Books about ABBA and related subjects

This page is about the original 1994 edition of ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions. A revised and expanded version was published in 2017. A second revised and expanded edition is currently in the works.

ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions was my very first ABBA book. The idea came to me while I was working with my friend Thomas Winberg on our Monica Zetterlund discography between 1990 and 1992. We decided that ABBA's recorded work would be our next project (for various reasons, we later agreed that it would be better if I wrote this book myself).

While we were searching for recording dates for Monica Zetterlund, we looked up the ABBA dates as well. I remember how confused and puzzled we were when we found session sheets with all sorts of odd titles. It was only later that I realised that most of them were in fact working titles for released songs, and not dozens of unreleased titles.

Meanwhile, I started collecting ABBA-related newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television interviews and so on. The Monica Zetterlund discography was completed in the summer of 1992, and that's when I turned my attention to ABBA. The motivation behind the project was that although the group were lauded as highly skilful recording artists and composers – even before the great revival that was yet to come – very little of what had been written about them dealt with the creative aspects of their work.

During the course of 1992 I started tentative research, and the bulk of the book was written in 1993. All four ABBA members, as well as their engineer Michael Tretow and many of their musicians, answered questions for the book. Björn and Benny wrote the foreword. ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions was published in October 1994 by the UK publisher Century 22.

If you want to know more about the creation of the book, a personal history in 12 parts is available under "More info".

The 1994 edition of ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions is long since out of print, but you might find used copies on Amazon (see links to the right).

A revised and expanded edition of the book was published in March 2017, and in 2025 a second revised edition is in the works.