Mikory's ABBA-blog

ABBA Pic of the Day

Björn and Benny's luxury cars stolen

An organized crime ring of car thieves are stealing luxury cars in Sweden.  Since July of this year more than 40 cars have been stolen - in Stockholm alone, the police says. The cars that are stolen are all luxury cars that cost between SEK 500.000 up to SEK 1.000.000. Because of these high prices these are not usual Swedes that can afford them so most owners are celebrities or CEOs.

     Among the ones who has had their cars stolen are Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. Björn owned a Lexus 600 and Benny had a Porsche Cayenne. The police suspects that the stolen cars end up in Russia with new, false documents.

1971 Björn and Agnetha "We will have one child of our own - the rest we will adopt!"

From Året Runt 1971

July's wedding couple Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus say:

"We will have one child of our own - the rest we will adopt!

This year Svensktoppen-couple is Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus. She is 21 and he is 26. They are going to have an oldfashioned wedding in Verum Church i northern Skåne on July the 6th. And have a big party afterwards in Vittsjö.

     Then they will split up in August. That thing about splitting up is not as serious as it sounds. This young and well singing couple will only split up artistically. Apart from that they really live up to the Svensktoppen ideal; kind, sweet, blonde and Swedish. And also very aware of what is going on in the world. Like all modern young people.

     Björn Ulvaeus began his career in Hootenanny Singers with Västervik as their base. Many years has passed since then. Back then he wanted to write music and create something new, something better than that year's best - The Kingston Trio.

     Then he met a guy called Benny Andersson, who was an exmember of Hep Stars, piano player and songwriter. The two started working together and quickly made it with songs on Svensktoppen.

     At the same time Agnetha Fältskog was sitting at home and listened to Björn, to Hootenanny Singers and to the team Andersson/Ulvaeus' melodies. And slowly started writing songs herself. Then she came, saw and conquered! She met Björn and two hearts started to beat as one.

     Soon Agnetha and Björn started to work together and the duo became a quartet when Benny Andersson brought his fiancée Anni-Frid Lyngstad to the mix.

     But now, a year later, Benny and Anni-Frid has split up artistically and the same thing will happen to Björn and Agnetha this autumn.

      - We're afraid to end up in the same situation as Svenne and Lotta who can't work separately anymore. Svenne Hedlund and his Lotta has, as everyone knows, has established themselves as a couple on aswell as off stage.

      Björn and Agnetha's church wedding plans almost fell apart. When they called the assistant vicar Uno Wardener, who will marry them, he asked them about their professions.

     - We are artists, said Björn.

     - If you are atheists Verum Church is not the right place for you to get married, said the assistant vicar who misheard what Björn said. The misunderstanding was soon cleared up though.

      Agnetha Fältskog:

      - We will have one child of our own - then we will adopt the rest.

      Björn Ulvaeus:

      - Naturally we want a child of our own if we can have one. But the world around us is filled with poverty and need, and it's just natural that we should do what we can to help. Unfortunately adoptions take a very long time. But we have planned to travel to Peru or some other country in Southamerica to see if that would speed up things.. With thousands of starving children all over the world we have to take a responsibility, make a difference. And also we love children - no matter where they are from.

ABBA Pic of the Day

ABBA Pic of the Day

1972 "The Svensktoppen-couple are expecting their baby!"

This article comes from the weekly magazine "Allers" in 1972. Thanks to Monica for sending it to me.

Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus are expecting. Their first child will be born in February.

     -       If it’s a boy or a girl doesn’t matter. But naturally we both think that little girls are really cute.

     Agnetha spends her time waiting with songwriting for a new album she is soon going to record.

-         It will be my fifth album and it’s really exciting.
I will write all of the music and some of the lyrics.

     When Agnetha isn’t working with her album she is eating raw carrots and drinking lemonade.

-         It’s amazing how tasty it is!

     As soon as Agnetha found out that she was pregnant she started knitting baby socks. Right now she is working on a babysuit.

-         You can by no means say that I’m very handy. But it’s such fun to make some stuff for the baby myself.

     Agnetha’s and Björn’s baby will be the first grandchild in the family.

-         Everyone is really engaged. Björn’s father is making a cradle, his mother crochets a baby blanket and Agnetha’s mother is sewing tiny, cute outfits.

     Agnetha and Björn also has a small dog, a French bulldog called Ada.

-         She is blissfully unaware about what is going to happen. But we hope that she will accept the new member of the family. I’m sure it will be fine if we spend time with her as well as with the baby.

     Agnetha and Björn are not planning to raise their child with the help of any babybooks.

-         We believe that you come a long way with lots of love. I really hope we are going to be good parents. That our child feels that it always can come to us with its problems and joy.

-         What characteristics that you and Björn have would you like your baby to inherit?

-         Naturally I hope that our child will be musical. Singing and music is such a joy. And I want the little one to get Björn’s happy temperament. For myself I have something that I value very highly. I’m extremely stubborn when I believe in something and when I know that I’m right.

Good luck, Agnetha and Björn! We are hoping you get a little girl with lots of humour and a big portion of stubbornness.

 

You Have To Be There from Kristina

I really like this song cleverly put together with scenes from the Swedish movies "Utvandrarna" and "Nybyggarna". Liv Ullman brilliantly portrays Kristina.

