Sweden: The ABBA voice that remains in the ear: Agnetha Fallskog is 75

If Agnetha fell to the microphone reached, in most cases it was connected to an immediate catchy tune. Whether “Super Trouper” or “Mamma Mia”, “Dancing Queen” or “The Winner Takes it all”: What the blonde Swede in the glorious ABBA years was sitting with her clear soprano voice, which stayed in the head for a long time.

A lot has changed in Fallenkog since then, but one thing has remained: her voice in the ear of the ABBA fans. Today one of the largest representatives in Swedish music history is 75 years old.

Felling cog is rare in public. To this day, she has retained her reluctance, which she has already said at the great time of Abbamania and which was sometimes interpreted as a distancing and coolness. She only gives interviews a few, even for her birthday, as the long -time ABBA confidant and manager Görel Hanser aligns on request. Your birthday will therefore celebrate your birthday entirely in private celebrations.

This private was something that the shy Swede missed for a long time. In the glittering, dazzling ABBA world, there was no place for a retreat for a long time – instead it went from world hit to world hit and from appearance to appear.

Love of music and music about love

Her love for music discovered Agneta Åse Fältskog – the H found his way into her first name only later – already in her children’s room in Jönköping in Swedish a good 300 kilometers southwest of Stockholm. In an unofficial fault cog biography of the authors Daniel Ward, it can be read that the young Swede decided to want to become a world rank one day as a five-year-old.

In this way, in addition to her musical talent as a teenager, she also helped her with her first listeners in 1967 as a 17-year-old in “Jag Var Så Kär” (I was so in love). At that time there was another emerging Swedish musician among these listeners: Björn Ulvaeus.

“I remember how I heard Agnetha’s first single on the radio,” said Ulvaeus 2013 in a BBC interview. “There was something so special in her voice, plus the fact that she wrote the song herself. It was magical.”

“Abba was shaped out of love”

Finally, this magic became more – much more: Fallskog and Ulvaeus became a couple on the one hand, which later got two children with Linda and Christian. On the other hand, together with Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, they merged into a quartet to conquer the world. “Abba was shaped out of love,” said Fältskog in 1979 to the magazine “Vecko Revyn”.

This was followed by one of the craziest band stories that pop music has ever seen: with “Waterloo” Abba celebrated the victory at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton in English and also the international breakthrough. Ulvaeus and Andersson thought one success hit after the other, Falletskog and Lyngstad sang these songs deep into the hearing aisles of this world.

“SOS”, “Fernando”, “Money, Money, Money”, “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and numerous other ABBA songs found their indispensable path to the chart tips. The four northern lights became world famous and toured to Australia. Felling cog also shaped the picture of the beautiful Swede with the blonde hair and blue eyes.

Reservation instead of glittering world

And yet she longed for calm and retreat. “It was exhausting to be on these enormous tours,” she said in 2014 in one of her rare public appearances in the Swedish-Norwegian program “Skavlan”. Sometimes she just wanted to be with the children at home.

Ultimately, the love for Ulvaeus did not stand the pressure of the ABBA hysteria, even that between Anderson and Lyngstad. At the end of the 1980s, some time after the end of the Great ABBA era, Fältskog finally retired completely from the public.

What remained with all of this is the love of music: accompanied by less glitter and less world attention after the Abbamania, solo projects, most recently in 2023 with the album “A+”, with which she again demonstrated, even without her former band members, being a first-class pop musician. This does not result in world hits – but the Swede may have come up with the focus of the world public after the excess years.

The withdrawal from the glittering world should not change the fact that 75th birthday of falling cogs will also have their voice in their ears. Perhaps one or the other fan will put on a record from the good, old ABBA period in your honor or die one of the band’s world hits.

Also almost half a century after Abbamania, the group’s music is listened to further up and down – and in 2025 young people also catch up with how Agnetha fellskog conjures up an occasional catchy tune.