Björn Ulvaeus turns 80: The silent head behind Abba

Björn Ulvaeus is a musician, singer, songwriter, composer, producer, publisher, entrepreneur – and in everything he is a perfectionist. Above all, he is: Abba. He founded this legendary pop group from Sweden, which is one of the most successful in music history with over 380 million records sold. Björn Ulvaeus performed with ABBA, sang, most of the texts written. He is the dad of Abba because he is the oldest of the troop: on April 25th he turns 80.

It is difficult to imagine this dainty but vigorous gentleman as a world star with megahoh plateaus, skin-tight glitter suit and electric guitar on a stage. He also describes himself as if the Björn von Abba was different: “I am a thoroughly rational person.” As if the true Ulvaeus is at home in the world of numbers and calculations.

Actually, he would have liked to become a civil engineer, but after Abitur and military service, the young man from Gothenburg initially studied law. But he is already playing in the popular Swedish folk group Hootenanny Singers. In 1966 he first met Benny Andersson (78), who was a keyboardist of the band Hep Stars. A friend and partnership develops for life, Ulvaeus gives up your nail.

Both musicians are passionate songwriters who find a composition partner in each other. You write songs for the HEP stars and other artists, take a studio in Stockholm, take up your own songs and are successful pop producers who not only make it into the charts in Sweden.

In 1969 Björn Ulvaeus met the 18-year-old singer Agnetha Fältskog (75). The two fall in love, marry in 1971 and decide to come together musically. His friend Benny Andersson and his partner, the singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad (79), join in a vacation in Cyprus-the new band was born, named after the initial letters of their first names: A (Gnetha) B (Jörn) B (Enny) A (NNI-Frid). Ulvaeus is the first B.

After the first successes and the first album (“Ring Ring”), the big breakthrough on April 6, 1974: Abba Siegen at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton (England) with the hit “Waterloo”, an earworm from Ulvaeus and Andersson.

In the following years, Abba conquered the world. With hits that are still happy to be played on the radio today and prefer to be heard. Songs like “Sos”, “I do, i do, i do, i do, i do, I do,” money, money, money “” Fernando “,” knowing me, knowing you “,” dancing queen “” take a chance on me “,” chiquititata “,” The winner takes it all “,” Thanks you for the music “and what they are all called,, From the pen of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.

The band’s albums are all bestsellers, their tours break all records, the world is fond of Abba’s melodies. It is “far more contradictory to hate Abba than they love,” once the American pop culture author Chuck Klosterman writes.

With the end of love, ABBA is also at the end. The two couples have lived apart, Agnetha and Björn divorced in 1980, in the same year Anni-Frid and Benny also separate. Shortly afterwards is also the end of ABBA.

It is a liberation for Björn Ulvaeus because he only played the pop star, “for the stage you have to be exhibitionist and entertainer, I was never.” With the end of ABBA, freedom comes for Ulvaeus. He produces music together with Benny Andersson, you write musicals, including “Chess”, “Mamma Mia!”. He makes films, opens hotels, restaurants, theater. With his brother, he operates a computer company in Great Britain for a few years.

And he finds his way to himself – to the true Björn Ulvaeus. It is not an easy way because the surrounded pop star feels that he has no self -confidence. He starts drinking, stops again, goes to the therapist who teaches him: You have to love yourself. In conversation with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, he calls himself a “sober alcoholic”. Only gradually did he find a security “that displaced my shyly”.

The multimillionaire Ulvaeus (esteemed assets: 200 to 300 million euros) has become a political person who is fighting for “the liberal and secular democracy”, against populists and said five years ago: “Disinformation is the nature of dictatorships. I always thought, we here in classic liberal democracies of the West are immune.

He addresses his atheism and a strict separation of the state and the church, propagates a cashless payment transactions-cash is one of the main causes of crime for him-and as a public speaker, “fires, moderated question-and-response rounds and office hours after dinner”, conveys from an agency.

In 2008 he founded the publisher Fri Tanke (free thinking) with friends and published books “that no one else translated”. The program: popular science, politics, game theory, philosophy history, also works on Aristotle and Voltaire.

His family, his four adult children (from two divorced marriages), his grandchildren, his 27 years younger, third wife, whom he married last September, is also important to him.

A revival of ABBA is no longer an issue for him. “We will never be on stage again,” he told the British newspaper “Sunday Telegraph”. There is “simply no motivation to re -shape us. Money doesn’t matter, and we want people to remember us as we were. Young, exuberant, full of energy and ambition”.

This memory is difficult for him, because Ulvaeus has problems with his long -term memory. He can no longer remember many events of the past, not even the triumph of 1974 with “Waterloo”: “It is like I have never been there.”

It is quite possible that this loss is the motivation to write the ninth Abba album “Voyage” in 2021. Björn and Benny have the idea of ​​making ABBA perform virtually, as avatars, in the style of their heyday: young, beautiful, perfect. They want to make three songs for the avatars, then you can think of three more, after all it is an album.

Since 2022, the ABBA-Avatars have been performing in an ABBA arena (3,000 places) in London, seven times a week-until 2026. So far, well over three million spectators have seen the 90-minute show, for Björn Ulvaeus the perfect ABBA impact: “Our avatars will sing forever.”