| ABBA
- The Complete Recording Sessions: the creation of a book
Part
5 (of 12): WORK ON THE BOOK BEGINS
In
early 1993, I finally set to work full-time on my ABBA book. As it happened, after
completing my university studies, there was a recession in Sweden and getting
a job was not so easy. I took this situation as an opportunity to really devote
myself to my book project. I was prepared to live on next to nothing, as long
as I was allowed to pursue my dream of writing this book. And that's exactly what
happened. When I think of today's world of fairly affordable hi-tech computers,
the Internet revolution and so on, I can't believe how primitive my working situation
was. I had a computer, yes, but I believe it was severely out of date even when
I bought it. For example, everything had to be saved on floppy-disks, and it had
no Windows environment whatsoever.
The first few months of the project
were spent just gathering information. I had a few friends here in Sweden who
were ABBA fans and had saved old cuttings and television programmes which came
in useful, but it was far from everything I needed. Therefore, I went to the archives
of the evening paper Expressen, where everyone was allowed to read archive copies
of all their back issues from the time they started until the present time for
free (the archives have since closed down). I knew that this newspaper had been
quite positive about ABBA at the time, writing a lot about them, so I figured
this might be a good way to gain insight into the whens and wheres of ABBA's career.
What few music magazines had been around in Sweden during ABBA's heyday, didn't
have a consistent coverage of the group's activities.
I began with the
first issue of January 1969 and simply went through every paper, day by day, page
by page, to find even the tiniest morsel of information. I didn't have a laptop
or anything, and making photo copies in this archive was prohibitively expensive,
so if I found something interesting I had to write it down by hand. As you may
imagine, this was quite time-consuming. I actually never got farther than December
1977 with this diligent method, simply because I was running out of time. After
that I would mainly look up various dates and periods where I thought I might
find something interesting, up to the end of 1982. Looking through these newspapers
in this way was also useful because you would discover ads for weeklies who might
run an ABBA-related story, and then you could look up those magazines in the Royal
Library.
I also watched television programmes and listened to radio programmes
at the National Archive Of Recorded Sound And Moving Images here in Stockholm.
Most importantly, I went back to the archives where I had found the session musician
recording dates to find even more information. I also began approaching fans all
over the world, getting help and information from people such as Steve Ballinger
(who ran the fanzine International ABBA Express at the time), Noel King and Nicholas
Fältskog (yes, that really is his name; he had it legally changed ).
All
this information was entered into several different files on my computer, one
of which was a massive chronology where I entered all dates that I could possibly
find - everything from recording dates to trivial information about ABBA attending
this or that event. I also had one file where I assembled all the facts I could
find about each individual ABBA recording. Furthermore, I had separate files where
I collected all the facts, quotations, etc. that I could find about different
subjects, such as "songwriting", "recording methods", and
"how and why ABBA dissolved". I had to learn not only about ABBA's recordings,
but about the group's story in general.
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Fascinating
Facsimile no. 2: One page of notes from the archives of the newspaper Expressen.
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