Stig Anderson restless for new projects: ABBA producer, Polar Prize founder’s ears still open. By Dominic Pride

Stockholm

He has produced and managed one of the world’s biggest-selling acts. When he throws a party, Quincy Jones, Al Jarreau, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the King and Queen of Sweden turn up. The names on paintings in his house read like a roll call of famous artists

Time for Stig Anderson to put his feet up, content with his lot in life? On the contrary. The man who produced and managed ABBA seems restless.

Not content with masterminding the Polar Music Prize – intended as music’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize – Anderson is still keen to put his experience behind a new project.

Anderson sold the Polar label and Sweden Music publishing catalog to PolyGram in 1989, netting a substantial personal fortune, even by Swedish standards. He declines to state how much he earned from the sale, which at the time was estimated at $US25 million, but his donation of 42 million Swedish Kroner ($US5.5 million) to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music for the prize has not left him out of cash.

At present he is working on remastering the Polar catalog archives, which date back more than 30 years. “I am the only one who knows how these songs were recorded,” says Anderson. “As usual, some of them are crap today. But there are also pearls which should be on CD, otherwise they will just be forgotten.”

However, Anderson also is throwing his hat into the ring, looking to put his 35 years of experience with ABBA and other artists to use, either on his own or within a label.

His restlessness and enthusiasm are perhaps motivated by the fact that his five-year contract with PolyGram, signed after the 1989 purchase, expires Wednesday (1).

“What I will do in business in the future, I don’t know,” says Anderson. “I would like to find or help new artists if they come to me. I think I have good international experience; I know the industry people worldwide. I think I could help young artists to have a career.”

Despite his age and health difficulties, Anderson is still keen to start from scratch. “I have had offers from other people,” he says. “Not too many people know when my contract expires, I hope PolyGram is interested, but I am open to any offers.”

Like many of his generation, Anderson bemoans the lack of “music men. I don’t want to make enemies among lawyers. It’s not that there are too many of them, it’s that there are too few music people in the business, people who can hear talent, can pick them up, can build on it.”

“What makes it in this business is having something different. Could you ever have dreamed of having some Spanish monks at the top of the charts? Everything in showbiz is possible. The more unusual it is, the bigger chance you have.”

It was such thinking which led Anderson to be the first European to pick up The Beach Boy’s publishing outside the U.S. “People said I was crazy. I said, ‘this could happen very big, it’s something new.’ ”

Although the industry has changed radically since ABBA’s Eurovision breakthrough in 1974, Anderson maintains that the recipe for success remains unchanged. “The base is the song, it has always been. There must also be some talent there. Then it’s just hard work to market it. The marketing has changed through the years, because the picture is now essential as the record to get the audience.”

“I was really the first one to think of this. Back in 1974, when we had Waterloo and we won the [Eurovision] Song Contest, I started to film. In those days we had 16mm film, and we sent it all over the world.

“Our people in Japan could take it to the TV station and show it. That was how it started in a big way with ABBA in Australia. All of a sudden you could see the act; we were No.1. That’s why we have a film for every single since the beginning.

“We couldn’t travel to all these countries, so we sent a film to 60 different countries and it was shown. This was very important for ABBA.”

In founding the Polar Prize, Anderson is attempting to give the music community an internationally respected accolade. But he also believes the ceremony may have local repercussions. “I think that musicians here will notice that Quincy Jones is so broad-based, that could give some Swedes a kick. Mathematically, being a small nation of 8 million, we’d be lucky if we had two artists successful internationally.”

Anderson believes the success of ABBA had a knock-on effect. “I think it’s a kind of Björn Borg fever. He’s a world-famous star. Young people say if he can do it, we can. It started every young guy playing tennis. Instead of 10 people playing, you get half a million. It’s a big chance that some of these are going to be good. That’s what I think happened with ABBA.”Transcribed for ABBA World

Billboard (USA) · 4 June 1994 (Pages 66 & 77)

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