Kristina: A New Musical from the ABBA Guys

(Time) Some of the most rapturous melodies ever heard in Carnegie Hall poured out of that grand old barn last night. The occasion was the first English-language production of Kristina, a musical based on the four Emigrants novels by Wilhelm Moberg. Spanning two continents and the Atlantic in between, the three-hour epic has all the makings of a thrilling stage experience: noble peasants, dying children, powerful voices, the dream of a new land. Most of all, a superb score. No wonder that, at the end, cheers and a standing ovation greeted Kristina's creators: two spangled Swedes, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus — once, and always, the guys from ABBA. Where have Benny and Bjorn been? Well, their music has been on Broadway, eight times a week for the past eight years, and in theaters around the world. Mamma Mia!, the show based on Andersson and Ulvaeus' ABBA songbook, has been the major theatrical hit of the past decade and an international blockbuster of a movie. But those tunes are old; ABBA burst on the scene in 1974 by winning the Eurovision competition withWaterloo, and the quartet — Andersson, Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — lasted eight more years, breaking up in 1982. Then what? The lads did what songwriters like Irving Berlin and the Gershwins used to do after proving themselves on the pop charts: they wrote a Broadway-style musical.

Teaming with lyricist Tim Rice (who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita with Andrew Lloyd Webber), they produced Chess as a two-disc album in 1984. The stage version spawned three Top 10 hits — "One Night in Bangkok," "Nobody's Side" and "I Know Him So Well" — and impressed many listeners as having the richest score of the decade. Or, he added defiantly, any decade since. Andersson, who had shown a mastery of the pop idiom as composer of the music for the ABBA songs (Ulvaeus wrote the words), tapped a symphonic romanticism that wedded Richard Rodgers to the brassier modern idiom. The Andersson-Ulvaeus partnership was poised to dominate Broadway.

Instead, they went home, where Andersson had an even more ambitious idea: to compose Kristina fran Duvemala (Kristina from Duvemala) as a sung-through national epic, in a style that would span folk tunes, symphonies and musical theater. Ulvaeus, adapting the Moberg novels — which had served as the source for two popular Swedish films in the '70s, The Emigrants and The New Land — also had a radical notion: for the first time in his career, he'd write his lyrics in his native language.

In 1995 this lush pop opera was released, once again as a concert album. Nearly four hours long and containing a staggering 39 songs, the piece was staged in Stockholm in 1997 and ran for nearly four years. The three-disc CD topped the local charts but was never issued abroad. Herbert Kretzmer, who had anglicized the French musical Les Misérables, worked with Andersson and Ulvaeus on an English translation, yet despite the seismic success of Mamma Mia!, the new show never left Sweden.

But here it was, last night, at Carnegie Hall, played before the blondest, most Scandinavian audience likely to be assembled in New York City, except, perhaps, for a Prairie Home Companion performance. And what a treat people got; there's nothing like the spectacle of nearly a hundred singers and musicians gathered on a famous stage to present a work that deserves to be renowned. Sung in English and trimmed by about an hour (losing a few favorite numbers in the process), this Kristina may not have the sweep and sonic magnificence of the album, but it's still likely to be the definitive reading of the new version.

Set in the 1840s and '50s, it focuses on the lives of Kristina (powerfully sung here, as on the original album and on the Stockholm stage, by Helen Sjoholm) and her husband Karl-Oskar (Russell Watson, the Salford factory worker known in England as "the people's tenor"). Nearly starved by crop failures in their native Smaland, Karl-Oskar and his brother Robert (Kevin Oderkirk, who earned vigorous shouts with each of his numbers) resolve to leave the land their ancestors have farmed for a thousand years and go to America. Despite Kristina's severe reservations, that's what they do, accompanied by Ulrika (Louise Pitre, the original Broadway mother in Mamma Mia!), the town whore who becomes Kristina's closest friend. In Minnesota, life is nearly as harsh; the characters are still buffeted and bullied by fate. Essentially stoic, passive characters, Kristina and the others triumph by surviving — by outliving their plagues and tribulations — until they don't. Endurance is heroism.

Jumping from one crisis to another, Kristina may prove not only too epic but too episodic — and far too dour — for a Broadway audience. The age of the serious musicals, your Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera, ended abruptly when The Producers and Mamma Mia! showed that theatergoers preferred perky, gaudy, old-fashioned musical comedies. But Kristina should find a constituency among those who love hearing wonderful music sung by gifted voices. If any naughty folks last night recorded the show, they should immediately post some of its instant classics: Robert's devastating solo "Gold Can Turn to Sand," the rollicking girl-group number "American Man," the anthemish "Summer Rose" and a whole sheaf of romantic duets, the most memorable of which is Kristina's and Karl-Oskar's "I'll Be Waiting There." Not to bring the show to the stage — or at least to a CD or a DVD of this concert — would deprive audiences of the most luscious score since ... well, Chess.

About a decade ago, one promoter offered ABBA a billion dollars, easily turned down, for a reunion tour. But the group was nowhere near as notable for its onstage electricity, for the performing verve and preposterous costumes, as for its songs. Now that Kristina seems headed for a fuller life in the West End or on Broadway, ABBA fans — all lovers of irresistible tunes that lodge in your internal iTunes and never go away — may have one more chance to tell Benny and Bjorn, "Thank you for the music."

ABBA Pic of the Day

ABBA couple reunite for every festive season - for grandkids

They might have got divorced nearly 29 years ago, but former ABBA couple Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog still reunite every festive season for the sake of their two young grandchildren.

The stars married in 1971 and had two kids, Linda and Christian, before their divorce in 1980.

Although both have remarried, they still remain close for the sake of Linda’s kids, eight-year-old Tilda and Esther, two.

“I see Agnetha quite often because we have two grandchildren together and they want both Grandma and Grandpa there at Christmas and things like that,” the Daily Express quoted Ulvaeus as telling Hello! magazine.