Bjorn Ulvaeus remembers it like it was yesterday. He and Abba had just won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with their glam-rock stomper Waterloo. The next morning, he and his wife, Abba singer Agnetha Faltskog, flew back to their home in Stockholm. They had become overnight stars but Faltskog was suddenly something else too: a global sex symbol. Those crazy satin knickerbockers. Those sad, dreamy blue eyes. And let the record also show — these were different times, so much was made of his wife’s epoch-making booty.
No wonder Ulvaeus dropped his bags and took a long look in the mirror.
“I remember the actual full-length mirror,” he says. “And I remember making a rock-solid decision: this cannot go on. This must change immediately, because this is not what a pop star looks like.”
Ulvaeus thought he was too fat to be famous. On the bus to the Eurovision final at the Brighton Dome, his trousers were so tight he couldn’t sit down.
“There are many myths about Abba, but that one is true,” he says. “I nearly split my trousers and something needed to change and change it did. I began running and eating more healthily that same day.”
At least one account says Ulvaeus found it “irritating” being married to a sex symbol. Was that a part of it? Keeping up with his wife, the best assembled Swedish export since Ikea’s Billy bookcase?
“No, I don’t think I ever said I was irritated. I mean she was very… Yeah, but the reason I went on a diet wasn’t because of her. It was because pop stars were thin. And that’s what I was supposed to be. A pop star.”
Ulvaeus turns 80 in a few days and appears in remarkably good shape. That’s no surprise: we’re looking at 50 years of salad and workouts here. In the mornings back home in Sweden he sails around a lake on his surf ski (a kind of kayak), doesn’t eat until midday and in the evening works out on his cross trainer, TRX suspension cables and something called a “vibrator plate”.
He also drinks 15-20 cups of coffee a day, which might explain why he vibrates slightly too, like there’s a small electric current passing through him. Bright-eyed with a lush wave of hair and a good beard, my only quibble are his very thin ears. Considering the crucial role they’ve played in music history, I can’t believe they’re so delicate. Almost see-through.
Usually I wouldn’t bang on about someone’s body. But you can with Bjorn Ulvaeus. He likes it.
You look amazing, I say.
“Thank you very much. That is nice of you,” he replies. “I can’t believe I will be 80. But I try to follow the advice of Clint Eastwood who, when asked how he stopped himself feeling old, said, ‘By never letting the old man in.’ ”
I take this as a sign I can ask Ulvaeus about having loads of sex. Again, I wouldn’t usually pry, but in an interview four years ago he grumbled that he was “only” managing sex four times a week. And then last year he got married for the third time, to Christina Sas, a music industry executive 28 years younger than him, so…
“Oh God no, that was a joke. Move on.”
Hmm, OK. That makes the last of my warm-up questions, the one about imagining your ex having an amazing orgasm with someone else, really quite difficult. Last year the writer Giles Smith published a lovely homage to Abba called My My!. He lauded Ulvaeus’s genius for using pop to explore mature subjects such as divorce (The Winner Takes It All), the jitters of a romantic ingenue (The Name of the Game), even the parental heartbreak of watching a child grow up (Slipping Through My Fingers; Ulvaeus has two children with Faltskog and two with his second wife, Lena Kallersjo).
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I was 16 when The Winner Takes It All came out (it was released 18 months after Ulvaeus and Faltskog split up). The heartbreaking lines, “But tell me, does she kiss/ Like I used to kiss you?” made perfect sense, but I was puzzled by, “Does it feel the same/ When she calls your name?” I wondered why someone calling your name should sound different after you’ve broken up. My older sister slightly haughtily explained to me that Ulvaeus was imagining an ex having an earth-shattering orgasm with a new lover.
“Oh, well, that’s reasonable,” he says, taking a big restorative slurp of his coffee.
But Ulvaeus is writing from the point of view of a woman. That’s the mark of a great writer, I venture, being able to imagine yourself as a woman and then imagining how she’d feel about her ex’s new girlfriend climaxing?
“Thank you and yes, why not? Why not indeed imagine it?” he offers, a little uncertainly. “I wrote that song very quickly while drinking whisky during my drinking days [he gave up alcohol in 2007]. I rarely wrote while intoxicated because you look at the words the next day and it’s garbage. But most of The Winner Takes It All is actually good. It’s not a personal story, but I tried to find the detail of a real human pain.”
