Stars respectively – Abba appeared manufactured, like a plastic
X Factor
band. Their 1973 song
Ring Ring
lost out in that year’s
Melodifestivalen, the talent show that determines which act will
represent Sweden at Eurovision. Yet Eblom thinks, “
Waterloo
is
almost a rip-off of
Ring Ring
.”
The band’s
schlager
sound (catchy, German-originated melodies
practised by Björn and Benny’s previous groups) may have been
a welcome novelty to the rest of Europe – who encountered the
finished article afresh when
Waterloo
won the Eurovision Song
Contest in 1974 – but Swedes were less impressed. With just one
state-owned TV channel and the media dominated by the left-
wing since the late 1960s, Abba were not flavour of the month. The
progressive political music movement, known as ‘progg’, nursed
a tight hold on all the arts and took against Abba. Leif Schulman
was the Swedish correspondent for
Billboard
magazine at the time
and remembers even
Waterloo
getting a chilly reception. “When
Swedish Television (SVT) interviewed Abba manager Stig Anderson
on the night of their
Waterloo
success, they said, ‘Last year you
made a song about people calling each other, this year you do a song
about how 40,000 people died.’” The reaction from progg musicians
was even chillier. “They considered Abba’s music ‘too commercial’,
and commercial was a bad word in Sweden in those days.”
Ingmarie Halling, who joined the group on tour in the late ’70s
and is now curator of the museum, recalls: “One DJ played an
Abba song on the radio and was called in to explain himself to his
superiors. Abba was seen as a hit factory, where you made music
just to make money. I don’t think that was the case – they were really
honest and into what they were doing – yet that was the perception.”
Abba’s manager Stig Anderson was the Simon Cowell of his
day. A controversial, larger-than-life figure, he actively enjoyed
baiting the left-wing movement. “People are not as stupid as you
think – they are even more stupid,” was one notorious quote that
encouraged the view that Abba were puppets.
Yet Björn and Benny’s songs, written in English, certainly
impressed abroad, and by 1977 they were arguably the most
popular act on the planet. Halling was with Abba on their first
major tour in 1977, in the wake of their 1976 greatest hits album,
when they played across the world and entertained 160,000 people
in Australia. “Arriving at Melbourne and seeing the people lining
the roads from the airport to the city was unreal,” says Halling.
“
That had only happened once before, when The Beatles came.
“
Alice Cooper was doing a concert there at that time and staying
in the same hotel. He told us he was lying on his bed one afternoon
when he heard chanting outside, ‘We want Alice! We want Alice!’
So he went to the window, only to find they were actually shouting,
‘
We want Abba!’”
Their trip to London on the same tour saw two dates at the
Royal Albert Hall – it was later revealed that some 3.5 million
»
“
Last year your song was about
people calling each other, this year
it’s about how 40,000 people died”
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