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the complete recording sessions

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197310 JanuaryMetronome Studio. Recording ‘Ring Ring’.

17 JanuaryMetronome Studio. Mixing ‘Ring Ring (Klocklåt)’; ‘Ring Ring (Zedaka)’.

Benny Andersson (keyboards), Janne Schaffer (guitar), Rutger Gunnarsson (bass), Ola Brunkert (drums).

FOR THE 1973 EDITION of Melodifestivalen, the Swedish selection for the Euro-vision Song Contest, Sveriges Radio (the equivalent of Great Britain’s BBC) decided that only professional composers would be invited to contribute songs. In order to decide on a suitable list of song writers, they asked a number of record industry people to make a list of ten songwriters or songwriting teams each, whom they thought would be able to come up with a competitive tune. Among those finally chosen were the team of Björn, Benny and Stig Anderson; they had proved their viability by finishing third with ‘Säj det med en sång’ (“Say It With A Song”) as performed by Lena Andersson in the 1972 Melodifes-tivalen, a song that was by far the biggest hit of all the entries that year. Their participation was announced by the newspapers in November 1972, and, in late December, it was reported that Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid would per-form the Andersson/Anderson/Ulvaeus contribution.

It was a perfect opportunity: not only would they gain exposure on prime-time television in their home-country, but if they won the selection they would get a chance to perform their song in front of hundreds of millions of viewers all over Europe. Indeed, after the past few years’ largely fruitless attempts at getting Björn and Benny’s music heard abroad, Stig Anderson had concluded that Euro-vision would be their best bet for making an international impact. Certainly, there had recently been the odd promising opening here and there – the release of ‘She’s My Kind Of Girl’ and subsequent singles in Japan; ‘People Need Love’ being issued in France, New Zealand, the United States and West Germany – but that decisive breakthrough still eluded them. If they could connect directly

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with an audience, they thought, they would be able to bypass conventional music business wisdom and prove that, despite being Swedish, they were able to write, produce and perform hits for an international market.

On the weekend of 6–7 January 1973, Björn, Benny and Stig Anderson went out to the island of Viggsö to try to write the perfect song. Of course, Björn and Benny wrote the melody on their own, but after that it was Stig’s task to come up with a catchy title and Swedish lyrics. With at least 1,000 lyrics under his belt at this stage of his career, Stig was well aware that he needed to keep it simple: he was writing for an international audience and then there was no use in trying to come up with convoluted lyrical concepts – he needed a catchy title to match the catchy tune. He was probably familiar with the success of American late Sixties bubblegum hits such as The Archies’ ‘Sugar, Sugar’ and Ohio Express’ ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’, or more recent British hits such as ‘Funny, Funny’ and ‘Co-Co’, both by The Sweet, noting how effective it could be if you repeated a word twice or even three times in the chorus. On that January day, seated by the kitchen table in the Viggsö house, the title must have come to him very soon after hear-ing Björn and Benny’s finished tune: “Started writing lyrics for Eurovision song

Björn, Benny and Michael Tretow hard at work in the control room of the Metronome Studio. This was where ABBA recorded their very first single, ‘People Need Love’, created the embryonic ABBA sound with ‘Ring Ring’, and made the majority of their recordings for the first half of their career.

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Ring-Ring,” he wrote in his diary entry for 7 January. “B+B took the boat home in the evening.” (Note: If Stig’s diary has been quoted accurately in his daughter Marie’s book about her father, Björn and Benny couldn’t have been present during the backing vocals overdub session for Ted Gärdestad’s album on 7 January [see above], as they would still have been at Viggsö at the time.)

All four ABBA members, and Stig, had entered or tried to enter Melod-ifestivalen before, with mixed results (see sidebar). Upon finishing ‘Ring Ring’, however, the team knew that they had something with great potential on their hands. “When we had reached the last note of that song, we knew that it was the best thing we’d ever written,” said Björn and Benny in an interview a few months later.

