Issue number: 539
Christmas 2022
Abba, Exclusive Benny Andersson interview Plus Their 40 Best Songs!
"WE LEARNED FROM
THE BEATLES"
And now to meet the man behind those 40 (plus one) amazing songs... Along with Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA's chief melodist, Benny Andersson, comprises what is finally - after years of being dismissed as pop lightweights – regarded as one of the great songwriting partnerships, up there with Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, Holland-Dozier-Holland and Wilson-Love. And with the Voyage album, their first for 39 years, and the ABBA Voyage concert spectacular featuring virtual avatars going on 'til well into 2023, ABBA are poised at last to be hailed as true immortals. But what was it like to make their first ABBA music since 1982? How have they managed to pick up after so lon-----g? "It was like it had been three weeks, not 40 years," Andersson tells Pete Paphides in this rare interview.
|Through the lens of a MacBook camera, the high eaves and variously shaped windows of Benny Andersson's RMV Studio studio in Stockholm, Sweden reveal what may have once been a church. The light that streams through the windows this afternoon reveals a grand piano and at least one studio console. Just out of shot (for now) is the trusty Synclavier which has withstood four decades of daily music-making from the only member of ABBA who witnessed the group's imperial years from a seated position.
After ABBA ceased trading at the end of 1982, a total of 39 years elapsed before their spectacular resurrection with the Voyage album and the eponymous shows in East London's specially created ABBA Arena, which presented a digitally recreated version of the group's younger selves alongside a hand-picked 10-piece live band. During that time, Benny and Björn Ulvaeus collaborated on two musicals - cold war drama Chess and Swedish literary epic Kristina Från Duvemåla – and saw the ABBA songbook slowly but surely come to be regarded as comparable to the very greatest pop music produced in the 20th Century.
For the guy who wrote those melodies, though, a line of continuity runs through the manic years of megastardom depicted in 1977's ABBA The Movie in somewhat nightmarish terms, right through to the present day. Every morning, this is where he comes every day, panning for melodic gold.
"Sometimes you come away with nothing,”
he says. "But if you don't try, then you're definitely not going to come up with anything.” Unlike the other three initials who make up ABBA, it's Benny who most closely corresponds to the description of a jobbing musician. He tours regularly with his Nordic folk ensemble Benny Anderssons Orkester, for whom he more commonly defaults to accordion. Back in 2010, at ABBA's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, he talked about his early years listening to music on the single radio channel that was available to him: "We didn't have any blues like you would call it blues in Sweden, we had some kind of blues because above [59 degrees latitude]... from eastern Russia, through Finland into Scandinavia, there's this 'melancholy belt', sometimes mistaken for the vodka belt [laughter]... It's definitely in the Swedish folk music, you can hear it in the Russian folk songs, you can hear it in the music from Jean Sibelius or Edvard Grieg from Norway, you could see it in the eyes of Greta Garbo, and you can hear it in the voice of Jussi Björling. And actually, you can hear it in the sound of Frida and Agnetha on some of our songs, too." While he happily acknowledges ABBA's early hunger for international success, also detectable is a certain pride taken in the fact that, when their songs ascended the charts all around the world, they did so on their own terms. Almost all their biggest disco hits, he beams, were written in a minor key.
Let's start with Voyage, because even though the album appeared at the end of last year, the album almost certainly wouldn't exist were it not for the ABBA Voyage shows and the ABBA Arena for which you built those shows. So much of this hugely secretive series of undertakings happened in plain sight. Didn't the auditions and rehearsals take place in Kentish Town in North London?
Yes. Jamie Righton [formerly of The Klaxons] helped us to reach the musicians. We said to him that we want people who like to be onstage: we didn't particularly want people who were used to sitting in a pit. It was important to have people who liked to perform. So, he found these guys. Victoria [Hesketh aka Little Boots] was one of them and we liked her. The funny thing is, there are seven women and three guys in the band, and that's not a feminist thing; that was just because they were the best musicians.
It's amazing that this was all happening on the outskirts of Camden, and no one knew. I cycle through Kentish Town most days, and the idea that you guys were there, just rehearsing, is mind-blowing. How did no one know?
