Carl Magnus Palm - Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA

London: Omnibus Press, 2001

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I’m currently researching a new novel with a background in the music industry, so I’m interested to learn how supergroups of ABBA's calibre reached the top. This book is cheating slightly - technically it belongs to Worcestershire Libraries, but when I came to borrow it, there was a fault because the library has had a new database and this book doesn’t exist on it, having been missed in their scanning exercise. So this is a non-book, in my possession, but like a good ex-librarian, I very much intend to return it.

About the Author - Hailing from Sweden, Carl Magnus Palm is one of the world’s foremost ABBA historians, and in addition to acclaimed books about the band, he has been heavily involved with special editions of the band’s reissues and work with the ABBA museum with Stockholm. Although he has written about other artists, his focus seems to be continuing research into ABBA and what he doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing, although he intends to try according to his well-appointed website.

Plot - the real story of ABBA, as opposed to the thousands of bootlegged versions.

Review - Back in the mid-1980s, Björn Ulvaeus decided to sell the mechanical royalty rights to his ABBA songs to a Dutch company, Batrax. This meant that should anybody want to reproduce an ABBA album, include their songs on a greatest hits compilation or perhaps slap a tune on a film soundtrack, the license fee due to Björn would instead be diverted.

The reason he did this was that ABBA, unofficially split since 1983, were old hat. He and long-time co-composer Benny Andersson had branched out into musical theatre (Chess was ending a painful flop run on Broadway), and he was instead mucking about with computers in his new home base of Henley-on-Thames. There was tons of old ABBA vinyl knocking about, and there was little reason to suspect his old group was going to suddenly generate slurries of cash in re-pressings.

Knowing what we do now, such a decision seems on a par with that taken by the unfortunate Dick Rowe, the Decca executive who passed on The Beatles. Almost as soon as Ulvaeus’ decision was taken, the rehabilitation of ABBA had begun, from the doldrums of interminable court cases to two hit musical films, via camp copyists and affectionate Australian comedy-drama. It’s difficult to imagine a time when enjoying ABBA was as uncool as it got, but if as Boethius postulated that time is but a wheel, maybe there’s hope for Chess yet.

The ABBA I know is practically the same one as everybody else: two married couples, perfectly symmetrical in hair colour, win Eurovision, have a bunch of catchy singles and not so catchy-looking videos, produced a clutch of miserable melodies about their failing marriages before eventually jacking it in. That’s what super-successful groups do: have an imperial period, start to get on one another’s tits and then call it a day. The only difference with ABBA is that they have yet to reunite, which looked less and less likely with every passing sequel and marriage to a minor royal until the recent tease of new material later this year.

So, I expected Bright Lights Dark Shadows to fill in what I assumed was a fairly small knowledge gap. A few years ago even picking it up would have been a ravens leaving the Tower decision, since growing up as a suburban punk left me ambivalent about their charms. I preferred the melancholy stuff, such as ‘SOS’, to the more sugary ‘Super Trouper’ treats, and even then I had a hidden preference for Erasure’s ABBA-Esque EP than the originals. I can’t say what turned me towards listening to ABBA more, but I can bet it was in search of something tuneful to write along to – writing two hundred thousand words gets so much easier when someone’s not ranting down your lughole for six months.

Bright Lights Dark Shadows is everything you were afraid to ask somebody cool about ABBA in one doorstop tome. Cribbing substantially from his earlier ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions, author Carl Magnus Palm claims to be the foremost ABBA historian and it’s hard to dispute that claim with the level of detail supplied herein. Palm is clearly an indefatigable researcher: Bjorn Ulvaeus claims to suffer episodic amnesia and has scant recall of the glory years, meaning Palm’s labours have added import, unless Benny was a dogged archivist. If the author is to be believed, we probably won’t be that lucky.

First, let Palm bust a few myths. That thing about ABBA outselling Volvo? Only half true, it turns out. Volvo made far more money in 1977, but ABBA's percentage of profit on their working capital was 70%, outstripping the manufacturer’s 5%. They were named after a canned fish company? Well, clearly it’s the member’s initials, but what’s notable is that it was far from their first choice, and management ran a newspaper competition to name the group until the name was promoted from within. And Anni-Frid Lyngstad – wasn’t she one of the Lebensborn children the Nazis hoped would populate non-Aryan Europe? Well, that’s a murky matter. She was born of a German occupier, Alfred Haase, and a Norwegian mother, but was the direct result of a clandestine affair rather than strict racial policy. I’m sure that kept her warm on the long winter nights living with her grandmother in Sweden after her mother died in her mid-twenties, shunned by her community.

Palm relates these and dozens of other notable details in fairly loose chronological order. The first part of the book details each member and their journey towards success, starting with manager Stig Anderson. Beginning with their svengali may seem odd, but in organisational terms ABBA wouldn’t have existed if not for him. Not just their early lyricist, but also the boss of their eventual label Polar, Anderson swapped a career as a schoolteacher and sometime musician to focus on publishing and writing hits. In later years Benny Andersson would be scathing about Stig’s contribution to the ABBA story, but Palm leaves you in no doubt as to how vital he was in promoting their success. Anderson was a man who drove hard bargains and rewarded loyalty with a fierce protection. It was he, fact fans, who wrote the lyrics to Eurovision smash ‘Waterloo’ (his English being so much better at the time). Ultimately it was this success which killed the collaboration, when business moved from selling a few records to investing in oil companies.

