ABBA was a Swedish pop music group, the most successful to date from that country. The group was formed around 1970 by Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and the name ABBA comprises their first initials. They became widely known when they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo". Abba split up in 1982.
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Origin Stockholm, Sweden
Genre(s) Europop
Pop
Years active 1972–1982
Label(s) Polar Music
Atlantic Records
Epic Records
Universal Music
Polydor Records
Website Official ABBA site
Former members
Agnetha Fältskog
Björn Ulvaeus
Benny Andersson
Anni-Frid "Frida" Lyngstad
"Abba" redirects here. For other uses, see Abba (disambiguation).
ABBA were a Swedish pop music group active from 1972 until 1982.
ABBA is the most successful popular music group ever to come out of Scandinavia, and ranks amongst the top acts in the history of popular music. The quartet topped worldwide charts from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. They remain a fixture of radio playlists and continue to sell albums. The group has sold more than 370 million records, all but one being self-penned.
They were the first act from the European continent to enjoy consistent success in the charts of the anglophonic world (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and their enormous popularity subsequently opened the doors for many other European acts. They introduced Scandinavian music into the international mainstream, and have done much to establish pure pop as an equal among more "hip" music genres.
Songwriters Andersson and Ulvaeus were unable to write notated music on paper.
Only Fältskog could do so (as revealed in a Dick Cavett interview with
the group from 1981). The instrument parts were experimented, improvised,
and overdubbed in the recording studio.[4] This limitation would later affect
the production of the Mamma Mia musical as other musicians were brought in
just to sit and listen to the existing recordings and notate everything that
was considered for use in the musical - a demanding task that required six
months as Andersson and Ulvaeus insisted on near-exact notation of their past
performances.[5] The composers have also indicated that they almost always
start with the music and add the words afterwards.