We are sitting in the bar of the Chateau Denmark hotel in London. It’s on Denmark Street, once known as Tin Pan Alley, and it fairly throbs with pop music history. The Rolling Stones recorded their first album here. Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote Your Song on the roof of the building next door. Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and the Small Faces used to hang out at a club on this street and the Sex Pistols once lived at No 6 (Ulvaeus is rather improbably staying in the hotel’s I Am Anarchy suite).
Ulvaeus started playing guitar after receiving one for his 11th birthday. For reference, that was in 1956, when Elvis was in the charts with Heartbreak Hotel. Now he finds himself at the nexus of extraordinary technological change.
Over in east London, the virtual Abba show Voyage has now played to more than three million fans, way more than ever saw them live in the UK. Ulvaeus and the other former Abba members don’t have to do anything. He can go out on his kayak. The money rolls in. And yet Ulvaeus is still very concerned about the impact of tech on the future of music.
As president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers he is advocating for creators’ rights in the age of AI, trying to make sure that songwriters and musicians get fairly paid. “AI is changing all the creative industries beyond recognition,” he asserts.
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Before Abba, Ulvaeus served a long apprenticeship playing in various bands and writing songs for other artists. Today that apprenticeship is more difficult. He wonders if he would even make it in today’s world.
“I mean, I’d like to believe I’d have tried hard and broken through, but who knows? I might be an Uber driver telling you about this song me and my friends are working on called Dancing Queen that you never get to hear. In the old days, you had a couple of hits and then you had access to all the national radio and TV shows. You had a career. You have to do so much more to be heard above the noise now.” TikTok and YouTube and all the “noise” are one thing, but he’s not a Luddite. Ulvaeus used AI to create the avatars for Abba Voyage. But I can’t help wondering if shows like these might become part of the problem. After all, others are soon to follow: Ulvaeus is helping US rockers Kiss launch their own avatar show in Las Vegas in 2027. And then there is the Abba stage show Mamma Mia! (it has been performed in more than 60 countries), plus the dining experience Mamma Mia! The Party (currently in London, Stockholm and Rotterdam).
Is this the future? Legacy acts dominating for ever? “That might be part of it: young people today are finding music from 1970 or 2010 or now. It’s true that when we started, we didn’t have to compete with decades of other music.”
Will Voyage continue when one of Abba dies? “That’s a very good question. That remains to be seen. We are allowed to stay in our current venue till 2029, but ticket sales might drop, you never know. But is it right to continue when someone is dead? That’s a big ethical question.”
If Voyage is still playing in 100 years’ time, would it bother you personally?
“No! Did Agatha Christie have a problem with The Mousetrap? [Christie’s play has run in London since 1952 and recently celebrated its 30,000th performance.] When you’re gone, you’re gone but… my kids might appreciate it.”
The Bjorn Ulvaeus avatar performing in Voyage is modelled on him during Abba’s Seventies pomp, when he was in his thirties. It’s intriguing that while this virtual eternal youth goes out and does the work, the pensioner in front of me feels very passionately about “ageism”.
“You reach 50 and people just walk past you in the street,” he says. “They don’t really see you. You don’t count. I think society wastes so much by discarding the skills and wisdom of the elderly. My father-in-law went from relevance to irrelevance from one day to the next.”
Is having a “for ever young” persona leaping about and performing the hits a sort of “F*** you”? “Yes, it’s the perfect rebellion,” he says, chuckling.
‘It was love at first sight’
And yet sometimes reality bites. In 2022 Ulvaeus divorced music journalist Lena Kallersjo after 41 years of marriage and very soon after began dating Christina Sas, who was working on the release of the Abba album Voyage. The age difference really troubled him.
“It was love at first sight, at least from my side,” he says. “But immediately I had severe problems with myself and the age difference. When a man or a woman meets someone much younger and falls in love they think, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ But in the end I just gave up. I decided, ‘It’s up to her — if she wants to live with someone older and we love each other…’ Age doesn’t come between us now — we rarely even talk about it.”
Wow. Love at first sight aged nearly 80 — what does that feel like? “Oh, well, there’s this person and there’s this attraction. You think, ‘What is this?’ And then, when you see it in the other person’s eyes… It’s spectacular. It’s fantastic. But you have to be very open, with your antennas out. You have to be adventurous and ready to take a chance.”
