‘It’s difficult to look upon yourself as an icon’: Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog on fame, family and her secret songs….
Agnetha Fältskog’s recent single, Where Do We Go From Here?, came with an animated video. It depicted the cartoonish version of the Abba singer that is permanently burned into the collective memory: blond hair, blue eyeshadow, clad in hot pants and platform boots. It was a look deemed so striking in the 1970s that it occasionally threatened to overshadow Abba’s music entirely. When the Swedish band attempted to launch in the US, the only label that would work with them was Playboy’s in-house musical operation, “who might have had other reasons for being interested in us”, band member Björn Ulvaeus later drily remarked. He was right: Playboy unilaterally changed their name to Björn, Benny and Svenska Flicka: Björn, Benny and Pretty Swedish Girls.
The cartoon is a neat way of getting around the fact that, at 73, Fältskog is not much interested in making videos, new single or not. “When you get older, you get a bit more limited as to what you want to do,” as she puts it on a video call from Sweden, with the single’s co-writer and producer Jörgen Elofsson by her side. He is here to help Fältskog with the language barrier – one reason she seldom gives interviews is that she feels her English isn’t good enough (it sounds pretty impressive to me) – although his role in her solo career extends far beyond occasional interpreter. It was Elofsson who contacted her with a set of songs he had written that became Fältskog’s first album of original material in 26 years, 2013’s A, and Elofsson whom she turned to a decade later with the idea of reworking A in a 21st-century pop style, hence her new album, A+. Elofsson kept her 2013 vocals, and Where Do We Go From Here? is the one brand new song.
Fältskog is delighted with the results – “How can they do that,” she boggles, “how come my song, my singing, can be the same and sound so different?” – and with the video, particularly its attention to detail. The two cartoon dogs are based on dogs she actually owned – “one pug and one pražský krysařík, a Czechoslovakian dog” – and the car she drives in it is a Triumph Spitfire, the same car in which she used to commute between Stockholm and her home town of Jönköping in the late 60s.
She was already a star in Sweden then: “the 18-year-old Svensktoppen comet” as one newspaper dubbed her, in tribute to the fact that she had topped the country’s charts with her debut single, a yearning ballad called Jag Var Så Kär, the first in a string of solo Top 10 hits. She was subject to a lot of gossipy speculation about her personal life. Judging by the old cuttings lovingly preserved online by Abba obsessives, the press were initially less interested in their nascent band’s music than the fact that the Svensktoppen comet had hooked up romantically with another star, Björn Ulvaeus of the Hootenanny Singers. You read more about how the couple have furnished their first home – they apparently had “a very practical laundry room with a drying cabinet” – and their marriage plans than you do about Abba’s debut single, People Need Love, or their first Swedish No 1, Ring Ring.
So the Triumph Spitfire-driving Fältskog was young, successful and famous, but she says today that if she could go back and give her advice, it would be “don’t be so worried all the time. Try to relax and have fun. You know, I was a little worried person about everything, so that’s the advice I would give her: try to have fun and enjoy yourself.”
This seems a very Fältskog answer. Behind the Svenska Flicka image, she was the member of Abba who seemed to most embody the deep strain of melancholy that ran through a lot of their music. Her favourite songs were always the sad songs, primarily The Winner Takes It All, which seems surprising, given that it is often depicted as less a song than an act of cruelty: Ulveaus impelling his ex-wife to sing a song he had written about their recent divorce from her point of view: “But tell me does she kiss, like I used to kiss you?” Then again, she says, her favourite songs on A+ are the ones that feature a certain darkness lurking behind the dancefloor-focused rhythms and bursts of Auto-Tune. “Maybe because I’m Swedish, we have something melancholic in us. I think it’s to do with our climate – we have long, dark winters, and that affects you in the long run.”
Nevertheless, life as a member of the biggest Swedish pop band in history was a bumpy ride. She was well known for not being hugely enthusiastic about playing live – “perhaps it had to do with getting older, making more and more demands on yourself to get better and better, and I’m a very shy person to start with” – and was genuinely disconcerted by the hysteria Abba engendered at the height of their fame: “It’s a thin line between celebration and menace,” she told her biographer decades later.
