Considering the huge success of the pop band ABBA, we sometimes forget that each member had a career or even a job before this “supergroup” was founded. Anni-Frid Lyngstad also had two children and was divorced when she first met Benny Andersson in 1968, who later became her second husband and ABBA music boss. Previously, he first became a music producer. The daughter of a Norwegian woman and a German Wehrmacht soldier came to Sweden as a child and trained as a seamstress, but later discovered her talent in singing to light music and jazz.
Lyngstad initially also relied on a mixture of folk tales and hits that Agnetha Fältskog popularized in Sweden at the same time. Escaping the city, a popular folk theme around 1970, can be heard as an allusion to his single “Man vill ju leva lite dessemellan” (“You want to live something now and then”), released in 1972, in which he sings about the hamster wheel of the modern world of work on a twelve-string guitar before the swaying refrain comes. This hit quality also suited some of ABBA’s songs, which later made them world famous along with Fältskog, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus – but only in the mixture of Andersson’s genius melodic strokes and Ulvaeus’ melancholic lyrics that became so distinctive: for example “Dancing Queen”, “Super Trouper”, “SOS” and many more.
After ABBA and the breakup: Take a deep breath
ABBA’s heyday only lasted ten years before the band broke up and the couple divorced again. Frida, as she was often called, then continued her solo career and recorded an album with Phil Collins as producer in 1982, including a duet with him (“Something’s Going On”). Another album followed (“Shine”, 1984) and, after a break, a return to singing in Swedish: “Djupa andetag” (“Deep Breaths”, 1996).
Just as she set the bar with ABBA, not least with the legendary cat dress (which even feminist pop critics, who deemed it a “style nightmare”), had to admit, Lyngstad did the same as a solo artist liberated by her sometimes androgynous looks. Then he retired from the music business. You can read about her in social circles because she married a German nobleman and now lives with an English nobleman.
He once said he wanted to let ABBA rest, and that is still true on stage today, while in the studio the incredible comeback album “Voyage” (2021) brought the band together again after forty years and you can see them singing and dancing almost every day in their own London theater as “Abbatare” from 1979. The original Anni-Frid Lyngstad turned eighty this Saturday.
