Trivia / ABBA

• Breakthrough Hit: All four members had been part of the Swedish music scene since the 1960s. Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson were members of The Hootenanny Singers and The Hep Stars respectively, while Anni-Frid Lyngstad (AKA Frida) and Agnetha Fältskog were solo singers. They first worked together in 1970 and, by the end of 1972, were a fully-fledged group. However, because Sweden was then considered to be something of a musical backwater, the only way they could hope to achieve international recognition was via the Eurovision Song Contest. Their first attempt (1973's "Ring Ring") failed to make it past Sweden's selection contest, but they returned the following year with "Waterloo" and, this time, they not only reached the Eurovision Song Contest in England but went on to win it. They subsequently became one of the most successful groups of the '70s.
• Breakup Breakout: Frida achieved more success in Europe with her post-ABBA album Something's Going On than Agnetha did during her solo career in the Eighties. However, Agnetha aimed for another solo comeback with her first album since 2004, A.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: ABBA: The Album. ABBA: The Movie. ABBA: The T-Shirt. ABBA: The Socks. ABBA: The Soap. You get the idea.^note ABBA: The Flamethrower! The kids love it!.
• Content Leak: In 1983, many unreleased Visitors-era songs were hijacked by a fan who stole them from Bjorn's car near Polar Studios. The songs (which included 3 mixes of "Just Like That", "I Am The City", "Nationalsång”, “When The Waves Roll Out To Sea” and "Every Man Needs A Helping Hand" (widely nicknamed "Every Good Man"), alongside early mixes of several released tracks) had later been incorporated into later projects by Bjorn and Benny, one track was released on More ABBA Gold and said tracks had appeared on a large number of bootlegs.
• Channel Hop: A fairly high profile example at that. Their longtime label Polar Music was a small Swedish company at the time, and was not able to operate worldwide. ABBA’s manager Stig Anderson decided to work around this by finding the best deals with record companies around the world and renewing them every three years - an unheard-of approach in the music industry even now. ABBA’s most notable label homes worldwide included Atlantic in the US and Canada, Epic in the UK and Israel, RCA Victor in Oceania and Latin America, Vogue in France, Sunshine in South Africa, Discomate in Japan, and Polydor in the rest of Europe and Asia. Most of these arrangements ended in 1989, when PolyGram (Polydor’s parent company) acquired Polar, and ABBA’s catalog with it. The remaining arrangements expired in 1992. Gold: Greatest Hits was released later that year, to not only celebrate ABBA’s 20th anniversary, but also as the first worldwide release from Polar. Polar would become part of the Universal Music Group in 1999. Almost three decades later, ABBA jumped ship within the UMG umbrella to Capitol (outside of Sweden) for Voyage.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • ABBA Gold: The Complete Story, which was at one point the "authorised" ABBA biography, is full of factual errors to the point that some of them have become Common Knowledge, most notably it describing "SOS" as ABBA's first big post-"Waterloo" hit.^note This is true in the UK and other countries where they didn't have a hit following "Waterloo", but not in countries were there were hits after that song.
  • The chiming sound on "Suzy Hang Around" has been incorrectly described by multiple journalists as being a harpsichord or clavinet, however, it is actually a 12-string guitar — also used on the earlier "Santa Rosa". Both songs emulate the sound of The Byrds, who used that instrument extensively.
  • It's common for ABBA biographies to not mention the name of the Swedish music festival that selects Sweden's song at the Eurovision Song Contest (Melodifestivalen), leading into some confusion.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Björn and Benny aren't too fond of "Santa Rosa", "I Saw It In the Mirror", "Åh Vilka Tider", "Dum Dum Diddle", "Summer Night City" or "You Owe Me One". They also don't like parts of "Just A Notion" and "Just Like That" hence editing them for the ABBA Undeleted Medley. Also, they disliked the chorus of the song "Terra Del Fuego" so much that they edited it out and renamed it "Here Comes Rubie Jamie" for its part of the Undeleted Medley. "Just a Notion", however, eventually earned a reprieve from the duo when the completed version appeared on 2021's Voyage and was even the album's third single.
