My ABBA

Here you can find some impressions of my personal ABBA fandom. Just some bits and pieces I would like to collect here.

About me

I got to know ABBA in 1975/1976 especially through the German Musikladen double LP The Very Best Of ABBA. The first ABBA album I bought on my own was Arrival. I still remember listening to the LP at the department store and it just blew me away from the start.

I stayed a fan even when there was no sign of a revival. After 1982 my biggest ABBA luck was to find an unknown version here and there on some imported LP in the shops. I spent hours going from shop to shop and also eagerly awaited the letter with the new offers from the mail-order shop each time.

So I really couldn’t care less for Erasure’s or other bands’ ABBA covers and I neither needed any movie soundtrack nor the release of Gold. Nevertheless the announcement of the Thank You For The Music box set was a big push again.

At around 1996 I had access to the internet. However, it took several years before I got the idea to look for information and bootlegs of ABBA. Each little found of a rarity was just like birthday and Christmas at the same time. Around 2004 I also got in contact with other, international ABBA fans on the net which lead to this site in the end. To my deep disappointment I never made it to see ABBA live in concert. So this site also is an attempt to have some compensation for that...

Soundwise I rely on the CD versions from the 80s and/or the Deluxe albums. My original vinyls have been played to death and I don’t want to buy them again because I don’t like the handling and the noise of LPs. Therefore I switched to CDs very early. In 1986 I bought my first CD player for a small fortune. I still own and use it. And the first CDs I got for it were the ‘Cock Robin’ album and The Album.

When the first remasters were released I became a fan of them for several years. Meanwhile I wonder why and returned to the first CD versions years ago because of the dynamics. I forwarded the remasters to a very close friend and so I could spread the ABBA virus a bit.

I’m not a true collector. I’ve neither been a regular reader of the old pop magazines like Bravo nor have I collected all kinds of snippets in a scrapbook, Mamma Mia! is nothing ABBA for me and I don’t own every single bit of the solo works.There also aren’t hundreds of ABBA LPs and CDs or merchandise at my home.

When my sister forwarded the news to me about ABBA doing new songs I couldn’t believe it at first, but I was very happy.. Soon after that I read an interview with B&B stating that the songs were as a part and a promotion for a virtual show. A lot of my happiness disappeared as it contradicted the first official statement about the joy of simply recording again together. Then there were the years of waiting for further news, ‘leaked’ bits here and there, delay after delay and missing communication and official statements which lead to frustration, disappointment and also some anger on my side.

Nevertheless, when the first songs and the full album finally were released, I was very touched by them. I hadn’t forgotten my feelings in the years before though and so I refused to buy the album immediately. Instead I bought a used copy of the standard jewel-cased Voyage album for very few Euros months later. The overkill of Voyage releases to me was and is just complete madness anyway. To some extent it actually even made me selling several ABBA items in the past months

The Voyage show, although technically interesting of course, is not made for me btw. While it was a nice opportunity to see all four together appearing in the public again (perhaps for the last time), the concept of the show feels just wrong for me. I for example can’t stand an ‘Agnetha’ with the hair of the 70s singing The Winner Takes It All...

So I guess my ABBA voyage ends here.