| ABBA
- The Complete Recording Sessions: the creation of a book
Part 11 (of 12):
THE BOOK IS PUBLISHED
Finally, in late October 1994, ABBA - The
Complete Recording Sessions was published. There had been quite some anticipation
surrounding the release of the Thank You For The Music box set and The Complete
Recording Sessions; the first few meda things in Sweden happened more than six
months earlier. The news about the upcoming box set and the book was broken to
the general public in the newspaper Expressen on March 19, 1994; the article was
based on an interview with me. A while later I also made my very first television
appearance. The programme was Go'morron Sverige ("Good Morning Sweden")
on April 6, and the occasion was the 20th anniversary of ABBA's Eurovision Song
Contest victory with Waterloo.
My agent also managed to stir up quite a
lot of interest in conjunction with the actual publication. Extracts from the
book were published in Exxet - which, at the time, was the Sunday supplement for
Expressen - and also in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. I was interviewed
on a couple of Swedish radio shows; on one of them, Efter tre ("After Three"),
I appeared together with Michael Tretow; on another, Studio Ett ("Studio
One"), I appeared with Björn Ulvaeus. You can listen to an interview
(in Swedish) aired live on Radio Stockholm on November 3, 1994, by clicking here.
Less memorable was a telephone interview with a local radio station in
the UK, where I was introduced as being from Denmark and the title of my book
as "ABBA - The Golden Years"! Indeed, considering the UK was where the
book was published, the overall media attention for it in England was scant: a
few brief mentions here and there, but only one full-scale review, in the now
defunct Vox magazine. Partly, the book was probably before its time: the world
had just got used to ABBA being back again, and it appears the interest in the
group was still regarded as a "temporary revival". I remember even in
Sweden, my agent was talking to an interested publisher who declined after having
been told - by people supposedly in the know - that "the ABBA thing was over".
Also, I guess the book simply wasn't regarded as important enough outside the
most ardent fan circles.
For me personally it was, of course, an amazing
feeling to finally see the book in print. Perhaps the design wasn't exactly what
I had envisioned - compare it with The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and
you will see what I mean - but at least the information was out there for anyone
to read who was interested in the history of ABBA's recorded work. Most importantly,
Century 22 did actually publish the book at a time when almost no other publishers
were interested. For that, I owe them plenty of gratitude.
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An
article based on extracts from the book was published in the Sunday supplement
of the Swedish newspaper Expressen. Although ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions
was hardly a muck-raker, the paper somehow managed to sell the story as "For
the first time, Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn tell all about the fights
within ABBA". Oh dear...
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