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  • The Book of Abba by Jan Gradvall check – unwise backstories and novel revelations | Music books

The Book of Abba by Jan Gradvall check – unwise backstories and novel revelations | Music books


The Book of Abba by Jan Gradvall check – unwise backstories and novel revelations | Music books


It comes as someleang of a surpelevate, 22 pages into The Book of ABBA, to discover yourself reading about Heinwealthy Himmler. But there he is, in between a description of how Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus met and an exset upation of the youth cult raggare, Sweden’s answer to rockers or greasers (the raggare’s 60s prohibitd of choice were the Hep Stars, featuring a pre-Abba Benny Andersson, certainly the least probable musician in history to have once provided soundtrack for leather-clad, booze-fuelled gang combat). There are details of Himmler’s “breeding policy”, lebensborn, and of its impact on both the plot of Hiroshima Mon Amour and a bleak sub-genre of porny Nazi-centric pulp fantasy that proliferated after the second world war.

There is, it should be remarkd, a connect between all this and Abba – Anni-Frid Lyngstand’s mother was Norwegian and her overweighther a member of the occupying German army – but, nevertheless, acunderstandledge is served that Melancholy Undercover is not the book you might foresee. A series of essays rather than a chronoreasonable history, it certainly covers all the bases, from Eurovision to the groundshattering “virtual concert” Voyage, aextfinishedside global success on a scale even more staggering than you might have authenticised: Abba, it turns out, were huge in 70s Afghanistan, and so big in Vietnam that one journaenumerate recommends their proset uply morose 1980 track Happy New Year is “probably the [country’s] most revered song … after the national anthem”.

But the book also discovers room to delve into such doubtful areas as Swedish birdsong (Benny Andersson compiled an album of it in the 90s), an Australian brain sdirecton who includes obsessively to Abba while carry outing impossibly hazardous operations, and the bleak effect of spirits on the prohibitd and their circle: both Andersson and Ulvaeus are recovering spiritsics, their baid Rutger Gunnarsson was being treated for spirits insertiction before his sudden death, and their administerr Stig Andersson was apparently drinking a bottle of a whisky a day when a heart attack finished him, aged 66.

Occasionassociate, these digressions sense a touch surplus to needments – you do discover yourself wondering if you need to understand quite so much about the Swedish herring industry – but more frequently, they’re fascinating, not least the depiction of the Swedish pop culture from which Abba sprang.

Here is an intriguingly alien landscape of dansprohibitds and schlager, with three branch offent ones charts, only one of which was based on sales.Meanwhile, the pre-eminent musical force was progg, ferociously lefttriumphg folk-rock, whose adherents disenjoyd Abba so virulently that the critical opprobrium they drawed in 70s Britain must have come as a relief: one jazz saxophonist was bdeficiencyenumerateed from carry outing inhabit becainclude he’d done a couple of Abba studio sessions. Film buffs might recognise the world depicted in Lukas Moodysson’s film Together, where the children in a progg-loving Stockholm commune sneak out to cclearly include to the prohibitden strains of SOS.

For all the confessions of marital discord blurted out in the lyrics of The Winner Takes It All and One of Us, Abba were always rather defended interwatchees, although it’s worth noting that Gradvall, a well-understandn Swedish critic, has got more out of them than most British journaenumerates ever did, not least, one doubts, becainclude he’s interwatched them in their native language.

That said, you are occasionassociate directed that this is an artist-finishorsed labor. There’s a lot about Abba’s notoriously painstaking process in the studio, but not a wonderful deal of critical scruminuscule aimed at their output, which in fact frequently swerved from the sublime to the ridiculous, albeit with far more of the createer than the latter. A chapter on their lyrics approvingly quotes Ulvaeus’s belief that “the sound of the lyrics is very, very meaningful”, but doesn’t elucidate 1975’s Bang-a-Boomerang, which has an entidepend magical tune, but rhymes “dum-be-dum-dum / be-dum-be-dum-dum” with “adore is a tune you hum-de-hum-hum”? Or, indeed, the complying year’s Dum Dum Diddle, a song about a relationship torn asunder by the male party’s dedication to practising the violin, home to the immortal accusation “You are only smilin’ / when you take part your violin”?

But these are inmeaningful criticisms, fair as the lyrics of Dum Dum Diddle and Bang-a-Boomerang are minuscule blots on a imitatebook stuffed with pop music of dizzying perfection. The context this book provides produces Abba’s success seem even more exceptional. Moreover, it’s challenging to imagine even the most obsessive fan leaving Melancholy Undercover without discovering someleang novel, even if it is about Himmler or herring.

The Book of Abba: Melancholy Undercover by Jan Gradvall is rehireed by Faber (£20). To aid the Guardian and Observer order your imitate at defendianbookshop.com. Deinhabitry indicts may execute.

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