“I love to make films about outsiders and I think that Abba were the ultimate pop outsiders,” British filmmaker James Rogan says of the subject of his new feature doc, ABBA – Against The Odds.
50 years on from that momentous night in April 1974, in Brighton, England, when the unsung Swedes won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, he is telling the story of one of the greatest pop bands in history with a depth and insight that transcends cheap nostalgia.
“The facts are the facts. This was a band from Sweden singing in a second language, doing something no-one had done before or [has done] since. You go anywhere and the music will be playing…If people want to focus on the kitsch and enjoyment of it, that’s wonderful but all I’m saying is that if you lift the lid and zoom beneath it, you will see a complexity and depth both to the music and the group that made it that is quite jaw-dropping.”
12 EBU member broadcasters are behind the new movie (receiving its world premiere at CPH DOX this weekend and made through Rogan Productions). The film will show in more than 15 countries in the build-up this year’s Eurovision song contest, due to be held in Malmö in May.
With so many powerful broadcasters behind him, Rogan and his team had the budget to license the footage and songs they needed.
“My [own] starting point with Abba is The Winner Takes It All which has to be one of the greatest break-up songs ever written,” the director says of one ABBA song he regards as a masterpiece.
When he was approached by commissioning editors Anders Bruus at DR and Axel Arnö at SVT about working on the project, he was determined to end the doc with the song.
The director bristles at the idea this is an unusual film for him to take on after his earlier projects like Uprisingwhich he co-directed with Steve McQueen or Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, about the racist murder of Black British teenager, Stephen Lawrence.
For Rogan, the kitsch disco era trappings were just a smokescreen – a way for Abba to get noticed. The real story is about an endlessly resourceful and talented Swedish pop group that “did something that no non-Anglophone pop had done. Still, to this today, no-one has done it on the scale they did. To break through from Sweden, which at the time was a musical outpost, to delivering that level of global impact, is just extraordinary.”
It helped that they had an ambitious and resourceful manager in Stig Anderson, who played a similar role to that of Brian Epstein with The Beatles.
“Somebody said to me something that is not in the film, that Stig did lots and lots of record deals with lots and lots of different territories. As a result of that, they didn’t have a single label controlling them,” the director reflects on the creative freedom Anderson carved out for them. “He clearly did enable them to keep a measure of control over their output.”
Rogan didn’t interview the four band members, Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid.
“It’s all archive. The approach in the film was to tell the story in the moment, through the interviews they did in the time and afterwards.”
There is plenty of material of the band members reflecting on everything from their growing fame to their relationship and break-ups. And the filmmakers did speak to plenty of friends, admirers and associates of the band members.
Rogan enthuses about the sheer ingenuity of ABBA’s songwriting. Benny and Bjorn weren’t native English speakers but they came up with ingeniously crafted and often very soulful lyrics.
“Well, if one wanted be literary about it, [novelist] Joseph Conrad famously had an idiosyncratic turn of phrase that defined his writing. He was a Pole whose third language was English. The things about pop songs is that they work on very simple combinations of words. If you get the right combinations of words with melody, it can then become a portal for anyone who listens to it to experience their own lives through it.”
The film has plenty of revelations.
“We were all surprised by just how intensely The Sex Pistols loved ABBA,” the director says of how Jonny Rotten and Sid Vicious used to listen to ABBA songs on permanent loop while on tour.
It wasn’t just the Pistols. Pete Townshend of The Who told Benny that SOS was the greatest pop song ever written. Members of the Beatles were equally enthusiastic about their work.
The multi-million pound royalties for ABBA’s 1979 song Chiquitita were all given to UNICEF. The group had recorded a Spanish version and the Argentinian journalist Ana Martinez del Valle explains in the film that for her the song felt like an act of solidarity during a period of intense political trauma.
Rogan was startled by just how ”nasty” the “sniffy critics” were to the band. ABBA’s songs were dismissed as being ersatz and terminally bland – charges which don’t stand up today.
Meanwhile, Agnetha and Anni-Frid were subjected to extreme sexism. “That was not unexpected at the time. If you look at the newspapers, Agnetha was referred to almost always as ‘ABBA blonde.’ Often, they called her in Anna in interviews because they wouldn’t learn her Swedish name….”
The band members were remarkably phlegmatic and resilient. They shrugged off the harassment and media abuse. Their solution was always just to get on with the work.
“And, of course, ABBA had the last laugh because ABBA remains a massive totem pole of culture just about everywhere. People love it. And they don’t just love it. They go and see it. I have to say, having been on the journey [of making the film], it is quite wonderful.”
Rogan has worked on documentaries about everybody from Freddie Mercury and Aretha Franklin to John Lennon. “The beautiful thing about making a music documentary is that you can ‘live’ the music of the artist for a period of time and in that period of time, you can experience everything they’ve said and have a deep dive. Making documentaries is the best job in the world,” he rhapsodises about spending so much time immersed in ABBA-world.
Yes, Rogan was a fan long before he started work on the doc but he is even more of one now. “I defy anyone to watch the film and not love them a little bit more.”
ABBA: Against the Odds is a world premiere in Sound & Vision at CPH:DOX ion 23rd March. Other broadcasters involved in the project include BBC, ARD/WDR and France Télévisions. A theatrical release is also being considered although details are yet to be confirmed.
