‘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.
