked for … although I extended it to 50,000. I interviewed people who used to work for CBS in the 1970s and who were involved with the ABBA catalogue, or putting together commercials, or running up to radio stations or whatever they had to do.

Deep inside, I never thought they were going to do that, because the motivation didn’t seem to be there. ABBA AT 50" by Palazzo Editions, follows ABBA's surprise new music announcement after a 40 year pause alongside the universally-praised digital show, ABBA Voyage. But he soon put me right, telling me that while it was first released in ’73 – the title track of their debut LP – it didn’t chart until just after their Eurovision success, subtly telling me, ‘That’s both right and wrong – ha! I caught up with Carl Magnus, who has also co-produced a number of television programmes about the band, contributed to his beloved home city’s ABBA The Museum, and worked as a consultant to Polar Music in their ABBA reissues project, earlier this week, and he suggested life was pretty good on the other side of the North Sea.

But I don’t think I’ve properly encountered a telephone attached that way since the days my Mum would take herself off to the hall, perching at the bottom of the stairs while chatting to friends and family. Yeah, I have, I mean it’s mostly just a matter of typing it out and finding the right tone for that book. ABBA at 50 by Carl Magnus Palm is a delightful history of the individuals as well as the group, complete with beautiful photographs. Based in Lancashire since 1994, after a free transfer from Surrey following five years of 500-mile round-trips on the back of a Turkish holiday romance in 1989. I didn’t know they were already famous in the role vans respectively before creating the group ABBA.

It’s a band that needs no introduction, but I’ll offer one anyway, ABBA emerging victorious from the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’, quickly catapulted to fame, capturing hearts across the world over the next few years with their melodic, ever-so-catchy pop songs. And this companion volume has expanded to be very much a book in itself, and it’s taking much, much longer than I had hoped for. Then ‘Waterloo’ was a big hit and a remix of ‘Ring Ring’ was released in the UK, and that was the one that went to No. Beautifully illustrated with essential images, this book examines the group's enduring legacy and much-loved musical repertoire of perfectly crafted pop.A decade on, the ABBA Gold greatest hits compilation became a global bestseller, then in 1999 their music was adapted into successful musical Mamma Mia!