Ulvaeus and Sas married last September. His friend, the Danish-born comic and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, officiated at the ceremony in Copenhagen. Sas is with him in London today. She is warm and friendly. I would say he has a type: pretty, blonde and blue-eyed.
Last night they went to see Sir Elton John and Brandi Carlile perform at the London Palladium. “Elton has a particular way of passionately hammering at the piano,” Sas tells me. “Which is remarkable for a man his age.”
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She catches herself. “You see, I’m doing it — I’m being ageist! Why shouldn’t he still play the piano as well as he always has?”
To be honest, I think there are perfectly solid gerontological reasons why: Elton John is 78 and recently told this newspaper he is almost blind. Anyhow, Sas and Ulvaeus make for a remarkably ordinary couple. No one recognised them in Waterstones where they went shopping for books this morning. No one recognises them in the bar.
But then again Ulvaeus has never been particularly starry. He embodies the Scandinavian creed known as janteloven: everyone is equal and even if you enjoy success, never get too big for your boots. According to the definitive Abba biography, Carl Magnus Palm’s Bright Lights Dark Shadows, when Abba won Eurovision in 1974, Ulvaeus was a bit snotty about English attitudes to success.
“I don’t want to become a nouveau riche like many of the English artists,” he said. “They wallow in luxury; they don’t know what to do with their money.”
But how does it work when you’ve enjoyed the sort of success Ulvaeus has? When he split from his second wife, the details of their pre-nup were published in Sweden. It stipulated there “must never” be less than 20 million kroner (about £1.6 million) in their joint bank account. These days Ulvaeus is reputedly worth close to £250 million.
I must admit I’m trying to match the guy coffee for coffee, so what I’m thinking just comes straight out of my head.
Man alive, Bjorn, what’s it like having £250 million in the bank? “Past a certain point, it [money] doesn’t matter… First of all, it’s freedom from the worries most people have — jobs, bills, the rent. That is so great. I can remember the moment I first felt, ‘I don’t have to worry about that any more.’ After that, it’s wonderful if you find a project that really needs financing. To be able to dream and let an idea develop and then actually do it — that’s what money is for. Like Mamma Mia! or Voyage [the latter employed 800-plus digital animators and cost a reputed £140 million to develop]. But these projects are not just to make money — it’s to do something worthwhile and fun.”
What is the most rock’n’roll thing Abba ever did? “I can assure you there are no hidden Abba scandals, no blemish on our image…”
Go on, there must be something. “There were instances when we didn’t leave hotel rooms in quite the order they were in when we came,” he says rather adorably. “But nothing like the Who driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.”
The darker side of fame
Abba were always as wholesome as a herring picnic in a Scandi forest. That’s what the various Abba shows celebrate: their manifest innocence. But in the background, there was some dark stuff.
A 2023 Prime Video documentary, Take a Chance, tackled Agnetha Faltskog’s scarcely believable interactions with her Dutch stalker, Gert van der Graaf, a porky water-pump factory worker who drove 1,000 miles from Holland to Faltskog’s home in Sweden in the late Nineties. After van der Graaf bombarded her with gifts and letters he moved to be near her and the pair ended up having a two-year relationship. Eventually realising her mistake, Faltskog called the police, who discovered van der Graaf living in an unplumbed cottage with a bucket full of excrement and a dead turtle.
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Similarly bonkers is the story of the “dark-haired one”, Anni-Frid Lyngstad. She is the daughter of a Nazi sergeant, Alfred Haase, who had a relationship with her mother, Synni, while stationed in Norway during the Second World War. After the German defeat, Haase disappeared and, aged two, Lyngstad was effectively orphaned when her 21-year-old mother died of kidney failure. Raised by her grandmother, Lyngstad moved to Sweden, became a jazz singer and eventually joined Abba.
“I don’t like to compare us to the Beatles — to me they were three of the greatest songwriters ever who just happened to be alive in the same place at the same time. But yes, in our own way, the slim chance of us getting together still amazes me.”
Ulvaeus says they all keep in contact privately (he and Andersson still work together), but he looks a little forlorn telling me they may have met for the last time as a quartet.
That was last year when they were awarded Sweden’s Royal Order of Vasa for “very outstanding efforts in Swedish and international music life”. It’s a bit like being knighted. Importantly, though, the honour is bestowed by public vote.
“And that felt so good, considering the initial reaction to us was not good,” Ulvaeus says, smiling.
