http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qbn0c1q_lUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92cwKCU8Z5cABBA sing together for first time in more than 30 years Telegraph (UK) - By Richard Orange, Jun 7, 2016
The four members of Swedish pop group ABBA performed together on stage on Sunday night for the first time in more than 30 years — a reunion they had pledged would never happen and which fans had long ceased to expect.
The event took place at a private party held at Stockholm's Berns Hotel to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the day when the group’s songwriting duo Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson met for the first time.
Towards the end of the evening, the group’s two female members Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad took to the stage to perform the 1980 hit Me and I.
To the delight of the small audience of friends and Swedish celebrities, Mr Ulvaeus and Mr Andersson then unexpectedly joined them on stage towards the end of the performance, reuniting the group in song for the first time since they split at the peak of their fame in 1982.
“It’s been a great night,” Mr Andersson told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper.
“It was absolutely amazing. A lot of emotions,” agreed singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad, who lives in Switzerland with her English boyfriend Henry Smith, heir to the WHSmith stationery fortune.
“We’ve made this journey throughout our history. Benny and Bjorn in particular. It’s been very nostalgic.”
The evening, held in the 19th century hotel's ballroom, brought together the key people from the two men’s often intertwined careers.
It was hosted by the radio DJ Claes af Geijerstam, whose band Ola & the Janglers beat ABBA to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1973, a year before they won Sweden’s first victory with Waterloo.
The group’s four members have always adamantly refused to reform, despite being offered a rumoured $1 billion (£690 million) to do so at the peak of the wave of ABBA fever, which followed the success of the musical Mamma Mia!
In January, Mr Andersson rejected suggestions that the band would perform in public once again.
After a rare joint appearance of the four members for the opening of Mr Ulvaeus’ new Mamma Mia-themed Greek taverna in Stockholm, Mr Andersson was asked about a reunion. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Mr Ulvaeus was similarly steadfast in 2014.
“We took a break in ‘82, and it was meant to be a break,” he said. “It’s still a break and will remain so. You’ll never see us on stage again.”
However, the group has been inching towards Sunday’s joint performance, with the joint appearance in January following a public outing for three of the four members in 2013 to mark the launch of Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/06/abba-sing-together-for-first-time-in-more-than-30-years/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8sABBA (stylised ᗅᗺᗷᗅ; Swedish pronunciation: [ˈaba]) were a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972 by members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They became one of the most commercially successful acts in the history of popular music, topping the charts worldwide from 1974 to 1982. ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest 1974 at The Dome in Brighton, UK, giving Sweden its first triumph in the contest, and were the most successful group ever to take part in the competition.
ABBA's record sales figure is uncertain and various estimates range from over 140 to over 500 million sold records. This makes them one of the best-selling music artists. ABBA was the first group from a non-English-speaking country to achieve consistent success in the charts of English-speaking countries, including the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and on a lesser scale, the U.S. The group also enjoyed significant success in Latin American markets, and recorded a collection of their hit songs in Spanish.
During the band's active years, Fältskog & Ulvaeus and Lyngstad & Andersson were married. At the height of their popularity, both relationships were suffering strain which ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Ulvaeus–Fältskog marriage in 1979 and the Andersson–Lyngstad marriage in 1981. These relationship changes were reflected in the group's music, with later compositions including more introspective, brooding, dark lyrics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-crgQGdpZR0After ABBA disbanded in December 1982, Andersson and Ulvaeus achieved success writing music for the stage, while Lyngstad and Fältskog pursued solo careers with mixed success. ABBA's music declined in popularity until the purchase of ABBAs catalogue and record company Polar by Polygram in 1989 enabled the groundwork to be laid for an international re-issue of all their original material and a new Greatest Hits (ABBA Gold) collection in the Autumn of 1992 which became a worldwide smash. Several films, notably Muriel's Wedding (1994) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), further revived public interest in the group and the spawning of several tribute bands. In 1999, ABBA's music was adapted into the successful musical Mamma Mia! that toured worldwide. A film of the same name, released in 2008, became the highest-grossing film in the United Kingdom that year.
ABBA were honoured at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005, when their hit "Waterloo" was chosen as the best song in the competition's history. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 15 March 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvChjHcABPAOfficial namingIn 1973, Stig Anderson, tired of unwieldy names, started to refer to the group privately and publicly as ABBA. At first, this was a play on words, as Abba is also the name of a well-known fish-canning company in Sweden, and itself an acronym. However, since the fish-canners were unknown outside Sweden, Anderson came to believe the name would work in international markets. A competition to find a suitable name for the group was held in a Gothenburg newspaper.
The group was impressed with the names "Alibaba", "FABB", and "Baba", but in the end all the entries were ignored and it was officially announced in the summer that the group were to be known as "ABBA." The group negotiated with the canners for the rights to the name. "ABBA" is an acronym formed from the first letters of each group member's first name: Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid. During a promotional photo, Benny flipped his "B" horizontally for fun, and from 1976 onwards the first 'B' in the logo version of the name was "mirror-image" reversed on the band's promotional material and ᗅᗺᗷᗅ® became the group's registered trademark.
The first time "ABBA" is found written on paper is on a recording session sheet from the Metronome Studio in Stockholm, dated 16 October 1973. This was first written as "Björn, Benny, Agnetha & Frida", but was subsequently crossed out with "ABBA" written in large letters on top.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za05HBtGsgUOfficial logoThe official logo, using the bold version of the News Gothic typeface, was designed by Rune Söderqvist, and appeared for the first time on the "Dancing Queen" single in August 1976, and subsequently on all later original albums and singles. But the idea for the official logo was made by the German photographer Wolfgang Heilemann on a "Dancing Queen" shoot for the teenage magazine Bravo. On the photo, the ABBA members held a giant initial letter of his/her name. After the pictures were made, Heilemann found out that one of the men held his letter backwards as in ᗅᗺᗷᗅ. They discussed it and the members of ABBA liked it.
Following their acquisition of the group's catalogue, Polygram began using variations of the ABBA logo, using a different font and adding a crown emblem to it in 1992 for the first release of the ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits compilation. When Universal Music purchased Polygram (and, thus, ABBA's label Polar Music International), control of the group's catalogue was returned to Stockholm. Since then, the original logo has been reinstated on all official products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unfzfe8f9NIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_9CiNkkn4
