ABBA - the History of a Rock Phenomenon Part 1
When the musical film “Mama Mia,” based on the smash stage musical built around twenty-four of the 1970’s Swedish rock phenomenon ABBA’s best loved songs is released in 2008, it is sure to cause a huge revival of interest in their music. ABBA was a group whose legend has continued to grow more than a quarter of a century after they recorded their final song. They were so successful, in fact, that their music is still standard fare on the playlists of thousands of radio programming directors.
ABBA took their name from the first letters of the names of their members, Agnetha Falkstog, her boyfriend Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and his girlfriend Anni-Frida Lyngstad. All four of the members had started very early in life in the Swedish music industry, but it was not until 1970 that Ulvaeus and Anderson paired to produce their first album, Lycka.
They caught the attention of Stig Anderson, a Swedish record producer, who encouraged them to enter a song in the Eurovision Song Contest preliminaries, and in 1972, their entry Say It with a Song was accepted. The song, performed by Lena Anderson, placed third in the competition, was a tremendous success in Sweden, and started Bjorn and Benny experimenting with a new sound which emphasized the vocal talents of their girlfriends.
Their musical technique, which they termed The Wall of Sound, eventually won them first place in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo, which took the British music charts, and those of most European countries, by storm. ABBA was invited on a European tour and showed up on many of the important television shows, and when Waterloo hit number six on the American charts, their album ABBA was also released in the US. But in spite of the success of their singles, the ABBA album found surprisingly little success with the American audience, possibly because there seemed to be no real effort to promote it.
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