ABBA Special Exclusive with Radio Times

‘ABBA BELONGED TO BRITAIN’

When Abba won Eurovision in 1974, the UK jury gave them nul points – an unpromising start to our enduring affair with the Swedish foursome.

But why do we still love them 50 years on?

Wnight was John Henty, a DJ on BBC Radio Brighton. “We were all rooting for Olivia Newton-John and Long Live Love, the British entry,” he tells me, speaking on his 88th birthday. “But we were all transfixed by Abba. They were getting around the town before the show, and we all thought the girls in particular were absolutely gorgeous.”

Within a year, their Eurovision-bounce had propelled the Swedes all the way to another British beach town, Torbay, with Tony Blackburn introducing Abba’s performance of SOS on BBC1’s summer variety show Seaside Special In January 1976, with Mamma Mia , they knocked Queen’s all-conquering Bohemian Rhapsody off the UK Number One slot. A year after that, on 10 February 1977, Abba played their first concert in the UK, with all 2,397 seats at Birmingham Odeon sold out in an instant.

“Eurovision was really important,” says Mike Watson. The 77-year-old, Sheffield-born musician, resident in Sweden since 1964, was one of Abba’s two studio bass players across their decade-long recording career, playing on hits including Gimme Gimme Gimme, The Winner Takes It All, Super Trouper and Does Your Mother Know. “If you win Eurovision, success is not only in Sweden, it’s everywhere.”

‘We thought, “let’s write in English and see what happens”’

BENNY ANDERSSON

For the four members of the band, that success was hard-earned. All had individually been making music professionally since the 1960s. By the early 70s they were a foursome comprising two couples (Agnetha and Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid), playing cabaret under the name Festfolk, “which is a pun that can mean either ‘party people’ or ‘engaged people’. Very witty!” Andersson told me in 2018.

The previous year Abba had been beaten in the heats to represent Sweden, despite roping in Neil Sedaka to help with English lyrics for their song Ring Ring. So they were determined to make a splash in Brighton. According to lyricist Bjorn Ulvaeus, if Abba were “accepted in Britain”, that meant they were a real pop group.

The reaction inside the Dome on 6 April 1974 was encouraging. But in the UK jurors’ room, the response was muted – a situation probably not helped by the panel being “secluded” 50 miles away in Broadcasting House in London, watching on a screen with no audio of commentator David Vine or presenter Katie Boyle.

hen Abba came to Britain 50 years ago this month, it’s fair to say that, initially, Britain wasn’t overly impressed. Performing Waterloo at the Brighton Dome at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest as if their career depended on it, the Swedish band gave it their all for the audience, jurors and BBC cameras. The foursome were dressed in high 70s fashion: stack-heeled boots, frills, all things glam (and that was just the boys). Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad, in perfect, lightly choreographed harmony, were singing arguably the catchiest number from their second album of the same name. And the orchestra was conducted by a man (band associate Sven-Olof Walldoff) dressed as Napoleon.

Basil Herwald, one of the ten-strong British judging contingent that year, was a 20-year-old Cambridge law student and Eurovision fan who’d answered a newspaper ad looking for jurors (five under 21, five over 21). “There were two things,” he says now. “Some of us thought they looked a bit stupid. Also, they were due to sing the song in Swedish, which is what they’d done at rehearsal. I don’t think that affected us, but during the voting process, I don’t remember Sweden coming up in our discussions.” The result for Abba: nul points from Royaume-Uni. And when they won? “We were nonplussed!” laughs Herwald, now a 70-year-old retired lawyer living in Cumbria. “Not one of us had thought about them. With hindsight, of course,

they deserved it. But at the time I’m afraid we weren’t concentrating on Abba. Most of us were surprised that Italy didn’t win.”

But they didn’t, Abba did, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria. Brighton 74 was the launch-point for the greatest pop career since the Beatles. It also kickstarted a global phenomenon that, half a century on – courtesy of the hit jukebox musical Mamma Mia!, two multi-million dollar blockbuster films and the Abba Voyage “Abbatar” attraction in London – is arguably bigger than it ever was. This is the story told in When Abba Came to Britain, a BBC documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the band’s game-changing win

and the UK’s deep-seated love-affair with Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid. As Benny’s son Ludvig – one of the architects of Abba Voyage –puts it at the top of the film: “In a strange way, Abba belonged to Britain more than their home country, Sweden.”

