ABBA blog

I'm pleased to report that work on designing and finishing the forthcoming book ABBA On Record - Packaged Promoted Reviewed (abbaonrecord.com) is going well. My designer, Maria Nicholas, and I sometimes encounter various hurdles, which we always manage to resolve, although it sometimes takes a little time. Everything is on track, and I hope to be able to share more definite news about publication dates and such soon. All the info I have at the time of writing is available on the Basic Facts page.

In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy reading the introductory text for the chapter about the Michael B. Tretow Tapes. I have a feeling this will be one of the most popular sections in ABBA On Record. Recently doing some editing on it, I realised that there is so much information to absorb in it that it feels new even to me each time I read it - and I wrote it!

So without further ado, here is the intro:

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In Björn Ulvaeus’ 2014 children’s book Pop Story, a partly fictionalised version of the ABBA saga, he describes the group’s studio work, explaining that it was a matter of grown-ups at play – “play” in the sense of children’s play. “It is important to have fun while making music,” he wrote, “because it makes you dare to do crazy things and that reflects into the music. It makes the music more interesting to listen to.”

In all their simplicity, these sentences neatly sum up one of the most important truths about ABBA’s music. Their oeuvre bears all the signs of having been recorded when “at play”: keeping an open mind towards whatever idea the members themselves, their session musicians, and their recording engineer might come up with; trying this, trying that; applying a sense of humour to their working situation – essentially, having fun in the studio. What they released on record was, of course, the result of the deadly serious ambition that was at the core of all that playing around.

However, outsiders haven’t experienced many concrete glimpses of the studio atmosphere. The 1994 CD box set Thank You For The Music featured the 23½ minute track ‘ABBA Undeleted’, edited together by Michael Tretow, where outtakes from the ABBA sessions were interspersed with studio dialogue, banter and laughter, providing a flavour of what was going on during the recording sessions. But so far, that’s been pretty much it.

Much of the chatter in ‘ABBA Undeleted’, and indeed some of the music as well, came from Michael’s own tape collection. Between September 1974 and late 1981, the engineer would sometimes let a reel-to-reel tape run “on the side”, to capture, in real time, what was going on at a recording session. In the past, Michael has said that the tapes served the purpose of keeping track of where they were with a certain song, and to keep a record of ideas that had been tried out and discarded but which they might want to try again. However, it is hard to see a distinct pattern in this intermittent, apparently random audio diary of the studio creativity: Michael seems to have switched on his tape recorder whenever the fancy struck him. Today, he admits that the tapes were made “mainly because it was fun, and I also had a hunch it was something worth preserving”.

The recordings have rarely been referred to in public, but Michael mentioned them briefly in an Arrival-era interview, when he said that he thought it would be fun to document how a song evolves. “On occasion I’ve had a tape running on the side,” he then revealed. “But then I’ve been unfortunate and recorded a song that didn’t change that much.” The tapes discussed in this book are, according to Michael, the only ones available in his archives today.

In more recent times, Michael has digitized the tapes, making sure that copies of the files were given to Benny (it’s unclear whether the three other ABBA members have requested their own copies). Benny quite enjoyed what he heard. “There’s a lot of junk on them,” he told this writer, “but it’s pretty fun to have them, because you can hear us talking and laughing. The interesting thing, when you listen, is that it seems like we had a lot of fun all the time, the girls as well; like it was all pleasurable.”

What Benny received from Michael wasn’t only the contents of those “on the side” tapes, but also other recordings in Michael’s archive. The various types of tapes break down as follows:

·       “On the side” tapes, capturing what was going on during a recording session.

·         Demo tapes, featuring rudimentary versions of new songs with Björn and Benny only (on vocals, guitar and keyboards) and with demo lyrics.

·         Work-in-progress mixes of songs featuring the same backing track as the familiar version, but originally with different lead vocalists and/or lyrics.

·         Unreleased songs with full band backing tracks, never heard from again, usually with vocals.

·         Greetings recorded for various purposes and recipients.

·         Mixes made by Michael Tretow in 1994, from original 16- and 24-track tapes, as he was assembling previously unreleased recordings for possible inclusion on Disc 4 in the Thank You For The Music box set, including candidates for the ‘ABBA Undeleted’ medley of outtakes.

Full access to the tapes wasn’t granted to the author until shortly before the revised and expanded edition of ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions went to print in 2017, too late to incorporate the findings into that volume. But what an eye-opener those tapes proved to be.

Providing a fascinating peek inside the recording studio and ABBA’s creative process, the tapes confirm previously published depictions and stories on the subject. For instance, we get to hear how Agnetha and Frida really played an active part in shaping the vocal arrangements and sometimes even adjustments of the lyrics. The tapes also add layers to the general insight into the group’s working methods, as well as revealing new facts about the development of a number of familiar recordings. It is absolutely enthralling to hear familiar riffs evolve in real time, from the original idea to the version the dedicated ABBA fan will have listened to hundreds if not thousands of times. Or to find out how isolated lines from Björn’s thrown-together demo lyrics would live on in the completed lyrics.

Beyond insights into the studio atmosphere, listening to Tretow’s tapes lets us know more about specific songs. In some instances, certain assumptions and theories about songs, put forth in ABBA – The Complete Recording Sessions, are proven to be incorrect, and it brings the author great joy to be able to straighten out question marks and make the story of ABBA’s recordings that bit more accurate. Last, but definitely not least, the Tretow tapes also reveal a handful of previously unheard songs, the existence of which wouldn’t be known to us at all it if weren’t for Michael’s recording diligence.

In the following text I’ve tried to convey the contents of the tapes to the best of my ability, but please bear in mind the following:

·         The recording dates are often based on assumption, speculation, or educated guesses, extrapolated from our knowledge about these recordings from other sources. Michael’s digital files have no exact dates: he has simply grouped them together in the year of recording, which isn’t always precisely accurate.

·         In some cases, it isn’t completely obvious whether the sudden jump-cuts in the tapes reflect real-time events or if Michael switched off and then on his “on the side” tape recorder at the time. Often, it’s impossible to know for certain when the session tapes for one and the same song jump to another recording date, since they appear in sequence in these digital files.

·         Dialogue excerpts featured in the text are not complete, not least because they exclude nonsense words and virtually inaudible dialogue. The purpose, then, is to present the gist of the dialogue, for the enlightenment and entertainment of the reader.

·         It isn’t always possible to understand what’s being discussed during conversations. Tapes sometime start mid-dialogue, making it hard to know what’s going on, and sometimes only one half of the dialogue is audible: the person at the microphone intended for recording vocals (usually Björn) is heard loud and clear, whereas the other person (usually Benny) can often not be made out at all, since his or her voice is only faintly picked up by someone else’s mic.

·         Some of the music heard in ‘ABBA Undeleted’ comes from Tretow’s “on the side” tapes, but also much of the studio dialogue and banter heard in the medley. Where applicable I have listed that dialogue, in its original Swedish with an English translation, to show exactly which session it comes from. Note: In ‘ABBA Undeleted’, Michael Tretow edited together dialogue from several different sessions, intermixing, say, a comment from Björn with a phrase from Agnetha, recorded at disparate points in time.

So, let’s begin this journey through The Lost Tapes, as Michael Tretow once referred to them – a documentation of grown-ups at play…

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