It comes as something of a surprise, 22 pages into The Book of ABBA, to find yourself reading about Heinrich Himmler. But there he is, in between a description of how Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus met and an explanation of the youth cult raggare, Sweden’s answer to rockers or greasers (the raggare’s 60s band of choice were the Hep Stars, featuring a pre-Abba Benny Andersson, surely the least likely musician in history to have once provided soundtrack for leather-clad, booze-fuelled gang warfare). There are details of Himmler’s “breeding policy”, lebensborn, and of its influence on both the plot of Hiroshima Mon Amour and a grim sub-genre of porny Nazi-centric pulp fiction that proliferated after the second world war.
There is, it should be noted, a link between all this and Abba – Anni-Frid Lyngstand’s mother was Norwegian and her father a member of the occupying German army – but, nevertheless, notice is served that Melancholy Undercover is not the book you might expect. A series of essays rather than a chronological history, it certainly covers all the bases, from Eurovision to the groundbreaking “virtual concert” Voyage, alongside global success on a scale even more staggering than you might have realised: Abba, it turns out, were huge in 70s Afghanistan, and so big in Vietnam that one journalist suggests their profoundly morose 1980 track Happy New Year is “probably the [country’s] most revered song … after the national anthem”.
