Mama Mia! (here We Go Again)
THE SUNDAY AGE
Saturday October 22, 1994
From dag to drag. Just when we thought it was safe to wallow in the nostalgia of the '70s, the Abba phenomenon has returned. Liz Porter put on her clogs and flares to investigate.
``WATERLOO, I was defeated, you won the war" blares through the speakers at the Three Faces nightclub on Melbourne's gay golden mile of Commercial Road. Up on stage the white satined drag queens Barbara Quicksand and Miss Candy are pouting and pointing and swinging their way through the 1975 Abba song that is the highlight of both `Muriel's Wedding' and `Priscilla Queen of the Desert'. The music of the group Joh Bjelke-Petersen once proclaimed to be ``clean and wholesome" has been spilling out of gay cafes from Commercial Road to Brunswick Street all day. This is not altogether unexpected. The Swedish superstars' emotional lyrics, preposterous costumes and high camp choreography are a drag queen's dream and the group have maintained their status as gay icons since their chart-topping days in the late '70s.
But the audience that files into the Hoyts Cinema Centre to see the Friday and Saturday night late show sessions of `Abba - the Movie' is much more mainstream - and there are suburban grandmothers and 12- year-olds at the Sunday matinee.
In one sense, Abba music never went away; almost everyone who was a child or teenager in mid '70s Australia has at least one song by Bennie and Bjorn, Agnetha and Frida indelibly imprinted somewhere in the memory. And Abba was already topping the Australian charts when the rest of the world thought they were just another bunch of Europap- singing Eurovision Song Contest winners.
THE current coincidence of two hit movies featuring Abba soundtracks is the signpost to a revival that will see Abba music on the CD players of a generation that was still in nappies the year a `Countdown' film clip of two wholesome young Swedish couples forced hundreds of thousands of teenyboppers to rush out and buy their record.
In a canny move to cash in on the Abba enthusiasm triggered by the soundtracks of `Muriel's Wedding' and `Priscilla', the Hoyts chain is now re-running the Abba movie, shot on the group's 1977 tour of Australia, in special late-show sessions on Friday and Saturday nights.
This is not the first revival of the film, which was made by the Swedish art film director Lasse Halstrom (director of `My Life As A Dog' and `What's Eating Gilbert Grape'). The Longford Cinema ran a successful five-month late-show season of the film in 1992, around the time that Polydor records released the highly successful compilation album `Abba Gold'.
But the 1994 revival will be bigger than any before, says Bronwyn Delaney, 29, national publicity and promotions manager for Hoyts, a former teenaged Abba bubblegum card collector.
1994 record sales also promise to be huge, with Polydor bringing out a four-CD box set of Abba in November.
``Abba is the cult film of the '90s," says Delaney, who describes the movie as the logical successor to '80s cult movies such as `The Blues Brothers' and `The Rocky Horror Show'.
``Abba are so daggy they're cool," she says - especially for a whole new generation of fans who were too young to hear the soulful Swedes the first time round.
``For people of my vintage it's nostalgia. I had this Abba dance routine worked out with my cousin, who was a blonde, so fortunately the demarcation between the Agnetha and Frida roles wasn't a problem.
``But there is a perceived coolness for young kids hearing Abba for the first time."
`Muriel's Wedding' director, P.J. Hogan, is happy to take some of the blame for the resurrection of Abba - especially given that he chose Abba music for his film because he wanted Muriel to have musical tastes that were at least five years out of date.
``In the eyes of her friends, she is a dag - and part of that is her love of Abba."
Hogan himself, on the other hand, says Abba remains one of his own personal favorite groups and confesses that, as a teenager, he wanted to be their fifth member.
``People tend to underestimate the music because of those white satin pantsuits," he says. ``Those songs were built to last. And they wouldn't have lasted if they didn't have emotional resonances. You don't get drag queens doing songs from K.C. and The Sunshine Band."
For record industry people such as Sandra Robertson, the Sydney-based marketing manager for London's Polydor Records, the Abba revival is simply an aspect of a universal trend in music towards '70s nostalgia. ``There's one new album of Carpenters covers by groups like Babes in Toyland and Four Non-Blondes. It's music that makes you feel good."
But for diehard devotee Nicholas Faltskog, founder and president of Australia's 300-strong Abba fan club and a fan for 20 years, the importance of the group transcends issues like cult and fashion.