Normally, we don't tell people where we are!
At that point, had you recorded any of the new songs?
Yeah, the first two, Don't Shut Me Down and I Still Have Faith In You. We played it to
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The Voyage begins: Benny Andersson backstage in 1975: "It's great to have more than one singer, like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Eagles"
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them, so they knew what was coming up. Those two were not in the setlist that we gave them: we had a set-list, but we had excluded those two because they weren't out yet. But we played the two songs for them, so they knew what was coming.
When you recorded those songs, did you have a good idea in your head of what ABBA Voyage was going to look like; what the shows were going to be like?
No, not at that time, because we obviously had ideas and how everyone working on this were looking at it, especially Ludvig [Andersson, Benny's son] and Svana [Gisla, who, with Ludvig and Benny, co-produced the Voyage shows], and also Johan Renck [director, best known for his work on Chernobyl- as well as being one-time rapper, Stakka Bo] was involved in the beginning. We recorded I Still Have Faith In You three years ago. And he filmed a video, with stand-ins for us.
So, you have these two songs, they're incredible. Who was the first person to say, "Why don't we keep going"?
Maybe me! It could be me! Then we spent another year after that, trying to come up with music, sending it to Björn, or he could come here to my office where I'm sitting now. I'd play it to him and then he'd write the lyrics. And then we maybe did three or four songs, and when we had those, we were saying, "Well, maybe Universal Music would be happy if we made a whole album" - they needed to have something to sell when this was going to happen. That was good thinking, in a way.
Did Agnetha and Frida know you were continuing to write a whole album?
Yes, it was step-by-step: first the two songs and then another three or four, then the rest. So, they came here in three... not sessions, but during three periods. Maybe they spent a total of 10 days in the studio.
It was almost business as usual.
It was. That was the funniest thing of all. Once they came in and recorded the first two songs, they came into the studio, and it hit me that I hadn't really asked them if they could still sing! I thought they could, but we hadn't really talked about it. But they were getting into the studio, we were playing through the songs, and they had the lyrics - of course, I sent them before. They started to sing, and it was all like we were [last here] three weeks ago, although it was 40 years ago. Quite a nice thing. I think we felt the same, all four of us.
There are a couple of songs on Voyage that reference other ABBA songs. The most striking is the reference to SOS at the end of Keep An Eye On Dan.
Yeah, that's on purpose.
You were clearly having fun.
We were. That was the only way to get through with this. We said from the beginning, "OK, we're going to do an album, we're not pop musicians anymore." I mean, we're 75 and older than that, even. There's no point in trying to emulate or keep on track with what's going on musically today, because we don't understand it. I could only do what I think: "This is a good tune, these are good harmonies, this is good, we'll keep that." It has to come from inside and not from what's going on around. In the 70s, it was different, because then we were trying to keep on track with what was going on. "Oh, there's a snare drum sound on Rod Stewart's latest single," things like that.
I wanted to ask you about that, because looking back at ABBA's years as a productive studio entity, I can see that you were taking notes on what was working for other successful artists - especially in the beginning - because in the early years, when you didn't know if you were going to have a successful pop career internationally, it was important that the music was commercially successful as well as artistically successful, right?
Well, yeah, I guess. Because once we were out there, once we had been in Brighton, winning the Eurovision Song Contest with a pop song, then we just said, "Well, now we need to start working; now we can work, because people know that we exist, all over Europe." But it's more a matter that you sit there, and you say, "Is this good or is it bad? Do we like this? Is this good?" If we both say yes, we keep it. If only I say yes, I'll play it to Björn again and again until he gives up. But normally Björn and I would be happy with the result. First when we wrote the songs and then once we were in the studio, and then it was me and Björn and [engineer] Michael [B. Tretow], all three of us... [we all had to be] happy with the final result. We didn't give up until we all were. It wasn't enough that I liked it, or Björn liked it, or Michael... That's the way it worked. Very Swedish.
If I listen to those pre-Arrival ABBA records, it's a bit like you're trying different styles and almost waiting to see what there's a public appetite for. So, a song like Another Town, Another Train, is very different to My Mama Said. It's almost like you're spreading your bets, just to see what catches fire.
