ABBA

Telling a story with the aid of music A girl with a talent for singing, who leaves her home town, becomes a star and then finds herself trapped by fame – that was the simple plot that formed the basis for ABBA’s mini-musical The Girl With The Golden Hair. This creation marked the first few steps for ABBA’s song writing team of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus in realising a dream they had nursed since before the ABBA era. That dream was to write a full-scale musical. Ever ambitious and forward-looking, they felt even in those early days that at some point, this would be the logical next step in their development as composers. Telling a story with the aid of music and lyrics, and being able to expand beyond the restrictive format of the three-minute pop song, was a highly interesting challenge for them. Neither Björn nor Benny had been great fans of musicals in their younger days. “But then I heard Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar”, recalls Benny in the book Mamma Mia! How Can I Resist You? “Stig Anderson, who was managing us and who was one of the leading music publishers in Sweden, had been sent the record long before it actually came out. I got hold of a copy and thought it was astonishing.” First released as a so-called concept album in 1970, the musical was very different to most earlier musicals in that it married a serious, historical subject such as Jesus Christ to modern pop and rock music. Explains Björn: “[When] Benny and I were talking about how to stretch ourselves, the success of Jesus Christ Superstar was hovering in the background. We thought, ‘This is fascinating. Why don’t we try this, why don’t we dabble in this for a while?’”