Monday, 16 January 2012

Popshop, 1977: ABBA is dreaming about a movie about their own turbulent love story

Despite the pile of letters that has heaped up on his desk, Stig Anderson is feeling as fit as a fiddle in his cosy arm chair. For weeks he has been on the road with ABBA, from one European city to the other, and now that he is back home he doesn't know where to start. "For the first few weeks I'm going to have to work twice as hard instead of taking it easy," he smiles, "but oh well, work pays off". Björn and Benny are present as well because there's a lot of work in store for them too...

"I never thought a tour could be so exhausting," according to Benny. "When we came home, we slept continuously for almost two days. The tour itself? All in all it was a success, certainly when it comes to public interest. The show itself wasn't one hundred percent perfect yet, but we've learned a lot during these couple of weeks and that's the most important thing. We've enjoyed it too, I don't think we will wait that long before we will go on tour again..."
At the moment, ABBA has started working on a new album. But there are other activities on their schedule as well. "We have all kinds of film plans," Björn proudly says. "We've been on the road for a couple of weeks now but still we only managed to reach a small part of our fan base. To give you an example: the demand for tickets in London was so overwhelming that we could have played in front of a sold out venue 147 nights in a row. We think it's a shame because the fans that haven't been able to get tickets are just as dear to us as the ones that have. The first movie that we are going to release is a sort of documentary about ABBA. With footage from our live show but from our private life as well. That way, everyone will have a chance to see us, albeit not live..."

"The footage has been filmed by a Swedish director who makes all our promotional films too. A real genius, believe me...," according to Benny. "When that movie is finished, we will probably start working on a musical. Björn and I will start writing the music soon and we already have someone who is working on the plot. At the moment we actually don't know which way we are heading. Maybe we will use the theme of the mini musical that we performed during our concerts: the story about a girl that is striving after fame and success but ultimately gets squeezed like a lemon. A project like that will probably take six months, but I think that we have reached the point that we can afford to release less singles. I think we have become a household name. On the silver screen we want to prove that we are more than just a commercial little pop group. And our film plans don't stop there; we would like to make a movie about the romanticized story of ABBA. A sort of autobiographical movie..."

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