"Abba": The Name of the Game

Andrew Oldham... And collaborators. Been around the block, as we say. Knows a thing or two about the pop music. A good adjunct to visiting their official version of events. Always remember that day. 04/09/2019 Stockholm , Sweden.

What a load of rubbish. Partner swapping, had me in hysterics. Worst book on the market about, four very talented people. Made my blood boil, so inaccurate. Gave it one but should only have half.

I am very confused by the Abba fans' contempt for this book. I think it is probably one of the best about a band ever (and I have waded through over 300 on The Beatles).Loog Oldham writes like he has lived - taking the broad view and sweeping all before him. Perhaps it isnt as accurate as you would like but it gives the flavour and feeling of being there.Read it in a night and enjoy the strange essence of what Abba were!!

Cranking up self-important opinions like they were facts, throwing libel around like it had gone into freefall, lining up and printing off blazing mistakes almost as long as Madonna's utter plague of a so-called career, yet this joke of a 'biographer' Andrew Oldham still thinks he's worthy to be called one, yet his self-belief he's an actual fan is even more troublesome and truly baffling. Nevermind the glaring and unforgiveable mistakes an Abba loving child wouldn't make: that Abba never toured again after 1979, Frida didn't like performing live, 'The Way Old Friends Do' was a 1992 single in the wake of the 'Abba Gold' renaissance of their music, Sweden was unheard of as a country in the UK before 1974, and best of all, that AGNETHA sang the opening verse on the huge and internationally recognised hit 'Knowing Me, Knowing You'! So much for the lengthy analysis of their very different voices in other areas of the book! Chronologically aswell, the damn thing does more scattered lurches all over the place then a hare with diarrhoea, and verbal diarrhoea is all it adds up to long before you struggle with huge trepidation past mid-section."Can we say lawsuit?" is a film term springing to mind as I read yet ANOTHER dog-tired categorically suspect character assassination on just how much of a nuclear capability did the two Abba girls "hate" each other. I think most true fans are sicker than sick of this, but the writer (if you can term him that) is surely the sickest of the lot. Truly, he must get off on all this fact distortion and hate-mongering, totally counteracting his actual stability in stating the media had to put them against each other cos they were both so different, and if you have "a good one", the other must be "the bad one", and that it was a shame. What about his shame though?Also, if he's a fan of their music, I'm Madonna's biggest supporter, and I hate that nasty old desperado attention-seeking street-walker masquerading as musical 'artiste'. nasty old desperado street-walker masquerading as disco 'singer' and 'all-round entertainer'. Oldham has the absolute nerve to end this tome with "pretty much ALL of the music stands up", championing those "God-like songs" yet in print, he seems to only have praise for the two albums that "sold the most", while dissing every other album and most of the songs before, in between and after, the stupidest and most outrageous ones being his dismissing of the hugely strong and much-loved 'Voulez-Vous' album era, forgetting how Abba ruled that genre, shaping it to their usage, not the other way round, yet he champions the last two they made that were obviously 'in', which, I assume means they weren't meant for the album. Pathetic. Equally so the bald, stuffy and ridiculous statement how Bjorn needs "beheading by the lyric police for using 'chick' on 'Does Your Mother Know'". OMG, did I HEAR that right?! You have Bee Gees shrieking about dancing, and not much else, Madonna coming out with "true blue, baby I love you" and "open your heart to me, I've got the lock and you've got the key", Cure squeaking "have each other with tea, have each with cream", the many absurdities of Madness, Ronan Keating with pretty much everything, not least the hideous "settle down" term that no man under 25 would even entertain as a thought, nevermind a spoken term, to say nothing of the one-syllable repetition dirge of the early 90s rave scene, and he's lambasting Bjorn for a term any man in the 70s would use on a totally untypical yet remarkable and daring hit most took their hearts in early 1979 as a huge single, despite it not being an obvious release cos of his lead vocal?! I suppose Queen, Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson, Beatles and Eagles never made mistakes like this. Cos "we all live in the yellow submarine" is hymn-like elegance and the stuff that makes such songs the first thing in cerebral interpretation. Jee-sus, Oldham, get a day job you turd!It's catty, moany, embarrassing and utterly unconstructive dirge like this that ruin the few good assertions he does make, notably that now the much-admired (and not before time)'The Day Before You Came', plus it's "majestic" (his superlative, echoing mine) b-side 'Cassandra', which he terms (and I also agree)"better even than 'Fernando', and that 'Under Attack' is much better than how it was received, while also 'I Am The City' is bang-on aswell.His equal degrading of the girls' solo output is the usual grating over-simplification, and all about what he thinks they should sound like. I just want to shake him with the intensity of a tornado and say that in 1983, Agnetha, after coming off a rollercoaster that had now gotten pretty uninhabitable for her, but still loving music, wanted an album that was upbeat, charming but intelligent too, so that was what she helped conceive and put out. And to call her second 80s offering, which I absolutely adore, despite only becoming acquainted with it a few months ago, "clever and agreeable" would be great if he didn't upend it with the utterly deplorable and useless "but soulless". And he's hardly better on Frida, saying she needed more "bite" even though she has it in her. This from a man who states it's far better that looks pervade pop music than talent and "long may it be so", but perhaps prophetic words from someone who deals in falsehoods over facts, while believing utterly incompetent, inaccurate and poison-pen portrayls of things he was not even around to consider, nevermind hear firsthand or witness, is enough to ladder him up in the stratosphere of the written word. We say "Non-Thank you for the bull and non-amusing, for giving it to me". "Under Attack" indeed.