She didn’t like flying or spending time away from her children and understandably tired of the focus on her appearance (“I’m not only a sexy bottom, you know,” she protested during a spectacularly awkward appearance on Noel Edmonds’ Late, Late Breakfast Show a few weeks before Abba broke up). Today, she is stunned at the band’s workload back then and seems impressed by contemporary young artists who cancel tours and clear their schedules to concentrate on their health and wellbeing. “Sometimes I look at pictures and clips and I don’t really know where we were or when it was, because we did so much,” she says. “Artists don’t want to cancel anything, so you work. I worked a lot when I was ill as well, like you have a bad cold or a fever, and you had a concert and just had to do it.”
After the band quietly split up, Fältskog pursued a successful solo career for a few years, working with big names including Blondie producer Mike Chapman and fabled songwriter Diane Warren, while turning others down – Elvis Costello submitted a song for her 1985 album Eyes of Woman, but she declined to record it. Then, after the release of 1987’s I Stand Alone, she suddenly stopped, retreating to her farm on the island of Ekerö, an hour outside Stockholm, and focused on her family and her animals: “We have dogs, cats, chickens and a rooster and maybe 20 or 30 horses, so it’s a big place,” she says.
Perhaps inevitably, rumours that she had become a troubled recluse proliferated, bolstered by a series of personal tragedies – an ex-boyfriend was served with a restraining order after stalking her, and her mother took her own life in 2004, both topics I’m minded to avoid today. Even after she returned to recording in the 00s, with A and a collection of 60s cover versions called My Colouring Book, she kept interviews and public appearances to a minimum, although she acquiesced to her first live performance in 25 years for BBC Children in Need in 2013 and turned up at Stockholm Pride the same year. “It’s difficult to point to when it started,” she says of her status as a gay icon. “When we won the Eurovision song contest in 1974, we knew we had something in us that we wanted to spread out and to show the world, but icon, I don’t know, that came later. It’s still hard to believe. It’s so difficult to look upon yourself as an icon, because you are with yourself all the time and we get tired of ourselves now and then. But it’s also amazing.”
Perhaps inevitably, rumours that she had become a troubled recluse proliferated, bolstered by a series of personal tragedies – an ex-boyfriend was served with a restraining order after stalking her, and her mother took her own life in 2004, both topics I’m minded to avoid today. Even after she returned to recording in the 00s, with A and a collection of 60s cover versions called My Colouring Book, she kept interviews and public appearances to a minimum, although she acquiesced to her first live performance in 25 years for BBC Children in Need in 2013 and turned up at Stockholm Pride the same year. “It’s difficult to point to when it started,” she says of her status as a gay icon. “When we won the Eurovision song contest in 1974, we knew we had something in us that we wanted to spread out and to show the world, but icon, I don’t know, that came later. It’s still hard to believe. It’s so difficult to look upon yourself as an icon, because you are with yourself all the time and we get tired of ourselves now and then. But it’s also amazing.”
Perhaps inevitably, rumours that she had become a troubled recluse proliferated, bolstered by a series of personal tragedies – an ex-boyfriend was served with a restraining order after stalking her, and her mother took her own life in 2004, both topics I’m minded to avoid today. Even after she returned to recording in the 00s, with A and a collection of 60s cover versions called My Colouring Book, she kept interviews and public appearances to a minimum, although she acquiesced to her first live performance in 25 years for BBC Children in Need in 2013 and turned up at Stockholm Pride the same year. “It’s difficult to point to when it started,” she says of her status as a gay icon. “When we won the Eurovision song contest in 1974, we knew we had something in us that we wanted to spread out and to show the world, but icon, I don’t know, that came later. It’s still hard to believe. It’s so difficult to look upon yourself as an icon, because you are with yourself all the time and we get tired of ourselves now and then. But it’s also amazing.”
