ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus says group plan to reunite this year and will release album
F-ABBA REUNION
The 73-year-old pop icon has denied plans to make an ABBA biopic as he gives his first in-depth interview about the band's shock reunion after 35 years
By Dan Wootton, Executive Editor
Updated: 5th April 2019, 7:07 pm
WHEN I found out ABBA were reuniting, I let out a little yelp in the middle of a news conference at The Sun.
The leaders of North and South Korea had met for historic talks that morning, but as a superfan of the world’s biggest ever pop group, this news was momentous in its own way.
Björn Ulvaeus is bringing the Mamma Mia! The Party experience to London's O2 and chats about ABBA reunioThe prospect of an ABBA comeback had long been dismissed as impossible. In fact, our front page the next day combined both bombshell reunions with the now-iconic headline: Mamma Mia: Korea We Go Again!
While no longer together romantically, the thought of Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad back working together in a studio in Stockholm was enough to send me on a pilgrimage to the Swedish capital synonymous with their name.
So for my birthday this year, I dragged three friends to sing Thank You For The Music with me at ABBA The Museum, party until the early hours in the immersive Mamma Mia! The Party — a theatrical and dining experience based on their music — and spend far too much money buying enough memorabilia to last a lifetime. (ABBA Monopoly, anyone?)
Then something special happened. An email drops into my inbox. Björn — one of the driving forces behind ABBA today — has heard I’m in town celebrating my birthday and wants to take me for breakfast. Tomorrow.
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I’m over the moon, obviously, and expecting a large entourage and the type of demands that come with today’s superstars. But I get a firm response. Björn wants to come to your hotel. No fuss and certainly no special treatment.
So I pulled on my newly purchased ABBA slogan T-shirt (“It might look like I’m listening to you, but in my head I’m listening to ABBA!) and await the arrival of one of the greatest pop masterminds of all time — and one of the most famous men in Sweden.
Björn, 73, lives just north of the hotel I am staying at in the centre of Stockholm. He’s driven himself and arrives alone. Within minutes, I’m asking about that moment when the band first reunited in Benny’s studio on an island in the middle of the city.
“That was so perfect in a way,” he smiles. “It was like going into the studio 40 years ago. Suddenly when we were standing there, the realisation came: This is kind of natural but weird at the same time. It’s been 35 years.”
ABBA are not interested in the Bohemian Rhapsody-style treatment of their life in film.
Björn says: “No, not while still being alive at least. I would hate to see myself. If someone is writing my part then I would have to be involved myself with inventing lines for myself.”
He has been asked to judge every talent show, including X Factor and The Voice, but says: “I don’t know, I’m in two minds. Sometimes they produce spectacular things. But then again, I love the idea of especially a group growing together organically.
“Finding each other organically and then something happens – because I’m part of such a band.
“The Beatles were the same and the Stones.”
The iconic ABBA harmonies “came back naturally” too, more than three decades on.
“The ladies are a tone lower which is completely natural, that’s what happens,” he explains. But the quality, the timbre, and the story-telling qualities, all of that is still there.
“It’s amazing, they started singing and, wow, it’s ABBA. It’s a fantastic sound. It’s inside Benny and I and all the ladies to feel what is right for ABBA and what is wrong.”
Wow. This is genuinely soul-enhancing for me to hear. As for any post-relationship awkwardness, it’s clear that has long since dissipated. Björn sees his ex Agnetha “quite often”.
“We have two kids together and, let’s see, five grandchildren,” he says. “It’s Christmas, it’s birthdays. I see her all the time. So that was normal.”
Suddenly when we were standing there, the realisation came: This is kind of natural but weird at the same time. It’s been 35 years
Björn Ulvaeuson ABBA
Initially, the re-formed ABBA recorded two songs together, but now there is a whole album on the way.
“So the world has heard,” he smiles, knowingly. “I heard that too.” The first tracks were meant to be released at Christmas, but it is technology holding up the release.