“We were lucky not winning in 1973,” Andersson told me in 2018, “because the next year we had Waterloo, and the competition was held in England. That was a big difference to winning something in Azerbaijan or Luxembourg. When you’re in England, it makes ripples.”

Certainly before Brighton, they were unknown here – as Vine says in the archive footage from Eurovision, introducing them to viewers, “these are the Abba group”. Sitting in the stalls that

They all hated performing “silly cabaret stuff… but this was in 1971 and we had to put food on the table. [But] we thought: ‘We can’t go on like this. Let’s try to write some pop music in English and see what happens.’ ” The result was People Need Love, which became a 1972 hit in Scandinavia, Germany and Holland. “And we thought, ‘Yeah, we’re on the way to something.’ ”

Despite how history may remember it, it’s not the case that Eurovision instantly lit the touchpaper for Abbamania in the UK. Waterloo was hardly all over the airwaves. As Henty recalls, BBC Radio Brighton “had a manager who decided well ahead of Eurovision that Waterloo was ‘too heavy’, so we were unable to put it onto our limited playlist!” Not unexpectedly, that ban was rescinded after the victory.

Benny Andersson related what happened next. “After winning Eurovision we thought, ▷

FANTASTIC FOUR Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus

Abba larking about at London’s Waterloo in April 1974

◁ ‘OK, people know there are these four guys from Sweden who can write and perform songs. So we had a platform and we did quite well in Scandinavia and Germany and Holland. But in the UK it just dropped dead.” Or, to put it another way, “we were ice cold in England after Waterloo,” Andersson continued. “Nothing really happened. But then [US record label] RCA had such a big success in Australia with Mamma Mia when the television stations started to broadcast the video. Then SOS, then I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do. And [our label] in the UK said: maybe we should look at these guys again. They started to send us nice cars instead of the Volkswagen bus when we came here! And they released everything again. And from that moment everything just went well,” Andersson said, smiling. “That’s why we’re sitting here.”

If the UK witnessed the birth of Abba it also saw the band’s swansong. Their final appearance was on BBC1 on 11 December 1982, beamed from Stockholm, performing I Have a Dream and Under Attack on Noel Edmonds’s The Late, Late Breakfast Show By then both married couples had divorced and the “girls” in particular were tired of the pressure of touring and the spotlight. “There was some sadness,” said Faltskog when I interviewed her for RT in Sweden in 2013. “We always said that if it doesn’t feel happy or fun any more, we have to stop. So we did that. Because it felt a bit heavy.”

That heaviness, though, is long gone. All four remain friends but have resisted eye-watering sums (a reported $1 billion) for a band reunion. In 2021, they released Voyage, their first album in 40 years, and followed that with the “live” Abba Voyage in 2022. The singers submitted to hours of motion-capture performance in Swedish studios during the pandemic, helping to create virtual-reality avatars that, two years later, are still packing in audiences at a purpose-built arena adjacent to the 2012 Olympic Park.

As Ludvig Andersson says in When Abba Came to Britain reflecting on the choice of London as the location for that game-changing concert experience, the UK isn’t just where Abbamania (eventually) began. The UK “is the place that kept it alive”.

CRAIG McLEAN

BRIGHTON

‘WE WERE THERE!’

Three Brits reveal how they became Abba fans on day one

While some UK judges may not have been impressed, even before the show started, Abba’s arrival at the Eurovision Song Contest turned every head in Brighton, “as if they’d beamed down from the Starship Enterprise”, according to dazzled onlooker Jacqui Shevlin She was not quite 16 when she saw them in a hotel lobby, where the contestants were gathering on the afternoon before the contest. “When the lift opened and they stepped out, it was like, ‘Wow!’ I’d never seen men in high-heeled silver boots before!” she says. “They had this golden aura around them, and they lit the place up. We were all gobsmacked.”

Also in the lobby that day was a local singer, Bobby Ward, who says he tagged along with a journalist pal (“Fernando, ironically”). “It’s like yesterday. They walked across the lobby and their clothes were incredible,” he says. “In those days, I was used to putting on different clothes for my stage work but this was on another level. They all walked incredibly slowly because their heels were so high! It gave me time to look at them. But they were quiet. They were probably in their own zone, and I don’t think they spoke a lot of English at the time.”