That's something we learned from The Beatles. They were always with their style in a way, much more so than we were, but what they did was, you heard a song with them, then the next
single was nothing close to the previous one, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. At that time, you needed to have some diversity, no? So, you have Fernando, then you don't want another Fernando, you want a song like Dancing Queen or My Mama Said, or whatever on that album, to give it some listening value. And another great thing, I have to say, that goes for many of the bands that I like, is that you have more than one singer; it helps you. You have John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] or you have Fleetwood Mac, you have the Eagles: it's great to have two singers, because that makes a difference between the tracks as well.
You're huge fans of Phil Spector and also Brian Wilson.
Oh, yes, especially Brian Wilson.
Did you recognise something of yourself in Wilson's obsessive attention to detail?
Yes, I do, but I can't compare with him. They [The Beach Boys] were in a different situation, they had three or four tracks to use, and when we finished, we had 32 tracks in the studios, which made it a little easier to do overdubs, to add things. I don't know how he did that, it's incredible. But it's more the heart of the songs. It's the way he treated them.
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"I THINK MAMMA MIA WAS WHEN WE REALISED, ‘THIS IS SPECIAL, NOW WE FIND OUT WHAT WE CAN ACHIEVE””
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What was the first song of yours that had "the ABBA sound"?
I think Mamma Mia was when we realised, "Well, this is special, now we find out exactly what can we achieve with a song if you work enough on it," you know? You're in the studio, and you see, "Oh, there's a marimba there, let's see if we can use it" - that's sort of special, there's not much marimba [in other pop songs]. But then also it was really arranged, you know? It wasn't just strumming along. Everyone was playing exactly the notes that were needed.
Around the same time, Money, Money, Money was also released. That's such a strange song. I remember as a child feeling frightened.
Ha, yeah?
Can you understand why?
Maybe it's because the bass is playing the melody line [sings]. It's almost like [the movie] Jaws! It's a funny song, that one. It's more like a ragtime tune for the piano.
The sentiments of Money, Money, Money were relevant to a lot of economic migrants who had left their native countries in the hope of getting a job that would allow them to return home someday. They're enduring years of hardship, delaying the gratification that their savings will one day allow them to enjoy. Is that Björn trying to put words to the feeling of the melody that you've given him?
Photo: Baillie Walsh
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Money, Money was one of the first lyrics he wrote for ABBA. Stig Anderson [manager] was writing the words to our first songs, and that changed with Fernando and Money, Money, Money. Stig wrote a Swedish version of that for Frida's [Anni-Frid Lyngstad's] solo album that I produced [in Stig's early lyric, the narrator is consoling the titular protagonist of Fernando, who has lost his lover]. Björn totally changed that. Over time, he realised there was no need for him to try to write lyrics before we knew what the backing track music was saying to him. So, we did the backing track, did some sweetening, did some overdubs to make it come close to what it would be like at the end, and then he would take it and see if it spoke to him or not.
The intro of Knowing Me, Knowing You is fascinating, because it grabs you immediately with very few notes: this very high keyboard and then the guitar in a much lower register – the sound of conflict. What do you remember about that?
I remember coming up with the verse, we had the chorus, and I think the verse is so special, kind of brilliant, because there are no notes, it's just [sings the minimal top-line of the verses]... it's very good.
And then you have that minor-to-major transition on the chorus, when Frida sings, "Knowing you," which is very dramatic.
Yes, it goes from minor to major.
Let's talk about your band back in the day. You had this amazing rhythm section, and the rhythm section on songs like The Name Of The Game and Lovers (Live A Little Longer); they were almost like your own Muscle Shoals. You must have known, around the time of Voulez-Vous, that the band was on fire...
Yeah. Especially Rutger Gunnarsson, the bass player. I've been around and walking into the pit for Mamma Mia, the musical, several times, in New York or London or whatever, I go down to the pit to say hi to the band, and everyone is talking about Rutger Gunnarsson. They find him the finest bass player in the world. He's dead now, unfortunately. They were all - Lasse Wellander and Ola Brunkert, the drummer - a solid band.
That bassline on The Name Of The Game is something else, isn't it?
