THE STORY OF ABBA

A wide-ranging cultural study of the Swedish pop icons.

This book by Swedish music journalist Gradvall is comprehensive—he had access to all four ABBA members—but structurally irreverent, taking its cues from Craig Brown’s history-in-fragments method. So rather than start with biographies of each member (songwriters Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad), it opens with the group’s collapse in 1982, filtered through its single “The Day Before You Came,” then skips to an exploration of Sweden’s dansbandvocal music before hopscotching around its key musical moments and influences. Good strategy: It shakes the stiffness out of a music biography of a pop group that was a little off-kilter, from the broken English of its lyrics to the lurking somberness of even its jauntiest tunes. (The book’s subtitle, Melancholy Undercover, refers to Andersson’s assessment of the predominant characteristic of their music.) Gradvall’s approach also reveals unusual moments for a group that seemed carefully machined: the tweaks to Eurovision contest rules that made “Waterloo” their first major hit, the tensions between dansbandand the ersatz-American raggareculture that the group exploited, the importance of LGBTQ+ culture in keeping the group relevant after their breakup, the backlash against the group as pompous and irrelevant when Sweden’s politics took a leftward turn, and various odd cultural collisions (to make a 1977 Australian tour viable, they agreed to a kind of cultural exchange program that made AC/DC big in Sweden). Despite all the interviews, the “Abbas” (as he calls them) remain somewhat mysterious, avoiding details about divorces and other matters that might tamper too much with their legacy. But the story is leavened by Gradvall’s personal observations of how influential the group was in their native country, especially their breakthrough 1976 album, Arrival, which “sounds as if the sun had signed a record contract.”

A fun, thorough, and considered appreciation of a major pop act.