There’s something incredible that happens when you listen to an ABBA song; you’d think, at some point, they’d run out of melodies to sing or emotions to detail, but it never seems to happen. The unparalleled heights of their discography (“Dancing Queen”, “Mamma Mia”) stand solid next to their little-known ones of emotional turmoil (“The Visitors”) or self-acceptance (“Me and I”), making them one of the best-selling bands of all time. This magic is missing from Jan Gradvall’s recent book, The Story of ABBA, which meanders around uninteresting anecdotes and unsubstantial music criticism to create a lopsided story of the band.
In many ways, Gradvall seems like the perfect man for the job. He’s a long-working, award-winning Swedish journalist who has appeared in two documentaries about ABBA: Benjamin Whalley’s The Joy of Abba (2013) and Andy Dunn’s Flat Pack Pop: Sweden’s Music Miracle (2019). Gradvall interviewed several people related to the band and was invited to ABBA’s 50th anniversary party.
The Story of ABBA boasts exclusive interviews with Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. These are standalone, wistful mini-profiles of ABBA, decades removed from the band’s heyday. However, Gradvall’s odd approach to the subject reveals itself early. He focuses on seemingly everything except ABBA’s career.
The Story of Abba treats the readers to non sequiturs like the devaluation of the Swedish krona, how ABBA’s music (specifically “Money Money Money”) is relatable for immigrants, Erasure’s mini-EP of ABBA covers, a Vietnamese obsession with their song “Happy New Year”, a long-winded briefing on the 1955 referendum that swapped Sweden’s driving lane from left to right, the differences between Swedish television broadcasts, the dansband and raggae culture the ABBAs grew up in, and ABBA’s integration within the post-punk scene. These often lengthy digressions would be acceptable if they explained some aspect of ABBA’s music, but they don’t, and thus, rarely leave an impression.
One bizarre chapter profiles a brain surgeon who works for 14 hours straight while listening to ABBA. Benny Andersson invites him and the child he operated on to his studio to sing “Thank You for the Music”, which is very nice, but not pertinent. Gradvall also includes a puff piece about Catherine Johnson, the playwright who scripted the Mamma Mia! musical and movie. Another diversion, on ABBA’s legacy, neglects pop superstar Robyn and critically acclaimed producer Max Martin to focus on the boring folk pop duo First Aid Kit and 1990s group A-Teens, a former ABBA cover band that had to change their name (ABBA Teens) after a strict but kind phone call from Andersson.
Only in the acknowledgements does Gradval justify this method: “It is perfectly fine,” he writes, “to skip the linking passages included in a traditional biography and just focus on what you — I — find most interesting.” However, this choice not only makes the preceding material worse in hindsight but also significantly weakens his skills as a biographer. Readers may feel as if they’ve deliberately been led astray.
In a further indictment of Gradval’s (supposed) critical ear, he laments that “Several obvious Abba classics are missing” from the band’s greatest hits album, ABBA Gold: “Ring Ring”, “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do”, “Hasta Mañana”, “Eagle”, and “The Day Before You Came”. Ah, those legendary hits! Arguing about a band’s best songs is par for the course for music journalists, but one must be realistic.
Reading The Story of Abba brought to mind Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024), a superior biography that winds around the legacy of Mitchell, her contemporaries, and her missteps, while focusing on her 40-year career and the music that defined it. ABBA, whose discography (minus one recent comeback) is confined within a ten-year period, should have been much easier to pin down, but Gradvall opts to focus on road politics and Vietnam. In a typical biography, I’d probably permit around ten pages that are completely unrelated to the subject. The Story of ABBA has about 100.
To Gradvall’s credit, the chapters focusing on ABBA are lovely. Most of the band has shied away from the public since their informal split after 1981, but they clearly feel comfortable with Gradvall. He details how Frida (Anni-Frid Lyngstad) was born to a Swedish woman and a German soldier who fled during the height of WWII; her mother was ridiculed and people hurled “German baby” and “Nazi spawn” at Frida while she was in a stroller.
We learn that Björn Ulvaeus uses hypnosis and running to dissect his relationships with his parents. Benny Andersson continues to make music, most recently an album of birdsong. Agnetha Fältskog, after releasing a reissue of her album A in 2023, is perfectly content living a life of solitude with her pets. The rest of The Story of ABBA, is littered with mini-facts that even obsessive fans might not know about — the ABBAs were famous in Sweden prior to the band, making it a supergroup; “Le Freak” was originally titled “Fuck off!”; “Dancing Queen” was “Boogaloo”; cymbals were prohibited in ABBA recording sessions, with the exception of “Dancing Queen”.
Some of Gradval’s minor plots are worth the read for informative sentences like “An underground movement emerged in Nazi Germany, ‘Swing Kids,’ or Swing-Jugend, young people who rebelled against Hitler’s directives by dressing in extravagant fashions and listening to American jazz.” Still, it’s not enough to bolster a book about ABBA that’s not about ABBA. “So, where does Abba’s melancholia originate?” he begins a chapter on page 297, forgetting the thesis and subtitle of the book in question.
Gradvall might be a skilled journalist, but with The Story of ABBA, he appears to be a weak writer. On their greatest hits record, for example, he writes, “Abba Gold starts with ‘Dancing Queen’, followed by ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘Take a Chance on Me’, ‘Mamma Mia’ — and so on — and when the album is capped with ‘Waterloo’, the sound of which sets itself apart from the other songs and is harder to fit between two songs, you as a listener are convinced that pop music can’t possibly sound any better.” This analysis — if it can be called that — is astoundingly flimsy.
It gets worse when he discusses Arrival, Abba’s star-making 1976 record: “My god. Then the harmonies. This is pop music in its purest form. When I was thirteen years old and heard it for the first time I felt there was no way it could possibly get any better. I was wrong. Because then came the next track, ‘Dancing Queen.’” It sounds as if his 13-year-old self had written it.
To ABBA fans like me, The Story of ABBA is disappointing; you’d likely be better off reading their Wikipedia page. Another factoid: ABBA was a guilty pleasure when they were rising, an embarrassing band to enjoy, which led magazine writer Pete Paphides to say, “I would not let anyone criticize ABBA. I recall that I thought, okay, you guys will seem cooler, but I will have a lot more fun,” which is maybe the clearest distillation of the Abba ethos in the whole book.
The Story of Abba is meandering, vague, and uncharitable to the reader. It’s less a story about the band and more an incomplete picture, told by someone who won’t put a plot together.