December 5 2008

GaydarNation

When Bjorn Ulvaeus was first approached with the idea of using Abba’s timeless songs to form the basis of a musical, he admits he was “intrigued” but not entirely convinced that it would work.

But the persuasive powers of producer Judy Craymer – and a funny and poignant script from writer Catherine Johnson – won him over to the project and the huge success story that is Mamma Mia! the stage musical and the smash hit film, out now on DVD, is the happy result.

Abba became internationally famous when you won the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Waterloo'. Do you watch it today?
I do because I think it’s fun as TV entertainment. Music wise, it used to be a song contest and now it’s a spectacle. The song is almost secondary to the way people dress, the way people behave, the way they are photographed and so forth. So I think it has lost something.

It has something like 300 million viewers and you would have thought that the best song that Europe can produce would be there because it’s such an opportunity. That’s the way we saw it, as an amazing opportunity. You write a song that is the best you can do and you write something that stands out. That’s what I would have thought. Why don’t they do that? Why don’t they write something that people remember? But it’s very hard to explain why it is the way it is. It’s certainly not the best songs Europe can produce.

When you wrote the Abba songs that we hear in the movie, did you think that some of them could be funny in the way that they are used in the film?
When I wrote those lyrics, I had my images. And that’s the interesting thing – I wrote from my images and then Catherine Johnson comes in and she listens to the songs and reads the lyrics and has her own images from those very same words. That’s the interesting thing.

She tells me the reason they work is because very often the lyrics themselves are little stories. Like 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' is about a man going through an empty house and leaving it for the last time and hearing the sounds he used to hear and remembering how he used to be happy there. Of course, that is very, very useful to use in that context, in a musical. 'The Winner Takes It All' is the same.

One of the interesting things about songs is that they reflect different periods in a person’s life. Did you draw on your own experiences?
Yes, I would draw from my own experience, my own reality and then build on that. So 80 per cent was fiction, but 20 per cent was based on my own personal reality. In the case of 'Slipping Through My Fingers' – which fits perfectly in the musical – I could vividly see my eldest daughter when she was seven or eight and she went to school on her own for the very first time.

So I saw this seven year-old girl with a rucksack, very proud, and she turns around and waves to me as she is going into school. That’s the image that song comes from. And, of course, it’s perfect for the movie for that scene when Donna feels that Sophie is finally leaving her because she is getting married and moving out. That’s the way it worked.

"I would draw from my own experience, my own reality and then build on that. So 80 per cent was fiction, but 20 per cent was based on my own personal reality."

And the power of a song like that is that it’s a universal theme.
That’s true and I always wrote about relationships. And when I had written about relationships from one angle twice, I used to try and find another one and another one and another one through the years.

What are your memories of Abba The Movie, which was directed by Lasse Halstrom?

Quite different from this one, quite different because I was only being myself in that one. But it was fun to make. It was made during a tour in Australia. We were not involved in the same way as we have been here, it was quite different but I have good memories of it.

How did you approach song writing for Abba?
We would always sit down together with the music until we had the melody. Then we would go into the studio and record a backing track – and then I would play that over and over again. It used to be like I was asking ‘what are you about?’ By playing it and playing it, something would come up and then I’d write the lyrics.

An incredible 30 million people all over the world have seen the musical and 17,000 people see it each day.
It’s strange, but when people ask me about it, I don’t know what to feel. It’s like I’m watching it from the sidelines.

"It’s interesting to see how you can use music and tell a story cinematically with the songs. It’s not like the old Hollywood musicals where the story stopped when the songs started."

Obviously Abba has brought you great financial rewards. What did that mean to you?
The feeling we got from the first economic freedom we had in the 1970s was incredible and I’ll never feel that again. It meant that we could work as long as we liked on the songs. I think that’s the reason the Abba songs are still here – we didn’t give up and we kept on working on them until they were as good as we could make them.

Did you invest any money in the movie?
No, it’s all Universal. When I visited the set at Pinewood and saw all the people there and I didn’t understand what everyone was doing, I thought, ‘Thank God, I’m not paying for this!’ [laughs]

Would you like to do more films?
Yes, it’s interesting to see how you can use music and tell a story cinematically with the songs. It’s not like the old Hollywood musicals where the story stopped when the songs started.

Thanks to Richard for permission to use the interview