After winning 1974's Eurovision Song Contest with their song "Waterloo," ABBA catapulted to fame, capturing hearts across the globe with their melodic and ever-so-catchy pop songs. It’s a band that needs no introduction, but I’ll offer one anyway, ABBA emerging victorious from the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’, quickly catapulted to fame, capturing hearts across the world over the next few years with their melodic, ever-so-catchy pop songs.

I considered starting this feature/interview with the line, ‘Ring, ring, I stare at the phone on the wall’ as a build-up to tracking down Carl Magnus Palm, seen as the world’s leading historian for a certain legendary pop quartet from his home nation. The book is also full of fantastic photographs of the quartet - from their lives before ABBA, during and after. In 2021, after a forty-year hiatus, the band released a new album Voyage, and announced an accompanying concert featuring their digital avatars, dubbed "ABBAtars. After winning 1974’s Eurovision Song Contest with their song “Waterloo,” ABBA catapulted to fame, capturing hearts across the globe with their melodic and ever so catchy pop songs.A decade on, the ABBA Gold greatest hits compilation became a global bestseller, then in 1999 their music was adapted into successful musical Mamma Mia! I mean, the group’s real 50th anniversary – when they started recording together English language pop songs – is this year, because it was 1972. Depicting the group as they appeared in 1977 in a motion-capture hologram show held in the ABBA Arena, a purpose-built venue within East London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, their 22-song set each night included two singles from their comeback LP and plenty of old hits. And this companion volume has expanded to be very much a book in itself, and it’s taking much, much longer than I had hoped for.

Even my teenage daughters love Abba and because I knew next to nothing about them I couldn’t wait to read this book. among 20 top-10 singles – including classic hits such as ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘The Winner Takes It all’, ‘Super Trouper’ and ‘Take a Chance on Me’. They’re like The Beatles now, in the sense that they’re part of the culture … it’s a reference point, it’s everything else, you know. It was a bit of a challenge, because I’m used to writing these really detailed books, but I only had 45,000 words, because that’s what they asked for … although I extended it to 50,000.But the 1990s ushered in a new wave of ABBA appreciation, and their music found favor again in modern popular culture. In addition to revisiting the ABBA songs I also looked up and listened to many songs by artists I was barely or even unfamiliar with (mostly from their very early days before even becoming ABBA), and that was a lot of fun.