The Metronome studio was promptly booked for 10 January and the night before, Björn, Benny and Michael Tretow met up at Michael’s place – an apartment located only a short walk from the recording studio – and discussed the best way to record the song. Michael, always keen to try new recording methods, had read a recently published book about legendary producer Phil Spector (Out Of His Head: The Sound Of Phil Spector by Richard Williams), which was the first time he was able to confirm his theories about the secrets behind Spector’s record-ing techniques. On classic hits such as ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Then He Kissed Me’, ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ and ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, the book revealed, Spector had used three guitars instead of one, three pianos instead of one, three basses instead of one, and so on, with each particular instrument playing the exact same part and blending into his famous ‘wall of sound’, rendering individ-ual instrumental contributions almost impossible to separate. “That explained why it sounded like five guitars,” Michael would later recall, “it was because Spector really did use five guitars.”

Björn and Benny, who were long time fans of Spector, agreed that they should try this approach when recording ‘Ring Ring’. With fate decreeing that Michael had come across the Phil Spector book at this particular point in time, he points out that “it was just a coincidence that [we tried this recording method on] ‘Ring Ring’, although it was

Legendary record producer Phil Spector was the inspiration behind the ‘Ring Ring’ sound. The top picture shows the biog-raphy where Michael Tretow discovered the truth about Spector’s recording methods. The two albums feature some of his most famous early Sixties productions for acts such as The Ronettes, The Crystals and Darlene Love.

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understood that it had to be an up-tempo song.” However, there was no budget for bringing a Spectorian number of musicians into the studio, so they would have to let the musicians record their parts twice instead, in the hope of achiev-ing the same effect.

Recently Michael had also been staying late at Metronome Studio, experiment-ing with the tape machines on his own. While recording himself playing the electric guitar and then overdubbing the exact same part, he discovered that another way to deepen the sound was to alter the speed when doing the over-dub, in fact making the second part just slightly out of tune. “It sounded like the world’s biggest guitar,” Michael would recall. “It was like stepping inside of a five feet high guitar.” He decided that he would try this approach when they recorded the second overdub on the ‘Ring Ring’ backing track, although he didn’t tell Björn and Benny about it. “I changed it…on the sly,” he remembered. “It was a risky thing to do considering the expense of the musicians and studio time that would be wasted if it failed.” But Michael’s risk-taking paid off in a way that per-haps even he hadn’t dared imagine. “It was like the roof was caving in, Björn and Benny were ecstatic. And I can still remember the chills and how the hair stood up on my arms. It really was something else.”

Changing the speed during the recording of vocal and/or instrumental parts was an effect that would be used on and off during ABBA’s recording career, although with all the sounds blending into each other in the group’s soundscape it’s often impossible to determine when the effect has been used. ‘Ring Ring’ may be an exception, however, with close listening revealing vocal parts on the choruses that sound almost like cartoon mice, particularly on the Swedish version.

Another typical ABBA feature, introduced on this record and also borrowed from Phil Spector, was the handling of the lead vocals. Rather than being the focal point of the recording, they were almost buried in the mix, more or less treated as just another sound ingredient. So unusual was this approach to recording that when the single was released, Polar received complaints from Sveriges Radio, who insisted that there must be something wrong with the mix.

In all likelihood, considering the time and effort that was spent perfecting the backing track, the Swedish vocals were not recorded at the 10 January session. The group probably didn’t return to Metronome Studio until 17 January – after

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all, Polar usually only had access to Metronome on Wednesdays, and both 10 and 17 January were Wednesdays. At any rate, the Swedish version was mixed on 17 January; presumably the working day started with the recording of the vocals, after which Agnetha and Frida left for home, while Björn, Benny and Michael remained at the studio and did the mixing.

On the tape box containing the finished mixes, the title of the song is given as ‘Ring Ring (Klocklåt)’, the title within brackets translating as “Bell Song”. Although this suggests that ‘Klocklåt’ was the working title of the song, this was not the case since the ‘Ring Ring’ title already existed when the song was brought to the studio. Instead, ‘Klocklåt’ was probably jotted down on the tape box just for fun, being a humorous reference to Kalle Sändare (“Charlie The Transmitter”), a comedian who was a favourite for all four ABBA members as well as the session musicians and many others in the group’s entourage. A number of the weird working titles used on ABBA songs over the years were references to Kalle Sändare (see sidebar), and ‘Klocklåt’ seems to be the first instance when one of these references appear in documentation related to the group’s recordings. ‘Klocklåt’ was a split-second non-sequitur that appeared on the track ‘Telefonsamtal med Bertil Schütt’ (“Phone Call To Bertil Schütt”) on the

‘Ring Ring’ was a groundbreaking recording in the Swedish music industry. To the left is the Danish single sleeve, to the right the Swedish issue.

