It’s hard to remember a time when ABBA weren’t the world-conquering titans that they are today.
With 350m record sales to their name, their songs have soundtracked weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and even funerals for as long as I can remember – but they haven’t always been regarded as classic pop heroes. Though they’ve since enjoyed something of a critical renaissance, fuelled by a series of playful covers by Erasure in the Nineties, and the Mamma Mia! films a decade later, it hasn’t always been this way. Back in the day, some viewed the Swedish four-piece as uber-cheesy and desperately uncool.
Putting substantial focus on the initial backlash, this new documentary, created by Rogan Productions and directed by the BAFTA-winning James Rogan, is an interesting way to approach the story of one of the best-known pop groups of all time: digging into the difficulties they had in breaking through, and looking at the challenges that persisted for pretty much their entire careers.
Our starting point is the Eurovision Song Contest, which the band won in 1974 with their slam-dunk single Waterloo... only to be met with a lukewarm reception from the Brits (who hosted) and those back in their home country of Sweden.
“Even if it the song was number one... if you’re a part of Eurovision, you’re dead afterwards,” ABBA’s Benny Andersson says at one point, with Björn Ulvaeus adding, “it was like an agreement amongst all DJs, amongst everyone.”
Nevertheless, the group persisted, and what unfolds is a fascinating reconstruction of what it was like to be ABBA before they became the global phenomenon we know today. We see archival footage of anti-ABBA protests happening in Sweden, the band’s months-long tour of Australia (which was an early outlier in its enthusiastic embrace of the band) and snippets of the relentless scrutiny they faced in the press.
Despite their huge fame, there are plenty of reasons not to envy ABBA, it turns out. For every sold-out stadium, there were men asking Agnetha Fältskog how it feels to have been voted owner of “the sexiest bottom in the world”. The band’s gruelling travel schedule that meant her children didn’t recognise her (or her then-husband, Ulvaeus) when they returned from yet another world tour.
In part, this story is told using archive interviews with ABBA over the course of their careers, lending the whole thing a pleasingly intimate feel – even if we’ve heard many of these insights before.
Along the way, talking heads such as broadcaster Paul Gambaccini, Chic singer Nile Rodgers and former members of the team’s hair and make up team also join from the present-day to offer up their own experiences and memories of meeting the band. .
Does the documentary reveal anything new? Not really: how can it, when so much of the most revealing footage and interviews is archival? But there are still fascinating nuggets here – the fact that the Sex Pistols, for instance, had a roadie whose entire job consisted of repeatedly flipping an ABBA cassette and replaying it (they were huge fans, apparently).
It’s also interesting hearing more about how difficult ABBA found it to break America, running themselves ragged in front of a largely sceptical music press – before, at the documentary’s culmination, heading back to a hero’s welcome in the UK and a sold-out Wembley Arena (no wonder, when ABBA Voyage rolled around, it was built in London rather than Los Angeles).
And even fifty years after they burst onto the world stage, Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Anni-Frid are still great company. Sit back and let the music play.