Faltskog, 30, has long been used to slights and arrows from followers of more serious rock groups and admits there were times he felt embarrassed to be out and about in his Abba T-shirt.
``There was a period when they were daggy - from the late '70s and most of the '80s," he says. ``But I've never been fussed about what people say." So the Murrumbeena fabric store assistant has soldiered on, spending all his spare time producing four fan club magazines a year and organising events like the Abba Convention, held for 120 fans at the Melbourne's World Congress Centre early this year.
``We had an Abba dance party at the Ivy nightclub, and an Abba sightseeing tour, visiting all the places Abba went in Melbourne - the Town Hall, the Myer Music Bowl. And they once had a photo session on England's Brighton Beach, so we went to Melbourne's Brighton Beach.
The sight of 50 Abba fans doing dance routines on a Met train is not to be missed!" It is a matter of eternal regret to the fan club president that he has neither met his idols nor seen them perform. A 13-year-old schoolboy in Ballarat during the 1977 tour, he was not allowed to go to Melbourne for one of the group's three concerts.
A trip to Sweden two years ago provided some comfort. Frida Lyngstad, who is now an environmentalist, gave a concert to raise money for the green cause and the excited fan was in the audience.
``When Frida first stepped out on stage, I couldn't see for tears."
But Agnetha Faltskog (whose name he took by deedpoll) remains his major love.
``She is the most gorgeous creature in the world. I drove past Agnetha's house when I was there, tears pouring down my face."
Faltskog has plans for another visit to Sweden, possibly in winter when Benny and Bjorn are in Stockholm working on their music.
``I couldn't imagine life without Abba," he says.
His Sydney fan club colleague, Cotton Ward, 32, a sub-editor on a computer magazine, hung on to her passion through the late '70s when the Sex Pistols came in and Abba was reviled as saccharine and childish.
``By 1977 you were pretty much in the out-group. But as other people grew out of being Abba fans, I inherited their collections of records and T-shirts," she says.
The night in March 1977 when, as a 15-year-old, she saw Abba perform live, remains the high point of her life.
``I've done nothing since. I haven't got married and had kids."
Instead she has devoted her non-working life to Abba, flying down to Melbourne for the Abba convention, attending Abba parties and writing accounts of all Abba events for the fan club magazine.
``I'm planning an Abba dinner party soon, cooking Abba's favorite dishes, as featured in a Margaret Fulton spread in a 1976 `Woman's Day'. Agnetha's favorite dish was beef in black bean sauce, and Benny's was a Tahitian salad." For Ward, a taste for Abba music is not just an indulgence in nostalgia. ``As I got older their music has matured with me. For example, when they went through their divorce phases, their music was depressed, not boppy at all."
Unlike many other fans, she has no desire to travel to Sweden to glimpse her idols.``I always thought it was a bit sick. But I still have my Agnetha haircut. Although her hair was dyed - it was really mousy brown. I was horrified when I discovered that."
How Abba met its Waterloo.
Agnetha (Anna to the fans) Faltskog (the blonde), 44.
Once married to fellow band member Bjorn Ulvaeus, the star whom Abba fans call ``the Garbo of rock" describes herself as ``a houswife" and lives reclusively on the island of Ekero, outside Stockholm with her two children, Linda, 21 and Christian 17. After a series of love affairs she married a surgeon in 1990, but divorced him 18 months later.
Frida Lyngstad (the brunette), 49, formerly married to Benny Anderson and divorced in 1981.
She remarried a Swiss aristocrat in 1992. An environmentalist who used to run Artists For The Environment, a section of the green Swedish enterprise called The Natural Step, she now has her own environmental foundation, which runs green projects including educational summer camps for children.
Bjorn Ulvaeus, 49, continued writing songs with Benny Anderson.
Their most successful post-Abba production was the songs for `Chess', Tim Rice's musical which opened in London in 1986. He moved to England in 1985, but returned to Stockholm in 1991, where he runs a company called Mono Music with Anderson. After divorcing Agnetha, he married Lena Kallersjo, a leading Swedish authority on English literature.
Benny Anderson, 47, married a Swedish TV celebrity in 1982, the year after his divorce from Frida.
In between his collaborations with Ulvaeus, he released two albums of Swedish jazz and folk music and an acoustic album of Scandinavian bird songs. He is also reportedly working, with Ulvaeus, on a new musical.
© 1994 THE SUNDAY AGE