Yes, after they won Eurovision, Abba were derided in Sweden as uncool, a bit too successful. “It was uncool to admit liking Abba,” he recalls. “Sweden was going very left, very socialist in the early Seventies and Abba was Mammon. During that time you were supposed to take a stand in your lyrics and I refused. I thought it was more interesting to explore relationships. I was uninterested in putting party politics in the lyrics. How boring!”
Ulvaeus is definitely a political animal now. That’s one of the reasons he wanted to do this interview. “I am really very worried about Europe and democracy and the rise of the autocrat,” he says.
I mention that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is supposedly a fan (he reportedly booked the Abba tribute act Bjorn Again for a private show at the Kremlin).
“I didn’t know that. I can imagine the scene with him dancing around the Kremlin,” he says, laughing, partly delighted and partly appalled. Actually, no, mostly appalled. And you can see why.
Late last year, every Swedish household received a 32-page leaflet, If Crisis or War Comes, warning them to prepare for a possible armed conflict. “Military threat levels are increasing,” it announced. “We must be prepared for the worst-case scenario — an armed attack on Sweden.” Tips included stocking up on non-perishable food and water, keeping cash in hand and growing fruit and vegetables.
“Can you believe it? We must mentally prepare for war,” Ulvaeus marvels. “I remember during my teenage years and my early twenties, during the Cold War, I asked myself, ‘Will I live under a dictator? Will I adjust or join the resistance and risk my life?’ And I thought, ‘I would rather die than live under a dictator.’ Of course, I was a young man. But already again I’m thinking, ‘How would I react?’ ”
But it’s not just autocrats that are bothering him; it’s what he calls the self-censorship of liberal democracies too.
“It really bothers me you cannot make Monty Python’s Life of Brian [the 1979 spoof of the Bible story] in a Muslim context for fear of violence. I find it demeaning to not be able to say this or that. Free speech is in danger. And I really feel, with autocrats on the rise, even in America, Europe needs to step up and unite.”
As a teenager, Ulvaeus did national service. He thinks it might be time for that again. “I am a proud European,” he says. “And now it seems we are the last bastion of liberal democracy. Let’s face it: we are alone and I think we should build a European defence force.”
By now, I’m so wildly caffeinated that I’m scarcely able to believe I am discussing military strategy with a quarter of Abba.
Ulvaeus says he wants to use his platform to educate kids about democracy. Bear in mind, this is the guy who turned down $1 billion for Abba to perform in 2000. Now he’s offering to tour school gyms to speak up for Europe, democracy and free speech. He literally has a “Euro vision”.
“I really wish the UK didn’t leave the EU,” he says. “Although I think you guys are still kind of European. And this is so important I feel I have to help. In Sweden, I made a democracy education programme for schools which will be launched in June. I want children to realise this thing that we breathe every day — freedom, respect for institutions — is at threat. Imagine the world these dictators want: you lose your job because you complain about the government. You pay taxes but they are stolen or you can’t get justice because the law has become an untrustworthy institution. We are closer to this than we know.”
If all that sounds a little sombre, well, that’s because it is. Mostly, though, Ulvaeus is grateful and amazed at all the luck he has enjoyed in life. He originally intended to be a civil engineer and only pursued music because his mum secretly entered him into a competition just as he was about to quit his band the West Bay Singers and go to college (his entry won and he met mentor and manager Stig Anderson as a result).
“Again, such luck,” he says. “And then to meet Benny and for us to meet these incredible ladies with the perfect voices.”
Ulvaeus is about to fly to Mallorca with 20 members of his extended family to mark his big birthday. But on the actual day itself he has no special plans. “No, no party with speeches. I don’t like that. I find it very difficult to sit and listen to people praising you. I’m too shy for that.”
When we finish talking, he’ll fly home with his wife. They’ll have a quiet evening. He thinks they’ll have salmon for supper. Then he might do his evening workout in the gym watching an action movie. Meanwhile, his young avatar will be on stage in London keeping the music alive.
“I would like to speak to the man I was at that age and tell him the things he worried about were not worth worrying about,” he says. “I was so insecure — what a waste of time! Relationships with other humans are the only thing that really matter.”
And what do you think your avatar would say to you?
“Hey, old man,” he says, laughing, “how come you get to sit at home while I have to do all the work?”
Bjorn Ulvaeus will be speaking at SXSW London (June 2-7; sxswlondon.com)
