From their humble beginnings in post-war Sweden to global superstardom, ABBA at 50 charts the remarkable story of this Swedish quartet. In 2021, after a forty-year hiatus, the band released a new album Voyage, and announced an accompanying concert featuring their digital avatars, dubbed "ABBAtars.

But he soon put me right, telling me that while it was first released in ’73 – the title track of their debut LP – it didn’t chart until just after their Eurovision success, subtly telling me, ‘That’s both right and wrong – ha! Meanwhile, I tell him I can’t believe it’s five years since we last spoke, marking the publication of ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions. The ABBA machine continues to function, and the industry around the band clearly continues to flourish.From the group’s outlandish outfits to the toll commercial success took on the private lives of the two married couples, this book is a must for all ABBA fans.

This book charts the journey of ABBA from their separate beginnings in pop, forming the group, Eurovision 1974 (how embarrassing that the UK judges gave them zero points 😳), their rise to worldwide fame, personal relationships, the break up and right through to Mamma Mia the musical and ABBA voyage (which I’ve seem and is absolutely amazing! Based in Lancashire since 1994, after a free transfer from Surrey following five years of 500-mile round-trips on the back of a Turkish holiday romance in 1989. Beautifully illustrated with essential images, it examines the group’s enduring legacy and much-loved musical repertoire of perfectly crafted pop. And this companion volume has expanded to be very much a book in itself, and it’s taking much, much longer than I had hoped for. This makes a great coffee table book and I can picture it generating some interesting conversations.I caught up with Carl Magnus, who has also co-produced a number of television programmes about the band, contributed to his beloved home city’s ABBA The Museum, and worked as a consultant to Polar Music in their ABBA reissues project, earlier this week, and he suggested life was pretty good on the other side of the North Sea.

I mean, the group’s real 50th anniversary – when they started recording together English language pop songs – is this year, because it was 1972. The other thing is that, because everybody else is so super-excited about it, and, ‘Ooh, it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.But the 1990s ushered in a new wave of ABBA appreciation, and their music found favour again in modern popular culture. ABBA at 50 takes fans on a remembrance journey…before, during, and after this group took the music world by storm. In addition to revisiting the ABBA songs I also looked up and listened to many songs by artists I was barely or even unfamiliar with (mostly from their very early days before even becoming ABBA), and that was a lot of fun. For a nonfiction book it flows nicely in the story is put together well it’s all I would have to say I highly recommend this book it is a great read.

The book charts the band's meteoric rise to stardom, plus the high and low points both professionally and in their personal lives. It’s very detailed stories about how the album sleeves were put together, it’s about chart success, it’s about how the record company people in the UK and the US primarily promoted or tried to promote their music. Beautifully illustrated with essential images, this book examines the group's enduring legacy and much-loved musical repertoire of perfectly crafted pop.

As far as I know … and for me – and I guess it’s the same for you, at least to an extent – I’ve been working from home for 30 years, so things just continued as they always had, largely. Of course, most of us will always equate the proper arrival of the band with a certain event at The Dome in Brighton on April 6, 1974.