The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover

by Jan Gradvall

Overview

Through exclusive interviews and over a decade of deep research, renowned music journalist Jan Gradvall explores the secrets to ABBA’s success.

There has never been a group like ABBA. More than half a century after their songs were recorded, ABBA still make people the world over dance and sing their hearts out. In 2013, when the band had not been interviewed for over thirty years, Jan Gradvall was granted unique access to them for the next decade and the result is The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover. Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad all share their personal stories, their thoughts and their opinions about ABBA’s music more openly than ever before. Weaving in and out of their story, well-known international music critic Jan Gradvall reveals the context in which their unique sound developed and shows how the story of ABBA is also the story of Sweden and the globalization of pop culture.

From their earliest hits in Sweden like “People Need Love” and “Ring, Ring” to their chart-topping international hits like “Dancing Queen,” “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” and “Mama Mia!” to ABBA Voyage – their first album in forty years – and the two-million-ticket-selling eponymous concert-experience in London, it is undeniable that, in the history of pop culture and music, there has never been a group like ABBA. With remarkable intimacy, Gradvall’s sensational book brings readers closer than ever to one of the world’s most notoriously private groups.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250379856
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jan Gradvall is an award-winning writer and Sweden’s most respected music journalist in the last 40 years. He has written several books on popular culture. Gradvall is the recipient of the Swedish Publicists’ Association’s Grand Prize in 2013 for and won Journalist of the Year awarded by trade organization Sweden’s Magazines in 2001. Gradvall was also instrumental in the founding of the Swedish Music Hall of Fame and served as chairman the first three years since its inauguration. He has a uniquely close journalistic relationship with ABBA, and has appeared in two BBC documentaries, The Joy of ABBA and Flatpack Pop about the Swedish songwriting phenomenon.

Editorial Reviews

"A fun, thorough, and considered appreciation of a major pop act." - Kirkus Reviews

"An unapologetically affectionate ode to one of pop’s biggest acts." - Publisher's Weekly

"Gradvall, who has been on the ABBA beat for many years and has interviewed its members extensively over the past decade-plus, has realized that the most interesting thing about the band isn’t its story but its penumbra: the wider musical world that birthed it, and the one it will leave behind." - The New Yorker

“Writing perfection on musical perfection: book heaven.” - Caitlin Moran, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be a Woman

“There are very few artists who are both extraordinarily successful and culturally important. ABBA were both and only Jann Gradvall - as the most respected of Swedish critics - could tell their story of sex, drugs and pop and roll with the gravitas their incomparable songs deserve.” - Merck Mercuriadis, Founder, Hipgnosis Songs

“Almost as miraculous as the songs it exists to celebrate." - Pete Paphides, journalist for The Times (London) and author of Broken Greek: A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs

“Gradvall, a well-known Swedish critic, has got more out of ABBA than most British journalists ever did…The context this book provides makes ABBA’s success seem even more extraordinary…it’s hard to imagine even the most obsessive fan leaving The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover without discovering something new." - The Guardian

“A masterpiece of music journalism.” – The Scottish Herald

From the Publisher

2025-03-21
A wide-ranging cultural study of the Swedish pop icons.

This book by Swedish music journalist Gradvall is comprehensive—he had access to all four ABBA members—but structurally irreverent, taking its cues from Craig Brown’s history-in-fragments method. So rather than start with biographies of each member (songwriters Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad), it opens with the group’s collapse in 1982, filtered through its single “The Day Before You Came,” then skips to an exploration of Sweden’s dansbandvocal music before hopscotching around its key musical moments and influences. Good strategy: It shakes the stiffness out of a music biography of a pop group that was a little off-kilter, from the broken English of its lyrics to the lurking somberness of even its jauntiest tunes. (The book’s subtitle,Melancholy Undercover, refers to Andersson’s assessment of the predominant characteristic of their music.) Gradvall’s approach also reveals unusual moments for a group that seemed carefully machined: the tweaks to Eurovision contest rules that made “Waterloo” their first major hit, the tensions between dansbandand the ersatz-American raggareculture that the group exploited, the importance of LGBTQ+ culture in keeping the group relevant after their breakup, the backlash against the group as pompous and irrelevant when Sweden’s politics took a leftward turn, and various odd cultural collisions (to make a 1977 Australian tour viable, they agreed to a kind of cultural exchange program that made AC/DC big in Sweden). Despite all the interviews, the “Abbas” (as he calls them) remain somewhat mysterious, avoiding details about divorces and other matters that might tamper too much with their legacy. But the story is leavened by Gradvall’s personal observations of how influential the group was in their native country, especially their breakthrough 1976 album,Arrival, which “sounds as if the sun had signed a record contract.”

A fun, thorough, and considered appreciation of a major pop act.

Kirkus Reviews