ABBA have partnered with Pop Idol mastermind Simon Fuller to launch intricate hologram versions of the band from at their peak — dubbed the “ABBA-tars” — that will perform in a new music video and then tour the world.
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Björn says: “Simon Fuller came to us with the idea of the digital humans. The heads will be from 1979. The voices will be from now. It’s taking too bloody long, it is the digitisation of ourselves which is taking much longer than we thought.
“It’s such hard work, it’s literally copies of ourselves and you will not see it’s not a human being. You see the clothes and every pore is taken care of — every hair, everything. So you can go as close as you want to and it looks like a real human being.
“They create the heads first — that’s a library of face muscles and everything else, so then they can create the rest much quicker. What we’re aiming for now is to finish that video so we can show the world this is what it is and I hope that will be this autumn.”
So ground-breaking is the concept, Björn can’t find the word to describe it, saying: “It’s like a hybrid of everything. It’s more than a show, different to a concert. So let’s call it an experience. The ABBA-tars will talk to the audience.”
Björn says there is no chance of ABBA ever performing together again
Will he go and watch? He thinks for a moment, then muses: “I could. That’s going to be weird.”
However, for anyone hoping for a live performance with the four human members, that remains out of the question.
“We never said we would never record again. We said we would never perform again,” Björn says firmly. “I definitely stand by that — there’s no bloody way. It would be such a hassle.
“I mean we had this incredible offer ages ago, to go on a tour for a year and doing all kinds of promotions and you made a lot of money, yes. But it would have taken ten years out of our life with stress. At that point we thought no, all four of us.”
BJÖRN has been in London for the past few weeks working on Mamma Mia! The Party, auditioning the cast and collaborating with Great British Bake Off’s Sandi Toksvig on the script.
He says: “We fell in love the first time we met – I love her, she’s so great and so intelligent. And so she was the first one I wanted to have once we knew it was actually happening.”
He lived in the UK after ABBA split between 1984 and 1990.
As well as celebrating 20 years of the musical on the West End, he is intimately involved in transforming a large space at London’s O2 Arena that used to be a nightclub into the Mamma Mia! The Party experience.
He says: “They ripped everything out, so it’s like an empty shoebox and inside that, as we speak, we’re building Nikos Taverna. We’ve made a fountain and everything. Everything will feel like a holiday in Greece.”
Having been in Stockholm, I even loved The Party experience despite not being able to understand a word of the Swedish script.
I want to know more about the reunion. Björn says he and Benny spent about two months writing the new ABBA songs. There’s something about their traditional approach, without the whizzbang technology available to songwriters today, that made them work hard to come up with hits.
“I thought the other day about song-writing that maybe people settle for less now because it sounds so good from the outset,” he says. You can have a whole symphony orchestra, whereas we were two guys without the best voices in the world in a room with a stand-up piano and an acoustic guitar.
"You have to make that exciting, so the melody has to be really good. We never settled. It’s never good enough, you know, we really felt, this is it. And you can feel that, it’s strange. And every note is in the right place in a song.”
The band’s priority was always making magical songs, rather than making megabucks on the road. “I mean life on the road is antisocial,” he argues.
Our Dan put on his favourite ABBA shirt when he went to meet Björn
“All four of us had like domestic careers before and we knew everything begins a song — that’s the most important thing of this whole business. Don’t ever forget that, touring is bulls**t. Benny and I worked office hours for months to write three songs.”
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Björn is attempting to reunite the band once more publicly to open Mamma Mia! The Party in London this autumn. He says: “I hope they’ll come, I really do. I’m working on it to make it easy for everyone. I think coming into that room together will be wow.”
For Björn, it will be a rare showbiz moment in a very low-key life that he leads in Sweden, where his family always bring him back to earth. He laughs: “One of my grandchildren, I was singing something the other day and she said, ‘You don’t have a very good voice, Grandad.’”
Millions of ABBA fans like me all over the world know that couldn’t be further from the truth.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/8802480/abba-bjorn-ulvaeus-interview
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