Abba boarded a coach with the other acts for the short journey along the seafront to the Dome, where the contest was held. By contrast, their rival performers didn’t impress Shevlin. “They were very low-key — in tank-tops and beards and woolly hats,” she says. Later, she’d watch the event from the wings.

“The audience were all in black tie, the ladies in long dresses, and I thought they all looked so old. It was meant to be a pop concert, but they were all silent — it was surreal. When Abba came on, Bjorn had a star-shaped guitar and the girls bounded on like the Andrex puppy and lit the place up.”

Also in the crowd were pop star Leo Sayer, who’d just had a hit with The Show Must Go On, and the man who discovered him, writer/ producer David Courtney. “When I saw Abba in their gaudy, silky outfits, I turned

to Leo and said, ‘Where are this lot from?’ ”

Courtney says. “And he said, ‘That’s the Swedish entry.’ As soon as I heard them perform Waterloo, I said, ‘That’s it, that’s the winner, that’s a hit record.’ In those days none of us had any great desire to go into Eurovision. It was seen as a bit naff. But Abba changed that. I’m a massive Beatles fan — they’re a great rock band — but when you look at Abba’s music, they have to go down as the best pop band of all time.”

Courtney, now 74, later set up a Brighton attraction called the Walk of Fame and inducted Abba on the 30th anniversary of their success. “During my research, I found out that 159 years before they won, the Prince Regent who built the Dome, the future George IV, was enjoying one of his banquets when a messenger arrived on horseback to tell him that Wellington had won the Battle of Waterloo. So it was fated that Abba would win at the Dome!”

That night is now a piece of pop history. “What I witnessed was one of the most famous bands in the world before anyone knew who they were,” says Ward. “No one realised what power they had in their music, and that we’d still be talking about them 50 years on.”

STEPHEN SMITH

Jacqui Shevlin and Bobby Ward’s recollections feature in an exhibition, “Abba: One Week in Brighton”, which is at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery until 4 August

‘My night with the Dancing Queens’

MIKE BATT created the pop band version of the Wombles, who performed at Eurovision. He had a ringside seat when Abba won…

How did you come to be in the Brighton Dome in April 1974?

When the BBC asked if the Wombles would be the interval act, I thought that would be a nice boost for our song. My mum made me a Womble-sized tailcoat, I carried a sign saying, “Vote for the Wombles”, and I presented the hostess Katie Boyle with a rose.

What do you remember of encountering Abba?

I chatted to Agnetha and Frida backstage. The next time they saw me later in the day, I was dressed as Orinoco – slightly fatter and hairier – but with his head off, so they knew it was me.

‘I knew they would win’

NICK INGMAN conducted the UK’s 1974 entry Long Live Love

How did you come to be in the Brighton Dome that April?

My boss at the time, record producer Norrie Paramor, was working with Cliff Richard, and his team had discovered an Australian singer Olivia NewtonJohn. I was asked to arrange her song and conduct the orchestra. Long Live Love wasn’t the strongest choice in our shortlist of songs, and Olivia famously disliked it, but the public had chosen it!

THEY “WON THE WAR”

Abba winning Eurovision on 6 April 1974, pictured with their manager Stig Anderson and conductor Sven-Olof Walldorf.

Right: Olivia Newton-John, singing for the UK, was pictured on the RT cover with Cliff Richard

How did Agnetha end up wearing a Wombles badge for Abba’s performance of Waterloo?

I had some badges for our new song, Remember You’re a Womble so I gave one each to Agnetha and Frida. I didn’t know that Agnetha would pin it to her blue velvet jumpsuit, and so the Wombles had their place in history!

Were you surprised by their victory?

They weren’t the favourites, but there was something about their energy and, from the rehearsals, I knew it was a very catchy record with their sexy, exuberant way of putting it across. After they’d competed, they came backstage and I was with them for the voting. We’d become friends through the day, so I was

and we were all getting very excited as the votes came in. When they won, I felt like I’d shared in their victory.

Did your paths cross again?

We shared a record label, CBS, so I used to run into them all the time. A couple of years later, a huge crowd of us went out for dinner, and by the end of the evening, it was just me and them, and we ended up going on to a disco. It was closed, but they let us in and the owner put Dancing Queen on the sound system. The chaps didn’t want to dance so it was just me, Agnetha and Frida on the dance floor –me and the two dancing queens!

