ABBA Gold - The Complete Story
Century 22 Publishing, 1993
The whole tone of the book is Anglocentric - concentrating on the releases and sales/chart figures in the UK. Highly inappropriate for an "international" book about ABBA’s career.
Who "Authorised" the book? ABBA? Björn? PolyGram? Century 22? Bocu Music? John Spaulding? John Tobler? This is unclear, and given some of the contents it appears obvious that most (if any) of the former members of ABBA had nothing to do with it.
Using the single picture sleeves from the 1984 UK box set. Most of the pictures, particularly on the earlier singles, are not even form the same year as the song they are supposed to illustrate (this is also a bitch about CBS/Epic as much as Tobler).
Use of the PolyGram CD covers, except for Ring Ring and The Album.
Most of the photos are out of context. I realise that to have every single photo in chronological order may make a boring looking book at times with all the pictures in a chapter being too similar, but a biographical record should also be illustrated at least mostly chronologically.
Many photos that should be captioned aren’t, or captions are inadequate. Who are the two members of the Hootenanny Singers with Björn on page 10? Which Hep Star is which on page 15? When did ABBA receive this award from Princess Margaret on page 23? I could go on for hours.
The Anglicisation of all the Swedish song titles, except in the final pages (Klinga mina klocker, Anglamark etc).
Swedish words spelled incorrectly (except for Björn & Fältskog)
Many opinions and assumptions creep into the text - for example repeated comments about songs that had been released singles only in the UK not being on compilations like ABBA - The Singles.
There’s a quite ironic quote on page 82: "...’factoids’, a term used to describe events which may not have happened, but which have been written about so much that a large number of people believe them to be true." Then see page 123 (amongst so many others) of this book.
pg 8: "[Frida] made an album and a series of singles for the Swedish EMI label [before moving to Stockholm, and meeting Benny]". Wrong. She recorded several singles only, though many of these singles were included on the compilation album Anni-Frid Lyngstad in 1971.
pg 9: Björn Kristian Ulvaeus, not Christian, though it’s probably an acceptable Anglicisation, it’s not the first book to spell it that way.
pg 18: photo captioned "Agnetha and Björn with their first child Linda". Wrong. The photo is of baby Christian in 1977.
pg 19: "Shortly before the end of 1969... Benny produced an LP for Anni-Frid, which was released by EMI Records in Sweden". And...
pg 21: "During 1971... Anni-Frid reverted to her recording career, releasing another LP." So far Tobler has Frida releasing 3 LPs, when she only released 1: the Benny-produced album Frida in 1971.
pg 21: "[Björn and Agnetha married] on July 7th, 1971" Wrong. July 6th, but the incorrect date has appeared in many books.
pg 23: "Both Agnetha and Frida were featured on the record [‘She’s My Kind Of Girl’], but were not credited on the label" Wrong. They were not on that recording.
pg 26: re: ‘Ring Ring’ at Swedish Eurovision heat: "Anni-Frid learned all the female vocal parts of the song, so that it would be possible for her to perform it without Agnetha". This story has been printed many times over the years, but is confusing. They both sing the song, mostly singing the same melody, so how could Frida sing Agnetha’s part at the same time as she’s singing her own? Possibly the quote is actually meant to be that Frida learned Agnetha’s higher harmony line.
pg 28: ".. while the English version [of ‘Ring Ring’] reached Number One in Australia, Holland, Belgium and South Africa." Wrong. According to the info on ABBA - The Worldwide Chart Lists, in 1973 it got to no. 5 in the Netherlands, and no 92 in Australia (in 1976 it got to no. 4 in Australia, but that was the remixed version, released in 1974).
pg 28: "...Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Anni-Frid... returned to the studio to record the follow up single, Love Isn’t Easy." Wrong. It was on the Ring Ring album, which had been already released and discussed in the same paragraph as this tidbit!.
pg 28: photo captioned "Agnetha jokes with a posse of admirers" Wrong. In every other ABBA book this is clearly shown as a photo of Agnetha and members of the Bengt Enghart’s (sp?) Orchestra, who are dismissed as " a dance band in Jonkoping" on page 17.
pg 30: photo captioned "ABBA with Sven-Olaf Walldoff in Brighton for Eurovision" Wrong. This photo (and a photo of ABBA performing on page 34) was at the Melodian Festival (the Swedish heat for Eurovision), though this too has crept into other books.
pg 36: "[‘Ring Ring’/‘Hasta Mañana’] the third ABBA single released in America". Wrong! I think it was the 4th or 5th.