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1968 album Lejonklösa – Kalle Sändare på nya äventyr (“Lion-clawing – the fur-ther adventures of Kalle Sändare”).

The mix tape also features a track entitled ‘Ring Ring (Zedaka)’. This could pos-sibly be the finished English version, with the deliberate misspelling of lyricist Neil Sedaka’s last name probably just being a silly joke. However, there’s also notation on the tape box that this was simply “a demo mix”, indicating that this was the version, perhaps with the melody played as an instrumental, that Sedaka was sent so that he could write the English lyrics. Stig Anderson knew Sedaka through his publishing contacts and sent him a telegram asking if he’d like to help out with the words. Although Björn would have been perfectly capa-ble of writing the lyrics himself, they enlisted Sedaka’s help to get someone with international fame on the song writing credits, in the hope that this would create some attention for ‘Ring Ring’. The American singer and songwriter, who was indeed famous for numerous late Fifties and early Sixties hits – such as ‘Oh Carol’, ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’ and ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’, for

himself, and ‘Stupid Cupid’, for Connie Francis – agreed on the condition that he liked the melody. A demo version of the song, along with a rough translation of the Swedish lyrics, was promptly sent to him, and Sedaka did indeed approve of the tune: “I thought it could become a hit,” he recalled several decades later. A few days later the English ‘Ring Ring’ lyrics, penned by Sedaka and his then song writing partner, Phil Cody, arrived.

When released in Sweden ‘Ring Ring’ became an astonishing success: the Swedish and English singles and the album occupied the top three positions on Sweden’s combined singles-and-albums chart.

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ABBA, Stig and Melodifestivalen (the Swedish selection for the Eurovision Song Contest)‘Ring Ring’ was not the first brush with the Swedish selection for any of the four ABBA members, nor for Stig. This was the mixed results of their efforts up until 1973, in as far as they have been made public.

1958: The very first year that Sweden participated in the contest Stig Anderson submitted a song entitled ‘Jag sänder dej solsken – det kommer på posten!’ (“I’m Sending You Sunshine – It Will Arrive In The Mail!”). That year there was no selection event for the general public to watch, a jury simply decided on a suitable song. Although Stig’s song was not chosen, later the same year it was recorded by singers Britt Damberg and Sølvi Wang, and in 1973 it was also recorded by accordionist Gnesta-Kalle on his slightly bizarre Benny Andersson-produced Polar Music album Ny-gammal kultis (“New-old traditional dancing”, featuring Benny on Moog

synthesizer).

1968: Agnetha submitted a senti-mental ballad entitled ’Försonade’ (“Reconciled”), which she hoped that singer Gunnar Wiklund would per-form. However, the tune was rejected and thus not entered into the compe-tition. Instead she recorded it herself and released it as a single A-side later the same year (it was also featured on her first, eponymous album).

1969: Benny became the first ABBA member to enter the competition as a songwriter when his and Lasse Berghagen’s sentimental ‘Hej clown’

was performed by singer and actor Jan Malmsjö. They almost won as well – they achieved the same score as singer Tommy Körberg’s ‘Judy, min vän’ (“Judy, My Friend”, recorded in English as ‘Dear Mr Jones’), but a second round of voting to determine

the winner gave Körberg’s entry the final victory.

1969: Björn, Benny and Stig’s satirical ‘Ljuva sexti-tal’ was rejected, but subsequently became a hit for singer Brita Borg.

1969: Frida was the first ABBA member to enter the competition as a performer, with a mid-tempo song entitled ‘Härlig är vår jord’ (“Our Earth Is Wonderful”). She finished in joint fourth place.

1971: Björn and Benny submitted ’Välkommen till världen’ and, with Stig as lyricist, ‘Det kan ingen doktor hjälpa’. Both entries were rejected: the first title became a major hit for singer Lill-Babs (see 25 May 1971), while the second was recorded by Björn and Benny with Agnetha & Frida on back-ing vocals (see 23 April 1971). According to a 1972 magazine article, the 1970 Björn & Benny single ‘Hej gamle man!’ was also a rejected Melodifestiva-len submission. If this is accurate it would have been for either the 1969 or the 1971 edition, since Sweden didn’t take part in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970.

