| ABBA
- The Complete Recording Sessions: the creation of a book
As
this is written, in December 2004, it is just a little over ten years since my
first ABBA book was published. It changed my life around completely, and turned
out to have some impact on the ABBA world as well. Here is the full story of how
ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions came to be written and published.
Part 1 (of 12): PASSIONATE ABOUT MUSIC
The
road between first landing on the idea that I should write a book about ABBA's
recordings, and then having the book published in October 1994, is not an especially
straight one. Indeed, as I'm writing this, a decade after publication, it is hard
to decide exactly where the story should begin.
Perhaps the right place
to start is with my falling in love with The Beatles back in the late 1960s. I
was born in 1965, so at the time I was just a toddler. When I was seven years
old, in 1972, my dad bought Hunter Davies' authorised Beatles biography for me.
I guess this must have started my interest in not just listening to music, but
to read about it and learn more about the stories surrounding everything to do
with music and artists.
As the 1970s progressed, this side of my personality
became more important to me. In 1973 I began a subscription to a short-lived music
magazine entitled Ny Musik ("New Music"), and around the same time a
friend and I started our own little home-made music magazine - it had about two
readers, and it too turned out to be quite short-lived! Towards the late 1970s
I had a little more money to spend as I saw fit, so I began buying more and more
music books - primarily about The Beatles - and reading foreign music magazines.
Fortunately,
I was fairly proficient in English even at this time, and no doubt listening to
and reading about music from England and America helped sharpen this skill. Somewhere
at the back of my mind there must have been a dream of writing about music in
some form. On my first visit to London, in 1979 when I was 14 years old, I even
visited the Smash Hits offices (I started buying this magazine from the very first
issue and eventually became a subscriber).
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I
was given my very first music-related book in 1972: the Swedish translation of
the biography The Beatles by Hunter Davies.
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