pg 40: "Ring Ring/Watch Out" Wrong. The b-side was ‘Rock ‘n Roll Band’. "Slightly remixed courtesy of Paul Atkinson of the CBS International A & R Department." Not necessarily right. The additional overdubs were done at Glen Studio in Sweden, though maybe he was the "representative from Epic Records" mentioned in The Complete Recording Sessions (p 39)
pg 44: "...Bang-A Boomerang, the song written for Svenne & Lotta’s abortive Eurovision quest." Wrong. It was written for ABBA, given to S & L then recorded by ABBA anyway (CRS p 45)
pg 47: photo caption on Mamma Mia single: "Note the spelling error on the single sleeve below [‘Mama Mia’]". Since this sleeve was created by CBS/Epic in the UK in 1984 for their box set of singles, is it relevant?
pg 47: "... a compilation album, Best Of ABBA... sold the staggering total of more than 850,000 copies...". Out of date info. The actual figure was over 1 and a quarter million.
pg 47: "The final month of 1975... [Agnetha] in a bid to ensure that her throat gave her no more problems [after having her tonsils removed], she also gave up smoking." The official story (which has been published in many other books and article) is that she gave up smoking at this time, but of course she didn’t.
pg 48: re: Top Of The Pops: "It was a rule that as many artists as possible should recreate their hit records for the programme, and in order to achieve this, a backing track was recorded shortly before the show to enable the artist to sing live when it was broadcast." It was a musician’s union rule that any musician not seen on the broadcast (in this case ABBA) had to be English. So a British band could actually lip sync, or sing live to their studio backing track, but overseas artists had to have their backing track recorded by the BBC orchestra.
pg 50: re: Greatest Hits LP: Fernando was included on this LP later, after it became a hit. It was not a case of "dar[ing] to include their current hit single, only released a matter of days before."
pg 52: "[In Australia] all three ABBA albums nestled in the Top 20." Wrong. There were four, in the weeks starting 8, 15 and 31 May 1976, as shown on the Australia page of ABBA - The Worldwide Chart Lists.
pg 56: re ‘Crazy World’: ‘...judging by the simplicity of the production, may have been recorded some considerable time before its release." Well, 2 years. If he’d had access to anyone involved he could have confirmed this bit of speculation.
pg 59: "Happy Hawaii is exactly the same musically as their familiar Why Did It Have To Be Me". Not exactly, though the two songs share do one melody line.
pg 60: "The only casualty was Anni-Frid, who slipped in a puddle during a dance routine, and fell rather inelegantly on her backside." Wrong. She fell on her front. Though the incident is not actually shown, a photograph of this is shown in ABBA - The Movie.
pg 60: "At another venue, manager Stig Anderson insisted that the ticket allocation be reduced from 40,000 to 20,000, pledging that the group would perform two shows instead of the scheduled one...". Wrong. It was not "another venue", it was in Sydney which was mentioned in the previous paragraph.
pg 69: "[ABBA - The Movie was] the seventh biggest box-office success of the year..." Where? Not in the world-wide figures that I’ve seen. Probably the UK.
pg 74: "Summernight City" Wrong. ‘Summer Night City’. Most entries in the book merge the words, but not all.
pg 82: "ABBA performed [on ABBA in Switzerland]... two songs from their forthcoming album: The King Has Lost His Crown and Kisses Of Fire." Wrong. Also ‘Does Your Mother Know’ and ‘Lovers (Live A Little Longer)’, plus ‘Chiquitita’ if you want to count that too. ‘Does Your Mother Know’ is mentioned as being in the special 4 paragraphs later.
pg 85: "According to eye witness reports, [the UNICEF concert LP]... was hardly an accurate representation of the music made that evening. For example, the chance to hear duets between Rod Stewart and Kris Kristofferson or between Donna Summer and Rita Coolidge could have been fascinating." These other performances were included in the one-hour television special of the concert, so they were seen by the public. The LP only included those songs which had been donated to UNICEF.
continuing: "Chiquitita... is little more than a very accurate live performance of the song..." Wrong. It’s the studio version. ABBA (and most everybody performing in the concert) lip synced.
pg 87: "Just as its forerunner, Greatest Hits, optimistically included a brand new track (Fernando), Vol. 2 carried Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!..." Wrong. As noted above, Fernando was added to GH after it became a hit.
pg 92: "On return from the West Indies, Björn and Benny mixed the tracks [on Gracias Por La Música]..." Wrong. Michael B. Tretow did all the engineering and production work. B & B only listened to it to approve release when it was completed.