Yeah, it's good. But the bass playing on Voulez-Vous or Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! all those songs, it's just incredible, because that comes straight from him. A normal bass player will play like [sings] and he will play [sings more notes, arranged differently] and you won't hear it. I don't know how he did that.
I would say that song for song, as a beginning-to-end experience, Voulez-Vous just about edges it over the other albums. Oh, you think?
That's interesting.
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I wonder if in the same way that Brian Wilson would hear Rubber Soul and be inspired to write Pet Sounds, something similar happened with Saturday Night Fever and Voulez-Vous?
Possibly, yeah.
Because the first sessions for the album saw you take a break from your base in Stockholm, Polar Studios, and use Criteria Studios in Florida, where the Bee Gees recorded most of their disco-era music.
We did, because Björn and I were trying to have a week of songwriting in the Bahamas. And we said, "If we're down here, why don't we call [engineer] Michael Tretow and ask him to fly down and we go into the studio in Florida and record?" - which was a bad idea. It was a good band, someone brought some musicians together and there was nothing wrong with them, they were good, but it wasn't our band, you know? It was difficult to
communicate. Normally, we would come in, I'd play the piano, Björn would play the guitar, we would sing them the song with rubbish lyrics and I would write down the harmonies on a sheet of paper so they knew what they were doing; maybe start a bassline so they knew there would be a bass note, and then we just went from there. But meeting new guys and trying to explain to them or make them understand what we were after, that wasn't so easy. But I tell you one thing: [the song] Voulez-Vous we recorded down there, the original backing track. Well, we came home, and it's totally redone, so we got in Rutger and our guys to do what you hear is our band. But the original was done in Florida.
Is there a version somewhere with theAmerican musicians on it?
I think they're credited still, because they were in it from the beginning. I don't know. It should be somewhere on a roll of tape.
In a parallel universe where Robert Stigwood had asked you to write the theme tune to Saturday Night Fever, Voulez-Vous would be that song.
But not as good as Stayin' Alive! Stayin' Alive is great. We were inspired by the Bee Gees, because suddenly they became another band. They were good, they did Massachusetts and all those songs in the 60s, then all of a sudden, they were back with a totally different approach. It had to do with...
[Producer] Arif Mardin? Yeah. I suppose he had something to do with that. And it was very inspiring.
I think Ahmet Ertegun, who was in charge of Atlantic, hooked them up with the musicians that could give them the confidence to reinvent themselves.
Yeah. Those were the days, when people in record companies had some musical instinct, not just handling money.
The impression I got when the Voyage show happened is that it was just something you wanted to do anyway. Finally, technology had caught up with the only way in which you were willing to "come back" - and that was to create a sort of time-travel experience. That way, you didn't have to compromise.
Yeah, you're right. It gave us the chance to pretend to be pop guys again.
I was happy to see that Summer Night City made it onto the setlist for the ABBA Voyage shows. Does that mean that you like it a bit more these days? I had the impression that, for a long time, you weren't so happy with it.
No, I wasn't so happy with the recording, because we had problems. We took away our long beginning. And it's very compressed. But I think it's a good tune. I have to say, in Voyage, that's the best moment, going from, in the disco section, Lay All Your Love On Me to Summer Night City. The whole stage becomes a totally different thing, and it's an amazingly beautiful design.
"WE MET JOHN CLEESE, AND SAID, 'WE'RE WRITING A MUSICAL, WOULD YOU WRITE THE BOOK?' HE SAID 'NO'!"
Can I ask you about Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) and what Madonna did with it to create Hung Up? You must like it because you allowed her to do it.
Yeah. She didn't come [to Sweden], she sent her right-hand woman. She had to come because we said, "We're not going to say yes until we hear it." Then she said, "Well, I'll let you hear it, but I don't want to send it over via the internet, so I'll send someone with a CD." We listened to it in my room here, and I thought it was bloody great. So, we said, "OK," and split the copyright.
Madonna did an interview on the Song Exploder podcast recently where she talked about the process of writing it. She said she was nervous about the prospect of getting your permission: she loved it so much but couldn't bear the idea that you might not let her use it.
I can understand that, because it's such a vital ingredient in that song. If you swap that for something else, then it becomes something totally different. I think it was a clever thing to do.
