Hitkrant, May 1979: Will ABBA be cut in half? – Success is contradicting the rumours

In 1979, it was rumoured in several magazines that Björn and Benny would withdraw from the limelight and Agnetha and Frida would continue as a duo.
Alarming stories in the Swedish media: allegedly, ABBA will be cut in half! At the end of this year, when the upcoming tour is completed, Björn and Benny would retire from the limelight permanently, after which Anni-Frid and Agnetha would continue as a duo. Manager Stig Anderson is silent as the grave when it comes to these rumours and although that’s mostly a bad sign, we can hardly imagine that it’s true, especially when we take a look at the overwhelming success of the new album ‘Voulez-Vous’ and the single ‘Does Your Mother Know’!

The icing on the cake of this success was achieved in England; over there, ‘Voulez-Vous’ entered the album charts at number one, the result of 400.000 albums sold in only one week! In Holland, it’s the same story and America has definitely fallen for ABBA as well: ‘Does Your Mother Know’ is rocketing up the charts over there.

And that’s only a small part of ABBA’s international success: the feature film ‘ABBA – The Movie’ is being released in both the US and South America and last week, ABBA travelled to Madrid, where two television shows will be recorded.
The first show, ‘Three Thousand Millions’, will be broadcast all over Mid and South America on June 3. The other show, ‘Applause’, will only be aired in Spain. In both specials, ABBA will obviously perform their Unicef-success ‘Chiquitita’, but... in Spanish!

And then of course, there’s the world tour. It has now been announced that ABBA will start this monster music tour on September 15 in Vancouver, Canada. After that, 17 concerts will be performed in Canada and the States, after which they will travel to Europe where they will perform 20 more concerts in Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland (October 24 in Rotterdam, remember!), Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the UK, Scotland and Ireland. There are negotiations with the Swedish broadcasting company to record a special during that world tour; the special would be called ‘ABBA International’ and it’s supposed to be broadcast in the beginning of 1980.

Alright. With all these plans to look forward to and keeping the album and single successes in mind, it seems a bold statement to us that ABBA will fall apart. But we are keeping something else in mind as well: the old saying ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’. We will keep you posted.