ABBA, Les débuts

La Suède est un petit pays où les gens qui habitent la même rue se rencontrent un jour ou l'autre.

Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad. et BjornUlvaeus, quatre personnages de la scène suédoise, se rencontrent en 1965. Il représentaient la nouvelle génération de musiciens pop.

Des horizons nouveaux s'ouvrirent en Suède. Les Hootenanny Singers furent créés en 1963. Ce groupe, très Kingston Trio, fit revivre de vieilles ballades suédoises et des chansons folk. Le leader du groupe était Bjorn Ulvaeus.

Les groupes Rock poussèrent comme des champignons; l'un deux classé comme "pseudo-américain" était les Hep Stars avec Benny Andersson au piano. Ces compositions donnèrent aux Hep Starsleur image des années '60. Benny Andersson rencontra BjornUlvaeus. Anni-Frid Lyngstad fit ses débuts en 1967 après des années comme chanteuse amateur de jazz avec de petits orchestres de danse. Le succès ne fut pas facile et il lui fallut travailler avec acharnement loin de ses enfants et de son mari. En 1969, elle rencontra Benny Andersson. Bjorn rencontra Agnetha Faltskog à ses débuts, alors qu'à dix-huit ans elle composaitdes chansons et chantait.

Après de longues années de travailde studio anonyme, Michel B. Trotte pouvait finalement réaliser ses rêves lesplus fous avec Bjorn, Benny et Stig. Les couvertures de disques l'appellent "l'homme derrière la musique d'ABBA". "Nous travaillons la même musique. Nous formons une bonne équipe. Nous n'avons aucune inhibition en ce qui concerne la technologie sauvage. A mon avis, ABBA est le meilleur groupe dans cette branche," dit Trotte lors d'une interview.

Narcisa Stoian
"Al. I. Cuza" National College, Focsani
Romania

The Story of ABBA

Abba is a pop quartet formed in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. The band officially disbanded in the early 80s. The members were, Frida Lyngstad (vocals), Agnetha Faltskog (vocals), Benny Anderson (keyboards), and Bjorn Ulvaeus (guitar). 

Group formed in Stockholm, 1972; released internationally successful series of pop-rock recordings. Abba was a 1970s Swedish pop group that achieved unprecedented worldwide success. The group specialized in light love songs with instantly memorable musical "hooks" and cultivated a cheery pop style that rarely permitted the exploration of serious themes. Some of Abba's music was aimed at dancers, and when popular taste shifted toward the pulsing dance music called disco at the end of the decade, it was easy for the group to exploit the trend. 

The group's name, which was sometimes spelled with all capital letters, was an acronym formed from the initial letters of the first names of each of its members. Agnetha Faltskog, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid ("Frida") Lyngstad were all active in the Swedish pop music business while they were still teenagers.

Abba's first hit came with the singsong "Ring Ring" in 1973, but the group's success was cemented the following year when the song "Waterloo" was named the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual program televised in 32 countries and watched by hundreds of millions of people. "Waterloo" was released as a single and rocketed to top chart levels in many countries, reaching number six in the United States. 

Throughout the 1970s, Abba was a consistent generator of worldwide chart successes, and while Andersson and Ulvaeus aimed more at entertainment than at rock "authenticity" in their writing, their compositions were always original and sharp, drawing on a large variety of pop music traditions.

"Money, Money, Money" had the dark cynicism of German composer Kurt Weill's satiric cabaret songs. "The Name of the Game" expertly manipulated major and minor harmonies to depict a romance in its breathless opening stages. And "Dancing Queen," though it treated a subject no more profound than a 17-year- old girl on a dance floor, vividly captured the moment when a dancer becomes the center of attention to everyone around her. "Dancing Queen" brought Abba its only American Number One early in 1977. 

Abba's multitrack recording equipment was state-of-the-art in its time, and producer Stig Anderson, like the Beatles' producer George Martin, was sometimes referred to as a fifth member of the group. An Abba tour was a major undertaking, for it was difficult to recreate the band's sound in live performance. Abba's lush production values, blending, strings, keyboards, and synthesized sounds with the electronically modified voices of the group's two female vocalists have been likened to those of pioneering American pop producer Phil Spector and his "wall of sound." 

Abba entered the 1980s with another string of hits, including "The Winner Takes It All" and "Super Trouper." But the latter song, which deals with the rigors of touring, might have taken root in tensions that divided the group at the time.

Several of Abba's pieces in the early 1980s were complicated structures that seemed as if they could come to life as part of a live stage musical. The title track of the 1981 LP The Visitors was a long, free-form depiction of a woman's mental breakdown; "The Day Before You Came" (1983), one of the group's last single releases, completely lacked a chorus melody and more closely resembled a dramatic speech set to music than a simple piece of dance pop.

Abba's deep reservoir of public support made them a natural for revival when popular taste shifted back to sonically inventive dance pop in the early 1990s. A greatest hits package, Gold, stayed at Number One on many of Billboard's European charts for months on end, and in late 1993 Time reported that the Abba revival was "surfacing fast in America" as well.