ABBA at 50

Product Information

Responsible for ABBA music reissue liner notes and several books including the exhaustively comprehensive "Bright Lights, Dark Shadows", this book comes at a perfect time. I caught up with Carl Magnus, who has also co-produced a number of television programmes about the band, contributed to his beloved home city’s ABBA The Museum, and worked as a consultant to Polar Music in their ABBA reissues project, earlier this week, and he suggested life was pretty good on the other side of the North Sea.

But I don’t think I’ve properly encountered a telephone attached that way since the days my Mum would take herself off to the hall, perching at the bottom of the stairs while chatting to friends and family. 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. Beautifully illustrated with essential images, this book examines the group’s enduring legacy and much-loved musical repertoire of perfectly crafted pop. Beautifully illustrated with essential images, it examines the group’s enduring legacy and much-loved musical repertoire of perfectly crafted pop. 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.With regard to listening to the back-catalogue, it’s great to wallow in nostalgia now and again, but I’m guessing that’s just a part of your life. The balance of "ABBA at 50" delivered as a somewhat generic coffee-table book, made me long for a higher quality, distinctive experience from other Magnus Palm books or to simply revisit the most recent ABBA Voyage showbook interviews for the ultimate artist recap. Deep inside, I never thought they were going to do that, because the motivation didn’t seem to be there. And it only struck me this morning that we’ve also had Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again since we last spoke.

I remember 30 years ago when people said to me, when I was working on my first book, ‘You better hurry up, before the ABBA revival dies down. I didn’t know they were already famous in the role vans respectively before creating the group ABBA.There’s a lot about that, and it’s about chart positions, and I’ve gone through hundreds of album and single reviews from – primarily – the American and British music press, putting in extracts from that as well. 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. Based in Lancashire since 1994, after a free transfer from Surrey following five years of 500-mile round-trips on the back of a Turkish holiday romance in 1989. It seems apt that Voyage came out – and straight in at the top of the charts – 40 years to the month after The Visitors seemed to signal the end of the story. As a 50+ year ABBA fan, while I enjoyed the written portion as a career compilation recap, there was nothing new in the content to set it apart from other biographies written by individuals other than the subjects themselves.

He presents them honestly as fallible people who have gone through extraordinary things in their lives. It was good, because I could just concentrate on finding the right tone for it – a different tone from what I’m usually writing, being a bit more free.The other thing is that, because everybody else is so super-excited about it, and, ‘Ooh, it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. Yeah, I have, I mean it’s mostly just a matter of typing it out and finding the right tone for that book. However, while technology, fashions, interior design decor and lay-outs change, ABBA remain a force to be reckoned with, half a century after their first English language recordings. 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.

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.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’.