What were your impressions of Abba on the day?

We’d been kept apart from all the other entries, even staying in different hotels. The IRA threat was high and security was tight. I can remember tanks on Brighton’s streets!

So I didn’t see anything of Abba until they appeared on stage.

Did their victory surprise you?

Not in the slightest. Within 40 seconds of them starting I said to my friend, “Well, that’s it.” They just had everything – a great song with a big chorus and glamorous costumes.

Did you predict superstardom?

I’d like to think so, but I’ve worked with some great people, and you never know. I’d like to say, probably.

The UK came joint fourth.

How did you mark the evening?

We all partied afterwards, but by then Olivia had disappeared. She was already in a taxi on her way to Heathrow. She had to fly to America to audition for a film called Grease! CAROLINE FROST

Eurovision 1974 is on iPlayer.

Abba: How They Won Eurovision is Saturday 9.00pm Channel 5

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC

Never mind the songs, the way they handled Shep and Swap Shop shows Abba were a class apart

The things pop stars will do to plug their songs. Never mind the glorious walk down musical memory lane that formed part of last Saturday’s Abba Night on BBC2 marking 50 years since the Swedes’ victory at the Eurovision Song Contest, the bits I enjoyed most were the clips of the group following up their success in Brighton with the hard graft of pop promotion in the UK, surrendering to the rites of what used to pass for mainstream British entertainment with impressive Scandi sangfroid.

Thus the unassuming quartet kept smiling as they were interviewed on The Mike Yarwood Show, their host impersonating Larry Grayson all the while. This came after they’d sat down on the Blue Peter sofa, Bjorn answering the questions while Agnetha stroked Shep, and, beamed live from the “tea bar of the BBC TV Centre”, appeared alongside Noel Edmonds and Keith Chegwin on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Their last ever joint TV appearance also came courtesy of Edmonds on The Late, Late Breakfast Show in 1982. In a memorably awkward interview, they united in denying they would split, but perhaps that was what decided it for them.

So far, so David Cassidy and the Osmonds. But from day one, there was something special about Abba. The romance of two couples, of two wholesome boys who’d won the hearts of their

contrasting goddesses and whose songwriting talents were matched by the ladies’ silky voices, was like something out of a Swedish fairy tale.

For a long time, their simplicity disguised the craft in every chord. Frida once recounted how Benny had come home and played her his first, unpolished version of Dancing Queen: “I cried,” she said. For five years it seemed effortless, until the relationships foundered and the songs stopped being pop and became poetry.

‘Abba’s is a tale of talent and togetherness that transcends the music’

Record producer Pete Waterman has remarked that fans stopped liking Abba when they started writing about their heartbreak. What planet is he on?

For this piece, I asked people for their favourite Abba song, and their diverse, passionate replies tell their own story. My more musically technical friends wax lyrical about the accomplishment of SOS , saying something about syncopation and arpeggios, and have similar praise for The Day Before You Came. I received a

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POP LEGENDS

From left: Bjorn Ulvaeus, Frida Lyngstad, Agnetha Faltskog and Benny Andersson in 1976

three-minute voice message from a DJ friend in Australia describing the impact Voulez-Vous has on the dancefloor, and why. My school pals still soak up the drama of Knowing Me, Knowing You; others enjoy the enigma of Waterloo; dads well up for Slipping Through My Fingers. For me, it’s the generosity of My Love, My Life

It’s more than any one song, though. It’s the contrast between their understated Swedish selves and the huge hearts on display in their songs – their willingness, to coin one of their later offerings, to “let the music speak”. The fact that Bjorn wrote The Winner Takes It All for Agnetha when they were divorcing, and she sang it for him, still fills me with wonder at their creative courage; Frida’s farewell to Benny, When All Is Said and Done, equally so.

Watching them finding their way back to each other after a 40-year gap with 2021’s I Still Have Faith in You makes me want to hug anyone I’ve ever loved. Despite the tunes’ tireless glory, Abba’s is a tale of talent and togetherness that transcends the music. What a joy, what a life, what a chance. Aren’t we lucky they chose us?

BBC2’s Abba Night, including the documentary When Abba Came to Britain, is available now on iPlayer. For more on Abba’s 1974 Eurovision victory, see page 12

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