You never wrote a Christmas song until ABBA Voyage: Happy New Year was the nearest you got. Happy New Year is a very beautiful song. It feels very Swedish.
Yeah, well, we are Swedish!
The sentiment is very fatalistic, with the suggestion that, in 10 years' time, the entire human race might have destroyed itself.
It was written in Barbados. Björn and I went out for a week, to the same house that Paul and Linda McCartney hired a year before. I heard about this wonderful place, and I thought, "We must go there." We met John Cleese, by the way, in Barbados. We said, "We're thinking about writing a musical about New Year's Eve. Would you be interested in writing the book for that?" and he said, "No"! We didn't get any further with that idea. But we liked the song.
Let's talk about the title track of The Visitors. It's one of your most extraordinary songs - and, at the time, a brave departure from a recognisably 'ABBA' sound. In the ABBA Voyage shows, it's the first song. That's quite a statement.
That was Ludvig's idea. We had a list of maybe 30 songs, and we tried to think how would this be if we actually did it live, if we had that to play? So, we eliminated a couple of songs, and we added another one, and we had a setlist. And Ludvig was really [lobbying] for opening with The Visitors, and then Hole In Your Soul. And we said, "[Hole In Your Soul] is the song we used to end with, and now I think you should put it in the beginning." Listen to it. It's a good opening.
Most groups would have started with a huge hit. But by starting with The Visitors, it establishes a relationship. We meet you on your territory, quite a confident thing to do.
Yeah, well, we knew that we had songs coming up.
Around that time, groups like The Human League were very vocal in their love of ABBA. Do you know their song Don't You Want Me?
Yeah, yeah.
You know the intro is inspired by Eagle, right?
No. I have never listened to it that way.
They admitted they got the idea from listening to Eagle. It is almost the same...
Yeah, I'm going to listen to it.
How about Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello? The piano motif is inspired by
Dancing Queen...
I didn't know that. I do know Elvis is very fond of SOS.
Oliver's Army was going to be a B-side when [keyboardist] Steve Nieve heard Dancing Queen and had the idea of doing a similar- sounding piano part throughout. At that point, they realised they now had an A-side.
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Cool, I like that. It's nice when what we do is inspiring other people. Like Brian Wilson inspired us, or Paul McCartney.
I hear Pete Townshend came up to you in a restaurant to tell you how much he loved your music...
I like his music, too. We also have the Synclavier [synth] in common [walks across his studio to show us his Synclavier]. Pete Townshend and I both got them maybe 40 years ago. He also has a GX-1: the big Yamaha synthesiser that I use. He's also interested in the folk music side, so we have communicated a little.
The Day Before You Came is a song you're clearly fond of. You featured it on your 2017 solo album, Piano. I guess a lot of these songs must have started out that way. I interviewed Billy Joel in 2007 and he said all his songs start out as solo classical piano pieces, then he decides what sort of a pop song to make out of them. Have some of your songs started out like that?
Nowadays, everything [starts out that way]. Even in the earlier days. Some songs are sort of 'pianistic'. Not so much a song like Waterloo, not even Dancing Queen. But a lot of the other stuff is, you know, like My Love,
My Life or the songs I have on my piano album. Some of [ABBA's songs] are more pianistic and I didn't record them... But you're right, if it sounds OK when you sit alone at the piano, it's probably worth keeping.
What's an example of a song we know that would have started as a solo piano piece?
SOS? They all started on the little old piano in Stockholm, where Björn and I used to sit, day after day.
Did you watch [Beatles documentary] Get Back?
Oh, yes, the best documentary ever made. It's fantastic. Like a fly on the wall, you know? Wonderful. I've seen it twice.
It's the story of all bands, isn't it?
In a way, I guess.
What did you recognise about yourselves in it?
I recognised a part of myself in Paul: he never gave up, constantly wanting to move things forward. Sometimes, nothing happens, but he keeps on feeding the band with stuff. I like that. I'm not saying I'm the same, but I recognise the method.
Just to see the song Get Back appear out of thin air was incredible, wasn't it?
Yeah, wonderful. You never see these things. I've never seen that.
