ABBA: The Official Photo Book

Dancing Queen, SOS, The Name of the Game, Knowing Me Knowing You, Take A Chance on Me, Super Trooper, The Winner Takes It All, Mamma Mia, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) and Fernando - the hit songs by a group of two couples in love who recorded songs that sound unlike any others. With every year that passes, ABBA's music appears stronger and more enduring. Between 1972 and 82 they released eight studio albums. The group had no international experience when the breakthrough came with Waterloo and their Eurovision Song Contest win. Benny and Björn wrote the songs, but in the studio all four collaborated. Agnetha and Frida worked on the arrangements, laying down track after track. The combination of their voices is also key to the ABBA sound, a soprano and a mezzo-soprano and songs in which they express their dreams, setbacks, loves and separations. Beautiful blonde Agnetha Fältskog was already a Swedish superstar and both she and Frida had sung with various dance bands before they went solo. Benny and Björn belonged to two of the biggest Swedish bands of the 1960s and met for the first time in June 1966. Agnetha and Björn met when she was 18 and he 23 in May 1968. Benny first met Frida at the Swedish finals of the Eurovision Song Contest in March 1969. She was 23, he was 22. Featuring rare photographs starting from their early years, nearly all in colour with all the glamorous costumes, fur coats, tiny mini dresses, in leotards rehearsing dance routines, picnicking with their children, lying in bed in The Grand Hotel Brighton, enjoying worldwide travel, the big concerts, set lists, the album covers, the reunions and TV appearances. And finally the movies, Mamma Mia! The Movie and wiring up for the incredible 850 visual effects artists who collaborate to create the current ABBA Voyage Show for four years. If you haven't seen it, go! With timeline, this is the only Official ABBA book, now with a brand new chapter featuring never-before-seen pictures from the Voyage Show plus dozens of never-before-seen behind-the-scenes pictures such as on the bullet train in Japan for the shows that were to be ABBA's last for decades. 304pp. 25.6cm square.