Page 93: Fails to include the limited edition 12 inch single of 'The Winner Takes It All' which was released in the UK.
pg 94: "[‘Super Trouper’] was accompanied by a spectacular video filmed in a circus big top." Wrong. There is no circus big top, just a dark studio.
pg 95: "... The Way Old Friends Do, a studio-recorded version of which seems never to have been released." A stupid statement in light of the fact that this book is documenting ABBA’s releases. Again, it shows that he had no contact with ABBA when researching this book.
pg 96: "Björn and Benny wrote and recorded a special song, Salute to Stig, which is probably the rarest ABBA record of all..." Wrong. The title is straight out of the ABBA Magazine, who wrote in 1981 that ‘Hovas Vittne’ was Happy Birthday in Swedish. And it’s probably shares its rarest ABBA record status with ‘Sång till Görel’, which is never mentioned in this book.
pg 96: "In April, 1981, the quartet starred in a TV special made in America and hosted by Dick Cavett..." Wrong. The Dick Cavett Meets ABBA special was filmed in Sweden.
pg 96: "Also in 1981, a solo album by Agnetha, Tio år med Agnetha, was released in Sweden." Wrong. It was released in 1979, and was a compilation rather than a "solo album".
pg 98: "[‘One Of Us’] was the first track to be heard from ABBA’s ninth (and last) original album...". The Visitors was only ABBA’s eighth studio album, though it was the ninth album released in the UK (Ring Ring was not released), including the two Greatest Hits compliatoins but not Gracias Por La Música). Depending on which albums you count, it could be the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th, but this fits in with what Tobler has to say on page 123 on the Opus 10 myth.
pg 100: "Until the release of Lay All Your Love On Me/On And On And On, [‘Two For The Price Of One’], which was one of the first completed for the album, was considered for possible single release.." Wrong. It never was. Polar press releases at the time described tracks recorded so far as "album tracks".
pg 101: "Benny and Mona were celebrating the birth of Ludwig (doubtless named after Beethoven, the famous classical composer)." Obviously he didn’t research any contemporary stories that would confirm this.
pg 103: "Benny and Björn finished writing two new songs for ABBA, Just Like That and I Am The City, for the next album, which was reported to have 26 tracks - 24 singles, a new track released as a single to coincide with the album, and one completely new track, perhaps one of the two mentioned." Wrong. In 1982 when these songs were announced, they were reported to be "album tracks" and as such would not be released as either a new single or as part of the compilation. And he manages to not mention the original plan of a double album, either a newly recorded live album of all the hits, or a single live album with a new studio album. I think this even made it to the pages of the ABBA Magazine, which very rarely reported any news, unless it was ABBA go to London for the opening of an envelope.
pg 106: "[The cassette EP] was probably released at a time when the UK record industry was making one of its periodic attempts to launch a new format..." Tobler has apparently written at least 15 books )according to his bio in this book), written for at least 11 music magazines, worked for CBS UK for a time, written scripts for radio series, researched for several radio series, TV shows and video releases. You would think that he would know more about the intoriduction of new recording formats.
pg 106: "... Agnetha released a single titled Never Again, a duet with Tomas Ledin, who had ironically written a song which Frida had included on her album." A Polar plot to launch Tomas internationally through ABBA is hardly "ironic".
pg 106: "Balavouine" Wrong spelling. Balavoine
pg 110: "... Man, which was also released as the B side of the second of three hit singles taken from the album, none of which reached the Top 30 of the UK chart." 1. Wrong. It was the B side to the first single (‘The Heat Is On’). 2. Contradictory statement of "hit" singles not reaching the top 30.
pg 111: "Agnetha recorded P & B, the title song of a Swedish feature film, and it was released as one side of a huge hit single in Sweden, the other side of which was It’s So Nice To Be Rich." Not wrong, but misleading as it doesn’t really make clear that both songs were from the movie.
pg 113: Obviously Tobler misses the point of why CBS UK issued Thank You For The Music - A Collection Of Love Songs. He raves that it included songs that had been on The Singles, but that it doesn’t include songs that had been UK singles like ‘Head Over Heels’, which would not fit into the "Love Songs" concept.
Also "Why weren’t there some of the single B sides that hadn’t been on album chosen?" One was: ‘Should I Laugh Or Cry’.
pg 116: re The Anniversary Collection of 26 singles: "... had the title of the double album released 18 months earlier really been so quickly forgotten?" Again he seems to be missing the point. Created by different companies to commemorate different anniversaries and different markets, The Singles LP was aimed at the general market, the box set for collectors.
pg 121: "In 1982, a world chess championship ... between an American, Bobby Fischer, and a Russian, Boris Spasskey..." I believe this was 1972.
pg 122: re reissue of Greatest Hits: "An identical reissue..." I believe this reissue had a single sleeve, not a gatefold like the original.
pg 122: "The first and most successful single from the album, I Won’t Let You Go... did not reach the UK chart." A bit of a contradictory statement.
