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The Book of Abba by Jan Gradvall review – dark backstories and new revelations

From Himmler to herring, a Swedish journalist offers unexpected angles on the 70s supergroup

There are details of Himmler’s “breeding policy”, lebensborn, and of its influence on both the plot of Hiroshima Mon Amour and a grim sub-genre of porny Nazi-centric pulp fiction that proliferated after the second world war. A series of essays rather than a chronological history, it certainly covers all the bases, from Eurovision to the groundbreaking “virtual concert” Voyage, alongside global success on a scale even more staggering than you might have realised: Abba, it turns out, were huge in 70s Afghanistan, and so big in Vietnam that one journalist suggests their profoundly morose 1980 track Happy New Year is “probably the [country’s] most revered song … after the national anthem”. For all the confessions of marital discord blurted out in the lyrics of The Winner Takes It All and One of Us, Abba were always rather guarded interviewees, although it’s worth noting that Gradvall, a well-known Swedish critic, has got more out of them than most British journalists ever did, not least, one suspects, because he’s interviewed them in their native language.

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