#Abba #turns #party #Abba #SVT
Not going to “A party for Abba”
Updated 06.54 | Published 05.59
share-arrowDela
unsaveSpara
On the day 50 years after the victory with “Waterloo”, Abba will be celebrated grandly on Saturday – but without the members themselves. Since the break-up in 1982, they have been seen together extremely sparingly and turned down almost everything.
You don’t want to get a call from Benny Andersson where he says: “that’s wrong,” explains the producer Carl Falk when Miriam Bryant will put the first lines in SVT’s tribute video “Thank you for the music”.
Benny Andersson finally sat down at the grand piano seconds after initially saying no to appearing in the video, which premiered on March 25.
– I was a bit reluctant and said “no, I don’t think so”, but then I heard what they did and how everyone sings and it was so nice. It’s not just the melody, it’s all the harmonization and all the “fillsen”, he says in the background film, also on SVT Play.
expand-left
full screen In May 2022, the digital performance “Abba voyage” premiered in London and the members of the group were there to see younger versions of themselves as avatars. Archive image. Photo: Alberto Pezzali/AP/TT
No to everything
But for the live gala “A party for Abba” at Cirkus in Stockholm on April 6, he will not come. “Agnetha, Frida, Björn and Benny have jointly decided to turn down all requests in connection with the anniversary,” announced their manager Gorel Hanser earlier this spring. Benny Andersson also said no thanks to a reunion at Eurovision in Malmö in May.
– I don’t want to, he said in an interview on BBC Newsnight, following a familiar pattern.
In 1999, they turned down offers for a world tour that would have given them billions, according to Aftonbladet. Nor at a tribute concert in 2012 in London, were they seen together.
– No one has asked us and if someone did, we will say no, said Benny Andersson in the TV show “Friday night with Jonathan Ross”.
The organizers of a British exhibition 200 years after the Battle of Waterloo only wanted to borrow a single from the Abba museum but were refused. “It is not of interest to participate in an exhibition about war,” the band explained, emphasizing that the song is not about the battle itself, but about a person facing his own Waterloo.
expand-left
full screen On April 6, 1974, Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton and was photographed together with producer Stikkan Andersson and conductor Sven-Olof Walldoff, who dressed up as Napoleon. Photo: AP/TT
Strategically yes
In connection with the new record 2021, they only appeared briefly on video clips from inside the studio. It was instead at the premiere of the digital show “Abba voyage” in London that they posed for the photographers.
Saturday’s tribute gala is certainly nice, but produced by others and doesn’t really have much to do with the Abba members themselves, reasons the Abba connoisseur Carl-Magnus Palm.
– If everyone in Abba is to participate, it must be something they produced themselves, he says.
Why?
– It’s incredible that there is still demand for a group that shut down 42 years ago. But I understand very well their need to be themselves, not a quarter of Abba.
FACT
Abbas reunions
After the split in 1982, Abba reunited in 1986 to briefly perform “Tivedshambo” in SVT’s “Här är ditt liv” in an episode dedicated to the group’s producer Stikkan Andersson.
At the Swedish gala premiere of the feature film “Mamma mia!” In 2008, they were seen together, as well as at the premiere of “Mamma mia! The party” in 2016 when they did a spontaneous group wave to the audience.
In 2022, they met the public in connection with the premiere of the digital performance “Abba voyage” in London.
Read more
