Thank you for the music
If we don't get this, we starve
Two weeks ago, on an island in Stockholm, I met four of my heroes. When I say I “met” them, I don’t mean in the conventional sense. I didn’t shake their hands, smile and tell them what they meant to me. I’d like to have done that, but I didn’t.
I have, by the way, met many famous people over the years. Sometimes people ask me what it was like. What I want to say is that it was usually a relief to say goodbye. And that you’re generally just hoping that that they turn up, that you can build some kind of rapport in whatever time you have allocated, that they don’t sneer at your questions, that they answer at least some of them in a way that enables you to write something vaguely interesting, that the recording doesn’t fail and that the editor likes what you have been able to cobble together in time for the deadline, which is usually pretty imminent. It’s a privilege to do this, of course, but I can’t say it’s a great way to relax.
When I walked into the building where I met my heroes, I felt my shoulders drop. My mouth split into what I can only call a grin. My body started making movements that were somewhere between a wiggle and a bounce. And when I saw my heroes, tears sprang into my eyes. There they were, the four Swedes who burst into my heart when I was ten. Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid. ABBA. If not the greatest pop group of all time, then certainly mine.
OK, I should probably say now I didn’t meet them “in real life”. A friend of mine has met Benny in Stockholm. I would love to, but I didn’t. I met, or rather saw, Benny, Björn, Anni-Frid and Agnetha dancing on a stage. Well, not actually them, but holograms of them. There was a space for someone to join them on the stage. It could have been me. It could have been you. Knowing me, knowing you, it was the best I could do just to watch. But yes, as I watched the figures bouncing on the stage, I was flooded with a cocktail of emotions.
It took me right back to an evening in April 1974. We were all sitting around the TV, eating peanuts and drinking lemonade. There were ten of us in our sitting room. My cousin Carl Johan was just a toddler and probably didn’t understand what was going on. The rest of us did and we were grinning and cheering because we were watching the Eurovision Song Contest and Sweden had just won.
I wanted to look like Agnetha. I wanted to wear her sparkly bomber jacket and blue satin knickerbockers. I wanted her perfect, white teeth. I wanted to sing, as she did, about the train station my father went to twice a day. I loved Agnetha, and Anni-Frid, and Benny and Björn. I loved their music. I loved their clothes. And I loved the fact that Sweden was finally on the map.
None of us could quite believe that our Swedish aunt, uncle and cousins were staying with us on the day Sweden became famous. For years, I’d had to explain to people that no, my mother was not from Switzerland, but from a country in Scandinavia called Sweden. And that that was the reason we always had our summer holidays on the West coast of Sweden, where my mother had grown up.
The Eurovision win was two years before Björn Borg won Wimbledon and thirteen years before IKEA hit the UK. It was the first time I felt that the half of my heritage that had always felt like a slight embarrassment could now be a source of pride.
I bought the albums as they came out. I Blu-Tacked ABBA posters to my bedroom walls. On the ferry to Sweden, I watched ABBA: the movie. I even bought ABBA: the soap. I was, if not a super trouper, a superfan. Or at least I was until I found God, at fourteen, but that’s a whole other story.
What struck me wandering round this museum (because yes, this was, of course, the ABBA museum) was that these men and women in satin and sequins were not just four young people who got lucky. They were incredibly talented musicians who had already each achieved acclaim.
Agnetha Fältskög wrote her first song at the age of six. She had three hit singles, including a number one, before she met any of the members of ABBA. Her first solo album was in the Swedish album chart longer than any of ABBA’s.
Björn Ulvaeus, the man she married and later divorced, was a member of one of Sweden’s top pop bands, the Hootenanny Singers. They held the record for the longest run in the Swedish charts (52 weeks) for a single until 1990, long after ABBA had split up.
Anni-Frid Lyngstad sang professionally from the age of thirteen. On the day Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right, she won a talent competition called New Faces and was signed by EMI. She had two number one hits before she joined ABBA.
Benny Andersson, her boyfriend from 1969 and later her husband, was a professional musician from the age of fifteen. He was a member of the Hep Stars, one of Sweden’s most successful pop groups, with a string of chart-topping hits.
We all love the idea of overnight success, but what happened when Björn and Benny decided to work with their partners, Agnetha and Anni-Frid, and then enter a competition, was not overnight success. It was global recognition for the talent and grind.
It was a thrill, on that cold day in Stockholm two weeks ago, to see the outfits they wore that night in 1974, on dummies in glass display units like the ancient Sami costumes in the Nordic Museum down the road. It was a thrill to see a reconstruction of their recording studio. In video footage, their sound engineer Michael Tretow talked about the process. It was not, he said, his responsibility to make sure they were all in sync. It was, he said, everyone’s.
I love that. So calm. So clear. So Swedish. It’s everyone’s responsibility. To listen. To contribute. To know when you should speak, or sing, or play, and when you should be silent. To know how to add just enough to the mix to make the magic.
And, boy, was it, is it, magic. I was tapping and fizzing and jiggling to the music for the whole visit, and for the rest of the day. I’ve been tapping and fizzing and jiggling to the music in my head ever since.
ABBA makes me happy. Not in quite the same way as Bach, who, according to Spotify, was my top artist of the year. He’s the top artist of my life, actually. What J S doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing. He can capture the highs, the lows and the in-betweens. He can capture the sublime.
What he can’t capture, or at least not in quite the same way as Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid, is the ridiculous. What he can’t capture is the fun. ABBA, with their sequins, silver platform boots and rhyming couplets that bounce around your brain, know that art matters and that music matters and that both should capture the sadness and joy. They also know that life is sometimes like the rollercoaster at Sweden’s oldest amusement park, Gröna Lund, round the corner from the ABBA museum. There are rides there that make you giggle even as you scream.
The Taliban have banned music and dance because they know we need it as much as the air we breathe. Without music, without art, we suffocate and starve.
I want to end this turbulent year by thanking ABBA for the music, and thanking all the musicians, artists and writers who have done what art is meant to do. Art reminds us that we are not alone. It reminds us that life is precious. It reminds us, as we try to muddle through, that we can all try to make something beautiful.
And I want to thank you, dear readers, for your attention, comments and time, which is the most precious thing any of us has. I also want to thank my paid subscribers for the money, money, money, which makes me happy, happy, happy. Perhaps money can’t buy you love, but it’s a bloody good start.
I can’t say, as Agnetha sang, that “everyone listens when I start to sing”, but this “girl with golden hair” is just happy and grateful to have a space to “sing” at all.