Not only spectacularly badly written (Agnetha is like a virgin who has just come back from her ahem.."delicious deflowering"...errr yeah right...) it is also full of factual errors and the authors' personal opinions are constantly stated as if they were fact, the authors seem to think this is cute and funny. It is not, it is bad writing pure and simple.The constant drivel that is masquarading as true fact has made me quite angry and I am only on the third chapter or so-we are reliably informed that 'no one in the uk has heard of Sweden in 1974'...errr no. I had heard of Sweden in 1974 and I was a little kid! That the Eurovison Song contest rules clearly state that only Monaco and some other countries can win (not true and Monaco had only won once!!) whearas Luxembourg are mocked and sneered at for having the termerity to be a small country and that they were only allowed to because they played the Bay City Rollers on Radio Luxembourg...(so how'd they win in the 60s before the Rollers even existed then?)In fact... Lux was tradionally one of the most dominant countries in the ESC at the time, small country or no. Just one of the many glaring inaccuracies in this waste of paper 'book'.There are no sources listed, no evidence offered for the many sweeping statements. This is not how to write a biography. how do we know that a person said this or did this or had this motivation-we list our sources and say why we came to this conclusion, we do not constantly make sweeping statements as if they were fact for the sake of a cheap gag...

This is the kind of book that makes every ABBA- fan scream for justice...but in the end...who cares ? So many inaccuracies, page after page so many mistakes. Here are a few:Oldham: "No more care free laughter" Agnetha sings mournfully on "Knowing Me, Knowing You" - sorry, but Frida sang the lead vocals. Oldham: "After their 1979 tour ABBA knew- they would never tour again" - so tell me, Andrew, who toured Japan the following year then- impersonaters? Oldham: "Frida moved to London to record "Something's Going On" - well, she moved to London but that happened two years later. Oldham: "Opus 10 ultimately died of boredom before delivery but the one song they recorded- I Am The City- was a sign that they have not lost their vitality"- once again nulle points for you, Andrew, that song was recorded way back in 1982.And these are just a few mistakes Andrew Oldham makes in his book- and if a writer of a biography doen't even know that Frida sang lead on "Knowing Me, Knwoing You" (that was even mentioned in the liner notes on the "Arrival"-album, Mr Oldham) how could I ever believe you know anything about this group ? Money-grabbing, yes, washing dirty dishes, yes, interesting, no and well-researched- absolutely no,no,no. Don't buy this, okay ?