reason to celebrate
Abba tops the chart for his birthday: Benny Andersson turns 75
Abba band member Benny Andersson is celebrating his 75th birthday
© BARDELL ANDREAS / Aftonbladet / Picture Alliance
Abba band member Benny Andersson celebrates his birthday. His musical creativity was put into his cradle from an early age. The new Abba album proves: Even at an advanced age, the Swede’s desire for music hardly seems to have dried up.
Benny Andersson recently made his best birthday present for himself with a few friends: Together with Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad and Björn Ulvaeus, the Stockholm-based Abba album was released at the beginning of November.
It was the cult band’s first studio album in almost 40 years. Andersson, the second youngest of the quartet, will be 75 this Thursday (December 16). And just like in the 70s, Abba found himself in a very specific place on Andersson’s birthday: right at the top of the music charts.
“We have nothing to prove,” said Benny Andersson in an interview with the Swedish newspaper “Dagens Nyheter” before the album “Voyage” was released. When the sensational comeback was announced in London at the beginning of September, the composer confidently said that he actually liked the new Abba music quite a lot. “We did it as well as we can at our age.” What if people think that Abba was much better 40 years ago? For free!
Abba Comeback: Record start for “Voyage”
“Voyage” has now made a record start in Germany. In the first week, the album sold more than 200,000 times and thus better than the remaining top 100 combined. In Germany and other countries, Abba stormed to the top of the album charts. The band was also nominated for a Grammy for the very first time for the single “I Still Have Faith In You”.
All of this was created in Andersson’s music studio in Stockholm. There Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid first came together for two songs, which were followed by more and then a few more. Suddenly there were ten songs, including an Abba Christmas carol for the first time – and all in all a new studio album. In addition, there is an unprecedented live show, in which digital images of the pop group will “be” on stage from May 2022 in a specially built Abba Arena in London.
If Agnetha and Frida are Abba’s face, then Benny and Björn are Abba’s heads. The congenial duo wrote and composed the Abba songs with their catchy melodies, while the voices of the two women gave the whole thing the unique sound of the group. That was the case with Abba’s breakthrough at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with “Waterloo”, and it’s still the same with “Voyage” today.
Benny Andersson and his love for music
What is heard over and over again with Göran Bror Benny Andersson, who was born in Stockholm on December 16, 1946, is his extraordinary love for music. It was created long before the dazzling Abba times of the 1970s.
When they were children, father Gösta and grandpa Efraim played the accordion with little Benny before mother Laila bought a piano for him. If he didn’t have to do anything for school, then from then on the young Swede spent large parts of the day at the keys.
He realized early on that he wanted to be a musician. That led him to join the band The Hep Stars when he was a teenager. “Sweden’s wildest pop band got a new organist,” it says in the Abba Museum in Stockholm. Several of the group’s hits, with Andersson on the keyboard, landed at the top of the Swedish charts and echoed through hundreds of people’s parks in the music-loving country over the summer.
On June 5, 1966, Andersson met another musician named Björn Ulvaeus while performing in one of these parks. The two became friends who from then on wrote songs together. At the end of the 1960s he met the then jazz singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad, whom he was to marry in 1978 after a long relationship.
Once upon a time in another time: super hits without ceasing
By the time they were married, the couple and their band partners, who were also in a relationship, had long since become world stars. Whether “SOS”, “Mamma Mia”, “Dancing Queen” or a whole bunch of other songs: what Abba touched suddenly became gold.
After three years of marriage, Lyngstad was over – and shortly after that, Abba was over. Immediately after the divorce, Andersson married the TV presenter Mona Nörklit, and musically things continued for the always creative composer: During the abbalance period he wrote the musical “Chess” with Ulvaeus, and played folk music with Benny Andersson orchestra resurrected. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University.
In general: Stockholm! Andersson has remained loyal to his hometown to this day. “The good thing about Stockholm is that people don’t bother you – not in the 70s, not in the 80s, not now,” he recently told the BBC. People just came up to him today and were pleased that Abba had made a few new songs.
With his friendly facial expression, long grayish hair and small glasses, the former teen idol looks a little bit like a satisfied physics teacher in high school today. With all the looseness he exudes, it’s easy to forget that there is hard work behind Abba’s successes – and that sometimes requires a few sacrifices.
One of the smaller ones was that Benny and Björn had to shave off their familiar beards as part of the motion capture for the digital images for the Abba show in London. “If it has to be done, then it has to be done,” Andersson told the BBC in a very pragmatic way. You could also say: Even at an advanced age, there should be no hair between Benny Andersson and the music.