A lot of the responses to the ABBA Voyage shows were very emotional. Was that expected?
No. We did not know at all. That's the thing with all of this: you never know until afterwards. You write the song, how will it be after it's recorded, and once it's recorded, once it's out there? Will it be accepted for what we think it is, a bloody great recording? Or will people ignore it? No one ever knows. People think they know... people in the business. And it's the same with this. How about coming onstage as 'ABBAtars'? Of course we don't know [how it'll be received]: they don't know shit! No one knows until it happens.
Your son Ludvig talks about the ABBAtars. In the programme, he said they have an "emotional voodoo power".
Yeah, yeah.
Do you know what he means?
No! I don't, but maybe he's right. I have an interesting take on this, because I've seen a number of performances with an audience, and
(CIn transition: the band in their motion capture suits preparing to be turned into digital entities aka ABBAtars))
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before we had an audience at all, no one knew how they would react. Would they think that they were watching a film and that they weren't needed? Because normally, when you see an artist, you're there for them, you're there to show your enthusiasm for their music, or their artistry or their voices or whatever they're doing up there. In this case, we didn't know, but I think the audience recognises the fact that, OK, so we're not there, but we've made this for them, which is absolutely true. They don't have to lift us up, because we're not there; all they can do is absorb what we are trying to do for them. And I think that makes them... I don't know, relax.
You said you watched a few times: where Did the response to any particular songs surprise you? were you watching from? Were you among the crowd?
Yeah, yeah, I was sitting just a couple of rows below the sound desk.
So, you were watching people as much as you were watching the band?
Yeah, yeah.
That must have been amazing.
It was. It was with only a third-full house, for invited people. Just to see that they were getting it, that and they were accepting what was going on, was such a tremendous relief, because then [we realised] it will work.
Did the response to any particular songs surprise you?
Don't Shut Me Down, because that's a new song, it hasn't had time to travel around for years. But they took to it, so that was good.
It sounds like a classic ABBA song, like it's always been there.
Yeah. I like it for its progress through the keys. You start in one key, you end up in a totally different one: I like that.
You held some songs back, didn't you? Isn't the set going to be changed at some point?
Could be done. It would take some work for ILM [Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company with whom ABBA collaborated for the Voyage shows]. It's a million pounds a minute or something to make avatars of us. They have everything that we did two years ago here in Stockholm, when we were recording everything, doing the filming. We did a couple of other tunes as well [for the Voyage show], so they don't need us for that: they can just start working with the information they have. But we
shall see. We'll let this run for a while, so people have a chance to get their money back, the people who invested.
This issue of Record Collector is going to feature a list of the 40 best ABBA songs. What do you think should be No 1?
I Still Have Faith In You.
Is that your favourite right now or do you feel that that's your all-time peak?
It's because it represents who we are now, you know? It's not very commercial, it's not catchy, but it's quite intricate, a great lyric and a good recording. I'll put it there. And then maybe Knowing Me, Knowing You, Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, SOS, The Day Before You Came...
The thing with the Voyage album that people found moving is it felt like it was something you were doing for each other.
It's absolutely true.
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"WE DO IT BECAUSE WE WANT TO DO IT, AND THE LADIES CAN STILL SING AND WE CAN STILL WRITE MUSIC"
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It felt like a private moment that we were being allowed to listen in on. That made it very different to any other reunion I can think being allowed to listen in on.
Yeah. As I said earlier, we couldn't try to emulate what's going on nowadays, being modern, we could only do what we can do, and there's nothing to prove here. People probably will say, "Well, I think they were better in the 70s." So fine, maybe we were, but it doesn't matter, because this is what we do now, and we do it because we can and we want to do it, and the ladies can still sing, and we can still write music. This is what it becomes when you're 75 years old.
Tell us something about ABBA that no one knows.
Oh, boy. There's nothing to know! Nobody knows anything about us! They know what we've been doing, they know the records, they know the pictures, they know what we say in interviews, but they don't know anything about how [our personal] life is, which is quite conscious. They don't know I walk the dog in the morning and late at night, I go shopping for food, I cook every day, stuff like that. I live a normal life: I have always done. I think that goes for nearly all of us.
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