When Abba Came to Britain
Available now on BBC iPlayer
‘ABBA BELONGED TO BRITAIN’
FANTASTIC FOUR
Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus
When Abba won Eurovision in 1974, the UK jury gave them nul points – an unpromising start to our enduring affair with the Swedish foursome. But why do we still love them 50 years on?
CAMERAPRESS
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hen Abba came to Britain 50 years ago this month, it’s fair to say that, initially, Britain wasn’t overly impressed. Performing Waterloo at the Brighton Dome at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest as if their career depended on it, the Swedish band gave it their all for the audience, jurors and BBC cameras. The foursome were dressed in high 70s fashion: stack-heeled boots, frills, all things glam (and that was just the boys). Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad, in perfect, lightly choreographed harmony, were singing arguably the catchiest number from their second album of the same name. And the orchestra was
conducted by a man (band associate Sven-Olof Walldoff) dressed as Napoleon. The previous year Abba had been beaten in the heats to represent Sweden, despite roping in Neil Sedaka to help with English lyrics for their song Ring Ring. So they were determined to make a splash in Brighton. According to lyricist Bjorn Ulvaeus, if Abba were “accepted in Britain”, that meant they were a real pop group. The reaction inside the Dome on 6 April 1974 was encouraging. But in the UK jurors’ room, the response was muted – a situation probably not helped by the panel being “secluded” 50 miles away in Broadcasting House in London, watching on a screen with no audio of commentator David Vine or presenter Katie Boyle.
night was John Henty, a DJ on BBC Radio Brighton. “We were all rooting for Olivia Newton-John and Long Live Love, the British entry,” he tells me, speaking on his 88th birthday. “But we were all transfixed by Abba. They were getting around the town before the show, and we all thought the girls in particular were absolutely gorgeous.” Within a year, their Eurovision-bounce had propelled the Swedes all the way to another British beach town, Torbay, with Tony Blackburn introducing Abba’s performance of SOS on BBC1’s summer variety show Seaside Special. In January 1976, with Mamma Mia, they knocked Queen’s all-conquering Bohemian Rhapsody off the UK Number One slot. A year after that, on 10 February 1977, Abba played their first concert in the UK, with all 2,397 seats at Birmingham Odeon sold out in an instant. “Eurovision was really important,” says Mike Watson. The 77-year-old, Sheffield-born musician, resident in Sweden since 1964, was one of Abba’s two studio bass players across their decade-long recording career, playing on hits including Gimme Gimme Gimme, The Winner Takes It All, Super Trouper and Does Your Mother Know. “If you win Eurovision, success is not only in Sweden, it’s everywhere.”
‘We thought, “let’s write in English and see what happens”’ BENNY ANDERSSON
Basil Herwald, one of the ten-strong British judging contingent that year, was a 20-year-old Cambridge law student and Eurovision fan who’d answered a newspaper ad looking for jurors (five under 21, five over 21). “There were two things,” he says now. “Some of us thought they looked a bit stupid. Also, they were due to sing the song in Swedish, which is what they’d done at rehearsal. I don’t think that affected us, but during the voting process, I don’t remember Sweden coming up in our discussions.” The result for Abba: nul points from Royaume-Uni. And when they won? “We were nonplussed!” laughs Herwald, now a 70-year-old retired lawyer living in Cumbria. “Not one of us had thought about them. With hindsight, of course,
they deserved it. But at the time I’m afraid we weren’t concentrating on Abba. Most of us were surprised that Italy didn’t win.”
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ut they didn’t, Abba did, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria. Brighton 74 was the launch-point for the greatest pop career since the Beatles. It also kickstarted a global phenomenon that, half a century on – courtesy of the hit jukebox musical Mamma Mia!, two multi-million dollar blockbuster films and the Abba Voyage “Abbatar” attraction in London – is arguably bigger than it ever was. This is the story told in When Abba Came to Britain, a BBC documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the band’s game-changing win
and the UK’s deep-seated love-affair with Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid. As Benny’s son Ludvig – one of the architects of Abba Voyage – puts it at the top of the film: “In a strange way, Abba belonged to Britain more than their home country, Sweden.” “We were lucky not winning in 1973,” Andersson told me in 2018, “because the next year we had Waterloo, and the competition was held in England. That was a big difference to winning something in Azerbaijan or Luxembourg. When you’re in England, it makes ripples.” Certainly before Brighton, they were unknown here – as Vine says in the archive footage from Eurovision, introducing them to viewers, “these are the Abba group”. Sitting in the stalls that
For the four members of the band, that success was hard-earned. All had individually been making music professionally since the 1960s. By the early 70s they were a foursome comprising two couples (Agnetha and Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid), playing cabaret under the name Festfolk, “which is a pun that can mean either ‘party people’ or ‘engaged people’. Very witty!” Andersson told me in 2018. They all hated performing “silly cabaret stuff… but this was in 1971 and we had to put food on the table. [But] we thought: ‘We can’t go on like this. Let’s try to write some pop music in English and see what happens.’ ” The result was People Need Love, which became a 1972 hit in Scandinavia, Germany and Holland. “And we thought, ‘Yeah, we’re on the way to something.’ ” Despite how history may remember it, it’s not the case that Eurovision instantly lit the touchpaper for Abbamania in the UK. Waterloo was hardly all over the airwaves. As Henty recalls, BBC Radio Brighton “had a manager who decided well ahead of Eurovision that Waterloo was ‘too heavy’, so we were unable to put it onto our limited playlist!” Not unexpectedly, that ban was rescinded after the victory. Benny Andersson related what happened next. “After winning Eurovision we thought, ▷