Meanwhile, all attempts to lure Abba into reforming, one of them involving an offer of $1bn to tour, were turned down. The groundbreaking virtual Abba Voyage project, she laughs, is a dream come true for an artist not fond of live performance: “I’m at home in my bed, and at the same time in London. It’s very cleverly done, isn’t it?” Even so, she wasn’t particularly taken with the idea at first. When I interviewed Benny Andersson and Ulvaeus shortly after the Voyage shows and accompanying album were announced, the former told me that both Fältskog and Lyngstat only took part on condition that they didn’t have to do any promotion: “They didn’t take much persuading, but we did have to tell both of them that they don’t need to speak to you, Alexis,” he chuckled. “Not you personally – but the media.”
“I was a bit suspicious, I must say – you know, what is this?” says Fältskog. “We were working the whole of February [2020] to prepare – it doesn’t sound so much, but it was, performing the songs with all these technicians and all the things on your body. We were working really hard and I’ll be totally honest, I was not so comfortable with it. But after maybe four or five days you get into it: OK, I’ll go there again. Also, the music helps, because it gives us a very special feeling, and somewhere along the way I could just feel proud – they really want to see us again.”
She pauses for an instant, then laughs at the incongruity of what she just said: even before the Abba Voyage show shifted a million tickets in short order, the fact that someone was willing to offer them $1bn to go on tour suggests that people really wanted to see Abba again. She enjoyed the opening night, she says, taking a bow on stage with the other members, and would like to see it again, this time incognito. “Like a little mouse,” she giggles. “Sitting in the corner, just looking.”
Fältskog laughs a lot, at odds with a latter-day image that more than one journalist has rather ham-fistedly characterised as “the Greta Garbo of pop”. Her predisposition to worry notwithstanding, she is, she says, very happy with her life today. “If I have a lot of makeup on or if I’m dressed very nicely, more people recognise me, but in everyday life, it’s not so bad,” she says. “Swedish people are very reserved, but now and then one person comes up and says ‘thank you for the music’, and that’s very nice.”
Still, a certain reputation clings to her, born equally out of the monumental scale of Abba’s success and the relatively low profile she has kept since. Elofsson is hardly a pop neophyte: he was part of the legendary group of producers and songwriters who operated out of Stockholm’s Cheiron Studios, alongside Max Martin and Andreas Carlsson, cranking out hits for Britney Spears, Céline Dion and umpteen TV talent show winners. Even so, he says, when the moment came to play the songs he had written for Fältskogwith Peter Nordahl, he was paralysed with fear. “We sat in the car outside her house for an hour, just to muster up the guts. We were really stressed. It’s almost like visiting a bit of holy ground for pop music.”
He would like to make another album with Fältskog, this time of her own songs. She apparently writes all the time – “If I sit down by the piano, it comes out” – but rarely records her compositions: there’s one on A+, a suitably melancholy ballad about memories and regrets called I Keep Them All Beside My Bed. It wasn’t always that way. At the start of her career, Fältskog was a singer-songwriter who wrote her own singles and wrote for other artists. There is a fabulous moment in an old Swedish interview around the time of Abba’s formation, where the journalist lauds Fältskog’s skill as a dependable hit-maker then adds, almost dismissively, that Ulvaeus writes songs too “with his friend Benny Andersson” and that one of them has done quite well in Japan. She co-wrote 10 of the 11 tracks on her 1975 solo album Elva Kvinnor I Ett Hus. But in Abba, her songwriting seemed to dry up entirely. “I think it’s because I didn’t have the time, really. When I started my solo career, I had it in me to write. But into the Abba years, I had two small children to take care of, and a lot of work with travelling, concerts and TV programmes. When we had some free time, I wanted to be with my children. I didn’t forget about music, I just did other things. But I have it in me.”
It might still happen: her voice still sounds fantastic, a result, she thinks, of not overusing it in recent years. Then again, Fältskog has developed a tendency to claim that every solo album she makes is “probably” her last. She nods when I mention it, then there’s a pause. So is A+ the last album you’ll ever make?
“Yeah,” she says. “Probably.” Then she bursts out laughing again.
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