  • Björn and Benny have been critical of some of the band's poppier moments. Regarding "You Owe Me One", they did not include it on the 2001 reissue of The Visitors even though it was on the 1997 one. However, it was included on the Deluxe Edition.
  • Benny said that he found the hard rock experiment "Watch Out" somewhat embarrassing in hindsight, and that it could easily be removed from his and Björn's track record without anyone noticing. The song is quite well regarded among fans though.
  • They also were pretty upset with how badly "So Long" did in the charts considering they rated it as being a good song and a guaranteed hit due to its intentional similarity to "Waterloo". They realised that writing to a successful formula was not always the way to have a hit, although they later realized that they did find one when they started writing lyrics about failing relationships.
  • In interviews, Benny has said in regards of "Summer Night City" that "we shouldn't have released that one", and Björn called the recording "really lousy". Agnetha has been quoted as saying she didn't like the song to start with, as she felt "it wasn't ABBA", but later on grew to like it.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • The Visitors and "The Day Before You Came", which were their last recorded album and song respectively for 40 years. Agnetha was clearly on the verge of tears for the latter song.
  • Of the six songs the band recorded for their ninth album, only "I Am the City" could be said to be joyful and upbeat. "You Owe Me One", "Just Like That" (which is still unreleased), and "Under Attack" all sound cheerful...so long as one doesn't listen to the lyrics, which concern a strained relationship from the perspective of a scorned partner, a woman abandoned by her secretive and deceptive lover, and a woman threatened by a stalker. The final two, "Cassandra" and "The Day Before You Came", are very dark indeed both in music and lyrics.
• Development Hell: "Don't Shut Me Down" and "I Still Have Faith in You" and the planned "ABBAtar" tour, which would have used virtual holograms of the band members from their heyday. Initially announced in 2018, with a planned release date for the end of the year, the project was delayed multiple times, presumably due to the development of the ABBAtars, the fact that they've written five new songs and the COVID-19 Pandemic. On September 2021, two new songs were finally released in a livestream on YouTube, alongside the announcement of the ABBAtar stage show in London, and an album with ten songs to be released on November 2021.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Frida's hair stylist must've gotten rich from performing all those re-dos and dye jobs.
• He Also Did: You know Lasse Hallström, the guy who directed Chocolat? He also directed most of ABBA's music videos and ABBA: The Movie.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • Mamma Mia! debuted in London's West End on April 6, 1999, twenty-five years to the day after ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest.
  • Their albums are often remastered and released with bonus tracks on their respective anniversaries, and new compilations come out by the bucketload when a milestone occurs.
  • Live at Wembley was released on the 40th anniversary of them winning Eurovision. (Well not quite, as they won it in April and the album was released in September, but within the year at least.)
• Missing Episode:
  • "Just Like That", "Get On the Carousel" and "I Am An A" were never officially released. The first one has bootlegs but is incomplete, the second one can only be heard in ABBA: The Movie and the third one in (bad-quality) fan recordings.
  • The 1977 Australian tour is kind of a one too; all the released footage is in ABBA: The Movie, but many performances are severely compressed, or outright cut. Sad, considering it was the most important tour of ABBA's career.
  • For a long time, "I'm Still Alive," one of only two songs Agnetha wrote while in the band^note  The other is "Disillusion," from the Ring Ring album. was this. It was only performed on the 1979 Europe/America tour, and for thirty-five years the only known recordings were fan bootlegs of varying quality made on video and cassette tapes. This all changed in 2014 when it was officially released, in HQ audio, on their live album ABBA Live at Wembley.
• No Export for You:
  • Ring Ring wasn't released in the UK until the CD issues in the 90s.
  • Ring Ring was never officially released in Brazil (except for the title song, released as a single), and Waterloo remained unreleased until 2014, when the 40th anniversary deluxe version finally reached the Brazilian stores. Their 1975 ABBA album was remade to accomodate the tracklist from Greatest Hits from that same year (see Remade for the Export below), and its original tracklist was not available in the country until the 2000s.
