| ABBA
- The Complete Recording Sessions: the creation of a book
Part 10 (of 12):
LISTENING TO RARE TRACKS & FINDING A PUBLISHER
One dream related
to the project was of course to get to hear some of the unreleased ABBA recordings.
Naturally, I would have wanted to listen to every single tape in the archives,
if possible, but I knew that this was likely to remain a dream. Indeed, at one
point it seemed as if I wouldn't be able to hear one single tape. Björn
and Benny didn't appear to be especially anxious to revisit the songs they had
already junked, and if I was to arrange this myself I would have to hire a studio
that could play 24-track tapes. Given the financial implications, this was simply
not an option.
However, eventually, during my talks with Björn and
Benny, they seemed to get more keen to hear some of those tracks themselves. I
remember Benny and me discussing one of the unreleased tracks and he said, "Well,
you can hear for yourself when you listen to the tape." When I replied, somewhat
glumly, that it didn't look as if I would have the opportunity to do that, Benny
said, "Oh, but we have to do that!" And the opportunity did indeed arise,
when the Thank You For The Music box set project was set in motion. (Read more
about this most exciting day with Björn, Benny, Michael Tretow and the forgotten
ABBA tapes in the "Box set story", accessed from the page for the Thank
You For The Music box set.)
Eventually, towards the end of 1993, the
English-language manuscript for the book was more or less completed. Björn
and Benny both read through the entire text, offering comments and corrections.
However, their input was hardly a matter of censorship: there were only one or
two things they ever asked me to take out, and those were simply things that they
felt might be hurtful to other people. And, needless to say, they certainly didn't
try to stop me from mentioning the existence of any of the unreleased recordings.
But
now that the book had been written, how to have it published? Fortunately, I had
already signed with my agent, Bengt Nordin, as early as February 1993. Without
his efforts I doubt that the book would have been published to this day. It soon
transpired that despite the ABBA revival - which was in full swing by this time,
following the release of ABBA Gold in 1992 - interest in a book that specialised
in the details of ABBA's recorded work was pretty slim. We only ever had interest
from two different publishers, and as it turned out, in April 1994, we finally
signed with Century 22. This company was run by the same people who had once published
the ABBA Magazine (1977-1983). Recently, they had also published John Tobler's
ABBA Gold book.
One main advantage with going with Century 22 was that
their association with ABBA meant that they had a large archive of pictures which
they could use. I had also done some additional research, trying to find photographs
that were as closely related as possible to the subject of the book: recording
and creating the music. Anders Hanser's photo archive came in very handy, since
he is probably the one photographer who has taken most pictures of the group working
in the studio. But I also found the odd picture by other photographers. A few
examples are the picture on page 43 of Björn and Benny with Janne Schaffer
and the photograph of Agnetha with her voice coach on page 84.
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Agnetha
and her voice coach Inga Sundström. One of the rare and unusual pictures
I found during my picture research and which were included in ABBA - The Complete
Recording Sessions.
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