-Brian Mendonça
Recently we had the curious phenomenon of a crowd
screaming their guts out for a tribute concert to the legendary group ABBA. The
inescapable ease with which the switch was made was, like most media events, heady
and scary at the same time.
The ability of the Waterloo team to mime the
original ABBA act along with, of course, original saxophonist Ulf Andersson
needs to be lauded.
Yet niggling questions remain. What happened to the
other three members of the original band? As the crowd coasts on the brand
recall of the original sound where are the legends who started it all,
slinking?
A chance remark in a discussion about the Waterloo
performance revealed that one of the original members has actually turned her
back on the world and lives now in isolation.
Benny Anderson, Anni- Frid Lyngstad (Frida), Agnetha
Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus were the original four in 1974. Their journey is as fascinating as their
music. Both couples were married at the height of their fame. Bjorn and Agnetha
separated in 1979, Benny and Frida in 1981.
The next year ABBA disbanded as if to bear out the
case that when the love between the couples was no longer there, the band could
not survive. In fact the Abba logo was designed to reflect that the bands
singers were two committed couples, ‘by having the B’s oriented towards the
A’s.’ The iconic logo was designed by Swedish artist Rune Soderquist.
Thirty-five years later ‘ABBA’ are resurrected in
Goa. Of the original four only the 77-year-old
Ulf Anderson survived. Frida would have been 72 years and Agnetha 67 years of
age. Audiences may not have been prepared to shell out to see a grandmother
perform, but a grandfather would be passable.
Throwing light on the
possibility of a reunion Agnetha’s words were full of pathos, ‘I think we have
to accept that it will not happen,’ she said, ‘because we are too old and each
one of us has their own life. Too many years have gone by since we stopped, and
there's really no meaning in putting us together again." (Interview of May 2013)
Frida now lives with her British boyfriend Henry Smith in
Zermatt, Switzerland. She lost her daughter in a car crash in 1988. Agnetha has gone on to record in English and
Swedish spawning an autobiography The
Girl With the Golden Hair. Bjorn who suffered from episodes of memory loss
now oversees the abba museum at www.abbathemuseum.com
To my mind, this awareness of the terrible beauty of life is
lost when an act that masquerades for ABBA is held. It glosses over the fact that the original
voices have chosen not to sing again. Masses are always ready to consume the
past if it is packaged properly.
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Published in Gomantak Times, Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 14 May 2017. Pix courtesy www.jellynote(dot)com
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