• The Pete Best: They had an interesting variation of this. Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid were all the original members of the band, but just shortly after properly establishing as a band (and still going by their "Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid" name), Agnetha became pregnant with her first child, and she was replaced for a short period of time by a friend of Anni-Frid, a gospel singer named Inger Brundin, on a trip to West Germany before Agnetha came back. Can also count as a Fake Shemp.
• Recycled Soundtrack:
  • Björn and Benny's 1969 soundtrack piece "Inga Theme" had its organ melody recycled as the verse melody of "I Am The City" in 1982 (released 1993).
  • Concurrently, the group released "Why Did It Have To Be Me" and an alternate arrangement of the same tune with different lyrics, "Happy Hawaii". Unusually, the former was the original arrangement which the group decided to keep after experimenting with rearranging it as the latter. "Why Did..." is a duet between Bjorn and Agnetha whereas "Happy Hawaii" is sung by Agnetha alone.
  • The Girl With The Golden Hair mini-musical had a fourth track on the tour they wrote it for: "Get On The Carousel". This failed to come across well in the studio, so they simply added part of the song as a middle eight to the new track "Hole On Your Soul", with "Get On The Carousel" getting a sort of release in an edited live version via ABBA: The Movie.
  • The 1977 song "I Am an A", which was a joke song during the European and Australian tours, had its chorus re-used in the Chess song "I Knew Him So Well". Another scrapped song, "Free as a Bumblebee", had parts of its chorus used in the same song as well.
  • The 1979 outtake "Dream World" had a section reused as the middle eight in "Does Your Mother Know" the same year.
  • The 1979 outtake "Under My Sun"/"Rubber Ball Man" is the same song with totally different lyrics, and in addition, had a small section reused in 1982's "Under Attack".
  • "Nationalsång" was an instrumental track recorded in 1981 and was later used in Chess for "Anthem".
• Remade for the Export:
  • The Australian version of ABBA Gold had "Ring Ring", "I Do I Do I Do I Do" and "Rock Me" replacing "I Have A Dream", "Super Trouper" and "Thank You For The Music". The first two were subsequently included on "More ABBA Gold", although "Rock Me" was not. Eventually, a special edition coupling "ABBA Gold" and "More ABBA Gold" with a bonus disc called "Golden B-Sides" was released in 2014, which at last included "Rock Me" - as representative of the b-side to "I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do".
  • The Brazilian version of the original Greatest Hits album is an interesting case. By early 1976, none of ABBA's studio albums had been released in Brazil yet (see No Export for You above), and the group was still relatively obscure in the country, save for a few of their songs that were previously released as singles and EPs. When "Fernando" became a massive success there, RCA noticed there would be a high demand for ABBA's LPs, but considered it would not make sense starting off with a "greatest hits" compilation, since the group was still relatively new to the Brazilian public. So, instead, RCA released their 1975 album ABBA with the same tracklist as Greatest Hits, with the back artwork adapted accordingly. In 1979, with the international release of Greatest Hits Vol. 2, RCA once again needed to readapt the local version of the album, this time releasing it as Greatest Hits, since there was technically no "Vol. 1" in the country yet.
• What Could Have Been:
  • ABBA didn't intend to split permanently in 1983 (hence why their compilation album was called The Singles: The First Ten Years) Rather, the intention was to go on hiatus for a year or two, during which time Björn and Benny would write the musical Chess whilst Agnetha and Frida would focus on solo careers. Additionally, despite the two divorces, relations between all four members were still amicable. However, the time apart simply helped them realize that they didn't want to get back together. When you look at how the band evolved over their decade-long lifespan, it would have been very interesting to see what other songs they might have recorded had they lasted a few more years...
  • According to Barry Gibb, "If I Can't Have You" was originally written for ABBA. It hasn't been revealed if the song was ever actually submitted to the group, and if so, why they didn't record it (likely because they didn't like to record material they hadn't written themselves); however, the Bee Gees' arrangement of the song (more so than Yvonne Elliman's hit version) is clearly done in their style, making it easy to imagine an actual ABBA version.
  • Björn and Benny were Tim Rice's first choice to compose the song's for The Lion King, but they were busy with Kristina from Duvemåla, so Rice went with his second choice, Elton John.