But of course the key partnership belonged to Benny and Björn, and another long-standing assumption was that the famed Andersson/Ulvaeus partnership was the happy accident of two dreamers marooned in the Swedish folk scene, a misnomer not helped by the name of Björn’s first group, The Hootenanny Singers, which he acknowledges is a terrible moniker for a band with ambition. But ambitious they were: in Swedish terms the Nannies were a big deal, as were Benny’s band The Hep Stars (the Scandi equivalent of The Beatles, being chased by screaming girls and having to hide things like long-term partners and kids). Palm does a good job of demarcating the boundaries in personality between the two men, even despite their ambition. When Anni-Frid (later Frida) and Agnetha Fältskog are added to the group, he has the task of ensuring their distinct journies and motivations are present in the mix, and so from a uniform picture of blonde/brunette we begin to see why ABBA worked: a grouping of folksy melodist, a hip rock n’ roll cat, a mature chanteuse and a Mary Hopkin-style singer-songwriter. This gave the chief drivers of the group considerable raw material to expand and shape their growing talents.

Set against this journey to the top is a group challenging the sterility of their native music industry, with Anderson’s steady hand on the tiller. In true showbiz style it took half a decade to be an overnight success, but when it came, money rained from the heavens and from sources even more unlikely: Australia, for example, displayed the kind of hysteria reserved for the members of the Royal Family they actually like. During their ’77 tour, material was shot for the ABBA feature film in amongst the chaos, but incredibly their biggest successes were still around the corner.

Inevitably, the ABBA story begins to feel the chill around the time of Agnetha and Björn’s split in 1978. It would be a mistake to assume that every happy ABBA tune came before this date (‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ dates from 1976, for example), but it’s a twist of fate that just as Stig was penning his last lyrics for the band, Björn was cracking open the scotch and writing ‘The Winner Takes It All’ in his empty family home. According to Palm, the band have always denied the divorce heaped misery on the recording process, in fact defusing many of the arguments the intricate and tiresome perfectionism of the boys’ production demanded.

But then again it seems that even at each other’s throats, ABBA was a more comfortable place to be. To avoid prohibitive taxes, their vast wealth was being funnelled into crazy investments and purchases of companies, many of which were toxic, overshadowing the music and casting the quartet in the roles of greedy bastards. Coupled with a sniffiness about their lack of soul and it’s clear that by the early eighties this was no longer the same group who reinvented A Song for Europe with such vim.

This edition of the book us up to the early noughties, and ceases before the zenith of the ABBA re-birth of stage shows and Streep, but that doesn’t matter. Since they last performed together (sadly, a small skit on the Swedish equivalent of This is Your Life), the world has reshaped to their legacy without them having to beg. Cover versions, samples, tribute acts and hipster reappraisals ensure that those mechanical royalties are certainly making money for somebody.

That’s the story of the phenomenon, then, but there’s the rub: compared to the legend, it’s a disappointment. In ABBA's case, we have been told for so long that the divorce of two couples within the same group led to an impassable breach, but Bright Lights Dark Shadows puts a heavy load on its title, which isn’t exactly delivered.

I mean, we get it: break-ups suck. But the way in which Carl Magnus Palm describes each divorce paints an almost amicable parting of the ways. There’s a few hints about troubled waters, and bang, there go Björn and Agnetha. The end of Frida and Benny is even quicker: within two pages of the terse statement of their split, Benny’s already met his next wife. In some ways Palm can’t help that – this is straight biography, and if that’s how it happened, so it goes. But the ABBA myth is predicated on the souring of relations, and that’s largely absent from the story told here. It’s all so pragmatic and adult, whereas this book suggests broken china and slanging matches. In truth, it details the story of a professional group of people who had both showbiz lives and normal ones. Agnetha in particular despised touring, while the lads saw it as a necessary evil. Only Frida, with her innate need for acceptance, seemed to relish it until her solo career fizzled out.

So ultimately, this book serves as an adjunct for the ABBA completist or the curious. It’s a well-researched and straightforward rock biography, but anybody searching for the real truth about this group would be better served with an immersive evening with ABBA's back catalogue. The slick progression of texture and maturing of lyrical themes from Voulez-Vous until their final single, ‘The Day Before You Came’ displayed Benny and Björn’s talent reaching such consistent peaks it’s no wonder subsequent projects struggled to scale them. Frida and Agnetha’s exceptional ear for harmonies is there from the thrilling opening lines of ‘Waterloo’ onwards. Listen to the little hooks in ‘Take A Chance On Me’ with fresh ears - the cheeky oompah bassline under the choruses, the spot-on timing of the organ sustains, the fun in the ba ba bas and that audacious, acapella opening. This strict dedication to craft and innovation dazzles some forty years on, even as it was draining their energy.

And when it all came apart, they left us The Visitors, a synth-dominated disparate collection of disconnected images about angels and soldiers and people listening to rain on window panes, in a sleeve where a once-loving set of people stand apart, in shadow and looking anywhere but there. There’s your melancholy, and a true book about ABBA's dark shadows could do worse than reproduce its lyrics at its head and work backwards towards the bright lights.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - Would that I could. It would make an invaluable reference book for the music fan, provided they liked ABBA. It’s a hefty thing, though, so if it’s after midnight when you finish, make sure you get a man in to help you.