1972: Björn, Benny and Stig wrote the saccharine ballad ‘Säj det med en sång’ (recorded in English as ”Better To Have Loved”), performed by Polar Music artist Lena Andersson. This was the first of Björn and Benny’s joint compositions to actually enter the competition. Although it only finished third, it became a major hit in Sweden.

A C LO S E R LO O K

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25 JanuaryKMH Studio. Recording ‘Me And Bobby And Bobby’s Brother’; ‘Love Is Always Young’; ‘Feel’.

Benny Andersson (keyboards), Björn Ulvaeus (guitar), Rutger Gunnarsson (bass), Roger Palm (drums): ‘Me And Bobby And Bobby’s Brother’ only.

Charlie Norman (piano), Lennie Norman (bass), Roger Palm (drums): ‘Love Is Always Young’ and ‘Feel’ only.

‘ME AND BOBBY AND Bobby’s Brother’, with lyrics by Benny, was yet another track for the forthcom-ing album. It was a typically cheerful ditty featuring a whimsical, somewhat inconsequential narrative, so typical for the group’s early years. And yet, lead vocalist Frida somehow still manages to sound as if she has waited all her life for the opportunity to relate this tale of childhood memories. A piece of fluff is almost turned into a deep and meaningful statement – a poignant example of the special talents of ABBA’s female vocalists and a vital clue to the group’s subse-quent global success.

At this time Agnetha was highly pregnant with her and Björn’s first child, and since the day’s recording session was focused on recordings with Frida on lead vocals (see below), she may have very well stayed home to rest. Indeed, it is doubtful that her vocals were added to ‘Me And Bobby And Bobby’s Brother’ at a later date – there certainly isn’t any strong aural evidence that she is on the recording.

The other songs recorded on this day were two demo tracks not written by Björn and Benny, both of them with Frida as lead singer. These two tunes were to be performed by Frida and Lena Andersson, respectively, at Festival Mundial De Onda Nueva, a song festival in Caracas, Venezuela, to be held in February.

Frida in 1973.

i feel like i win when i lose 1973

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The first song was ‘Love Is Always Young’. In all likelihood, this was the Eng-lish-language version of Peter Himmelstrand’s ‘Barnen sover’, originally recorded by Frida on her eponymous 1971 album (see 8 September and 19 December, 1970; 14 and 15 January, 1971); sheet music exists of the song with English lyrics written by Jack Fishman. However, contemporary press reports stated that ‘Love Is Always Young’ had been written by composer and arranger Bengt-Arne Wallin with lyrics by Roffe Berg. If this is in fact true, it seems a very strange coincidence that two songs, written only a couple of years apart

and strongly related to the same performer – Frida – featured identical titles.

The other song, entitled ‘Feel’, was written by jazz pianist and entertainer Charlie Norman; Frida, of course, had a previous association with Norman, having performed with him extensively in cabaret and in the Swedish folkparks in 1969 and 1970. The tune was originally an entry in Melodifestiva-len in 1967, under the title ‘Ren vals’ (“Pure Waltz”, Swedish lyrics by Björn Lindroth). It was per-formed in the contest by singer and guitarist Roffe

Berg (who finished third); Berg was another partner of Frida’s, having toured with her in 1972. For the English version recorded on this day, Berg himself had written the lyrics.

On the demo, ‘Feel’ was sung by Frida – at least the session sheets mention no other singer – although the song was to be performed by Lena Andersson at the song festival. According to Frida, these particular demo recordings were never intended for release on record. Presumably, proper recordings would have been made if they had been successful at the festival in Caracas. As it was, none of the songs appear to have scored very highly in the contest, which was won by Chilean singer Monna Bell and the song ‘Deshojada’.

Later in 1973, ‘Feel’ was recorded in an instrumental version by Charlie Norman himself and released on his Polar Music album Garner & Hemvävt (“Yarns & Homespun”), co-produced by Benny. It’s unclear whether ‘Love Is Always Young’ was ever recorded and released on record by anyone.

The original version of ‘Feel’ was ‘Ren vals’, first recorded by singer Roffe Berg.