Books about ABBA and related subjects

Shout Magazine (Melbourne, Australia), September 9, 2001

Why do gay people love Abba so much? That's one of the questions Carl Magnus Palm poses in his latest exploration of the Abba phenomenon, Bright Lights, Dark Shadows, which almost certainly the definitive tome on the rather kitsch Seventies icons who just won't go away.

by Gavin McGuren

Although none of the group were interested in yet another book about them, and declined to be interviewed, Palm is already the authority on the group and has pulled together interviews from his own publications (The Complete Recording Sessions and From Abba to Mamma Mia) as well as collating an enormous amount of material from other publications for Bright Lights. While some of the detail is likely to be of interest only to passionate fans, Palm has managed to create a three dimensional portrait of the terribly private and elusive Swedes.

"I believe copies of the book are on their way to the members of the group now," Palm said last week from Sydney. "I'm not sure how interested they will be. I think they're all a bit tired of the interest in them but they know people are still very interested in them and are going to keep writing about them."

At 554 pages and covering the lives of the four members from birth, the epic work is a remarkable piece of research. "I first started researching Abba around ten years ago. I really grew to like their music and I wanted to write about music," Palm says. "I was very intrigued about them and wanted to know everything about how they worked and to be able to reveal their creative process. They were very happy to talk to me when they realised I wanted to talk to them about their music and not their divorces."

While The Complete Recording Sessions may have been a detailed chronical of the groups musical history, Bright Lights, Dark Shadows does indeed delve into the personal lives of Agnetha Faltskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad - or at least as far as it's possible to dig with the intensely private Swedes.

Although Björn was always the most willing to talk to the media, and Benny the most suspicious, it was Frida and particularly Agnetha who captured the interest of the press and the fans. As people, however, B&B remain aloof in Bright Lights, despite Palm's best efforts. The voices of Abba, on the other hand, become much more three dimensional in Palm's hands.

Palm puts to rest the age-old rumours of screaming "cat fights" and animosity. Neither of the women pull any punches when it comes to talking about their temperamental and very different personalities, but as Palm points out, they could never have worked so closely for so many years if they hated each other as the press loved to speculate. The Abba story is remarkably free of megastar scandal but the tragic and triumphant story of Frida and the sad and apparently regretful life of Agnetha make for compelling reading.

In their time, Abba were endlessly written off as a mechanical, cold and highly artificial group. Palm chronicles the very organic development of the group and the eventual meshing of a musical tour de force with considerable skill. Abba was four remarkable talents that fate brought together, who hated the fame and attention but loved the making of the music. It's the music, according to Palm, which sustains their popularity, and not the camp and kitsch of their image in the early days.

From their childhoods (and before) to the naive enthusiasm of their entry into the execrable Eurovision Song Contest and the final sad notes of The Day Before You Came, Palm offers up detail after detail, some of which will be of interest only to dedicated fans but most of which is well written and compelling. As the authority on Abba, Palm is used to being asked whether he believes the four will ever work together again. "No, I don't think that day will ever come," he says, "They are all in the 50s now and I think they feel that people should remember them for what they were rather than spoil things by getting back together."

As for just why gay people love Abba - not all of them of course - Palm doesn't really have any answers. "As Abba's original fanbase grew into adulthood a disproportionate number of them turned out to be gay men" he says, probably correctly. He speculates on the camp glitter era image, kitschy fashion, mid-period disco sensibility, and of course the huge gay dancefloor hits like 'Dancing Queen', 'Summer Night City' and 'Lay All Your Love On Me' but doesn't touch on Frida's substantial lesbian following or the fact that Agnetha also had such a fanbase who were convinced she was a Sapphic Scandinavian if one is to believe the scandalous Nineties tome The Name of the Game.

In the end he concedes that gay fans were probably largely attracted, like others, by the music - the distinctive (and rather uncool at the time) Abba sound born out of the combination of killer 16-line choruses, innovative production, exotic accents and of course two of the most remarkable voices in the history of pop. Not to mention blue eye shadow.

Bright Lights, Dark Shadows is in stores now, published by Omnibus Press.