ABBA blog

I am happy and excited to announce my next ABBA book – or rather, series of ABBA books, as I intend to explore, in detail, the history of ABBA's live shows 1973–1981. It's something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and now, finally, the stars have aligned and I have the time to get to grips with it.

PROJECT BACKGROUND
Some of my ABBA fan friends in London will remember a visit almost 20 years ago when I told them that I was going to write a book about ABBA’s live concerts. This was 2006, and I genuinely believed that this was going to be my next project. Those friends opened their archives to me: I remember visiting a number of them at their homes to borrow or study newspaper and magazine cuttings from ABBA’s heyday. I also spent several hours at the British Library’s newspaper archive, which at the time was located in Colindale, retrieving a number of interesting and long-forgotten articles related to ABBA’s concerts in the UK.

Despite ABBA themselves sometimes doubting their qualities as a live act, as indeed did many reviewers at the time – using bona fide rock shows by acts like The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin as their yardstick – I never had any doubts about the viability of a series of books about the group's history as concert performers. This was confirmed during that London trip in 2006, when three different fans, independent of each other, told me how upset and offended they had been by the Daily Express' review of ABBA's first Wembley show in November 1979 – especially the headline, which they still remembered verbatim: "OH, ABBA! What a damp squib for Bonfire Night." I could feel how they travelled back in time to their teenage selves and their strong feelings about the group they had fallen in love with back then. It rammed home that, whatever anyone else thought, ABBA's live concerts meant a great deal to the people who were there to watch them.

For various reasons, the live book project was put on the backburner, but, over the past two decades it has never been far from my mind. When I’ve been doing other ABBA research, I have obviously come across facts and stories about their tours, and this has been filed away in various folders related to the subject. I am now sitting on plenty of information about ABBA’s live concerts, and I can’t wait to do further research and then try to make sense of it all in book form.

THE BOOKS
So far, I have crowdfunded two ABBA books – again: thank you to all who supported ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions and ABBA On Record, to the benefit of everyone who’s interested in in-depth books about those aspects of the group's story – and I will do that for this live book project as well.

I have come to realise that the single volume I envisioned back in 2006 will simply not be feasible. For one thing, although ABBA didn’t tour very much, at least not compared with other 1970s mega stars, they still did quite a few concerts between 1973 and 1981. And since readers will want to see plenty of pictures from the shows, it would be impossible to house all the photographs and all the information in one volume.

After thinking long and hard about it, I’ve decided to put together several volumes, so that I can really splash out on the illustrations, and also finish the books a lot quicker. This is how I envision this series.

Volume 1: The 1973 folkpark tour of Sweden

Volume 2: The 1974–1975 tours of European countries & Swedish folkparks

Volume 3: The 1977 tour of Europe & Australia

Volume 4: The 1979 tour of North America & Europe

Volume 5: The 1980 tour of Japan + the Dick Cavett 1981 live concert

There may be an additional volume of the pre-1973 live shows (Festfolk etc.), but I don't want to commit to that at this stage.

Now, I hear you questioning why the 1980 tour of Japan is not included in the 1979 volume – after all, that tour was basically an extension of the 1979 tour. The answer is simple: I want to include plenty of information and photographs in these volumes, and that’s why it’s necessary to keep them manageable in every sense of the word. I don’t think it would benefit anyone, least of all the interested reader, if I had to leave out information and photographs from those tours just to keep it all in one volume. With the inclusion of the live performance on the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA television special, there will also be something of an "ABBA in the 1980s" theme to the volume.

There have, of course, been one-off live performances by ABBA on television programmes, and these will be mentioned in the books. By "live performances" I mean, for instance, the two songs performed with a live backing band on the 1976 ABBA-dabba-dooo!! television special, or the brief renditions of Thank You For The Music on a couple of 1982 programmes. Playback and singback performances are not the kind of appearances discussed in these books.

SIZE AND FORMAT
I intend to publish these books in the same size and format as ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions (2017 edition) and ABBA On Record, so that they become a part of a “Carl Magnus Palm Self-Published ABBA Book Library”. The paper quality will be the same type of glossy paper as in ABBA On Record. However, there will not be any dust covers, as these are too susceptible to damage in shipping.

THE FIRST VOLUME
The first book in this series is the 1973 volume. I will write more about that in a blog post in a few days. Watch this space...