It makes now as good a time as any to pose the question: Just what kept the interest in this odd Swedish experiment in pop going for all these years? With Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a sequel-prequel to the 2008 blockbuster based on the smash 1991 musical opening in theaters, and plans for the band to release two new songs and reunite as holograms (yes, holograms) for a tour next year, it's clear ABBA isn't going anywhere. Now, more than four decades later, ABBA’s musical legacy is no longer so easy to dismiss. At the time, their sound had not yet fully jelled it would take songwriters and instrumentalists Ulvaeus and Andersson another go before they totally cracked the DNA that made ABBA, well, ABBA. When Patrick saw the television special, ABBA was playing the hits off of its 1975 self-titled album. After a newly minted name change to ABBA, the band returned to try its luck in the competition again the following year, belting out "Waterloo” on stage in a history-making April night to win the 1974 Eurovision, placing them on a path to ’70s megastardom with smashes like “Dancing Queen” and “Super Trouper.” Soon, they were getting airplay for their early hit "Ring Ring," which they sang in 1973 for the Swedish qualifying competition for the international music competition Eurovision. They struggled to break through until they re-formed with a new sound and a new formula that highlighted the vocals of Fältskog and Lyngstad. He wrote it, he says, because he felt someone ought to.ĪBBA, the acronym derived from the first names of band members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad, started off as a 1970 Swedish cabaret act named Festfolk. It's an exhaustive literary effort that shows the substance of a band whose critical merit has long been dismissed by the cultural gatekeepers. Now a professional cellist and arranger in his own right, in 2008, he published ABBA Let The Music Speak, which chronicles the entirety of ABBA’s musical landscape. ![]() He still has that cassette, as well as an impressive discography of ABBA’s music. “I went to get my little cassette recorder, a little tiny thing, and stuck it in front on a stool to record,” he remembers. It was the first time Patrick had heard them play, and he was transfixed. Reluctant travelers from the get go, the Swedish quartet had finally agreed to fly across the globe for a television special in a nation that implausibly had become fixated on the northern European pop band. Patrick, 13, knew he wasn’t going anywhere that night. ![]() The sounds of ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” filled the room. It was March 1976 in Queensland, Australia, and as Chris Patrick’s family prepared for their evening out, someone in the household had left the television on. The plan was to see The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the fifth film in the Peter Sellers detective comedy franchise.
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