pg 123: "Perhaps they were invited [to Live Aid], but declined..." He’s writing the authorised book, why didn’t he ask them?
pg 123: The Opus 10 myth. Factoid alert! Opus 10 was never a working title for an ABBA album in 1981, 1982, 1986 or any other time, but a (possible) joking reference made by a Swedish journalist who interviewed ABBA in the studio during 1981 sessions for what became The Visitors album. Visit the Recordings FAQ page on Carl Magnus Palm.com for the full story.
pg 123: "Frida also announced that she was abandoning her solo career, and would return to ABBA" Half right. She was abandoning her solo career, to become a "private person".
pg 124: "...The Way You Are was written as a them for the Olympic Games and as also featured in a Swedish movie.". Half right. The film was part of a bid for Sweden to host the 1992 Winter Olympics.
pg 125: re: Greatest Hits Vol. 2: "An identical reissue..." Like Greatest Hits earlier, I think this also had a single sleeve, not the gatefold like the original.
pg 128: "Klinga mina klocker... was written by Björn" Half right. Björn wrote the lyrics, Benny wrote the music, which is clearly credited on the album.
pg 132: The Collection 2 (Pickwick): the CD does not include ‘Ring Ring’ in Swedish and Rock ‘n Roll Band, though the vinyl LP does.
also mentions that it includes "the incomplete Live album - the full album has three more tracks" Wrong. The full album (also released on cassette) has 11 tracks (all on The Collection 2); the CD only has 3 bonus tracks.
pg 135: "There were rumours that en EP by ABBA containing four new songs... would be released shortly before Christmas 1988" I don’t remember hearing any such rumour, and at that time we heard every other ABBA rumour, fact, whatever through the grapevine. Again, if he’d had access to anyone involved, this sort of "factoid" would not have crept in, or if it had, it would have been discredited.
pg 138: re The Love Songs CD: "...even though every track had previously appeared on CD" Wrong. At the time ‘Should I Laugh Or Cry’ and ‘Lovelight’ had not been issued on CD at all; ‘Gonna Sing You My Lovesong’, ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’ and ‘Tropical Loveland’ had not been issued on CD in the UK, though the ABBA CD had been released in Germany in 1987, and Waterloo had been released in Sweden in 1988.
pg 140: photo caption: "An interesting and probably freezing photo session, Norway 1977". This is so funny! ABBA are obviously cut out and stick onto the photo showing a snowy background. Even the ABBA Magazine printed this in their "Funny File" and pointed out what a ridiculous photo it was.
pg 141: "It was suggested that a 4 CD boxed set of ABBA recording should be released in 1992, although this idea was eventually postponed" True! I remember hearing the same thing in 1992, and also that all the albums were going to be remastered and re-released. As we know all both eventually happened.
pg 142: "On January 28th, 1992, Frida joined the Swedish group Roxette onstage in Zurich in Switzerland and they performed Money, Money, Money" Wrong. This didn’t happen, but it was reported that Frida visited them backstage after this concert, and it has been said that they sang an improvised version of ‘Money, Money, Money" then.
pg 142: "The last five tracks on this CD [ABBA] were not on the original ABBA album, and it appears that they were added to the original album some time before the above date.." The 5 extra songs were added when the CD was first released by PolyGram in West Germany in 1987, probably because Ring Ring and Waterloo hadn’t been released on CD at that time.
pg 143: "This excellent [?!?] live album (which proved beyond all doubt that ABBA were equally adept on the road and in the studio) was the only genuinely new album in this program of reissues" It was only genuinely new in some places. It had been easily available (even on import in the UK, as he asserts elsewhere in the book) since 1986.
also "The [Live] album was also released on vinyl, although the final three tracks were omitted..." Vice versa. the 3 tracks were added to the CD. The LP and the cassette both had 11 tracks, ending with ‘Waterloo’.
pg 148: "..Saltwater, a song written by Julian Lennon and sung by Frida" Sounds like he’s saying it was written for her, which of course it wasn’t.
pg 152: in the ABBA singles discography, he lists "Ring Ring (English)/Merry-Go-Round". Wrong. In Sweden the b side was ‘She’s My Kind Of Girl’, most everywhere else it was ‘Rock ‘n Roll Band’.
pg 156: the listings of the singles Belle/C’est Fini, Time/I Am The Seeker, Sa lange vi har varann/Du finns hos mig and Om du var har/As Long As I Have You hints that Frida sang on both sides of all these singles, when she only sang on the a side of the first 3 and the b side on the 4th. Also fails to list the Adam Ant single ‘Strip’ that Frida makes an uncredited appearance on, reciting one verse.
Originally posted to ABBAMAIL in slightly different form under the title 'ABBA Gold - The (In)Complete Story'.
