Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story Of ABBA [Hardcover]

Carl Magnus Palm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2001

Eighteen years after they last performed together, ABBA remain one of the world's biggest selling groups with one of the strongest catalogues in the history of popular music. As a group ABBA were active between 1972 - 1982 and broke sales records during that period. This biography offers a thorough, warts-and-all account, covering all aspects of the ABBA members' lives and careers: the period before the group came together, the amazing success story fo the Seventies, their marriage and divorces, the ups and downs of their empire and their careers after the group. The bulk of the book focuses on the ABBA years, but as the story of the group and its members develop, the book takes a look at the group's musical development, offering a critique of the group's songs in terms of European tradition. Similarly the ABBA story can be related in the context of Swedish history and culture.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Another fine addition to the canon of music biographies...Palm's biography is extremely thorough and dipped deeply in a pond of melancholy. A powerful, moving read.' THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2002

About the Author

Stockholm based Carl Magnus Palm is recognised as the world's foremost ABBA historian. His earlier books include ABBA - The Complete Recording Sessions and from ABBA to Mamma Mia! He was involved in putting together the ABBA CD box set Thank You For the Music and has written liner notes to several ABBA related CDs most notably ABBA Gold and More ABBA Gold.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Omnibus Press (November 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0711983895
• ISBN-13: 978-0711983892
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The standard by which all future ABBA books must be judged, January 4, 2002

By 

Stephen Groenewegen (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story Of ABBA (Hardcover)

BRIGHT LIGHTS DARK SHADOWS is absolutely compelling; although the chapters are largely self-contained, the hooks leading into the next chapter (and the opening paragraphs of each chapter) are irresistible. I often found myself beginning to read a new chapter when I swore I would stop at the end of the preceding one.

Part I is gripping from the start of Chapter 1. I was impressed for several reasons. First, the personal and industry backgrounds on the four members and Stig are usually glossed over in other books. Here, the sketchy details are fully filled in, and it's
fascinating reading.

Second, Carl Magnus Palm puts everything in its cultural and historical context with information about the regions where each member grew up, the origin of the various Swedish charts etc. He expresses an authentic feel for the times and for his country
and its people.

Third, the narrative flows beautifully. Although it's largely chronological, it feels fresh - the first four chapters don't just go through each member one by one, the book has been better planned. It seems perfectly natural that we don't arrive at the childhood of the youngest member, Agnetha, until we've learnt about Stig's background and followed the others into their teenage years.

There isn't as much public information available about each member's childhood, which must have made it difficult to piece a lot of these facts together. The book really begins to hit its stride with the early chapters of Part II. In Chapter 12, Palm
begins to weave the various stories together. There's such a lot that isn't known about ABBA's formative years, there's a real joy of discovery in these chapters. Palm's tone is also more assured at this point - he slips in some reasoned criticism of each member's early recordings - and he injects some satirical, but affectionate, humour into the reportage. I loved the style on pages 177 and 178, for example, when Agnetha recounts her "baking accidents" and the bemused tone when Frida decides to throw it all in and "become a clothes designer".

An impressive feature of the book is its succinctness. That may sound funny, since BRIGHT LIGHTS DARK SHADOWS is over 500 pages, but it's a fair assessment. The Habari Safari movie takes up about a page; the progg movement is concisely charted and explained in a few pages. He sums up the sound and limitations of Gemini in one pithy phrase - "studio product, shoulder-pad music sorely lacking in soul" - and is equally spot-on with Agnetha and Frida's 80s solo efforts. Although I didn't accept his criticism of Djupa Andetag, it is a rational critique, and I admittedly suffer the disadvantage of not being able to understand the album's lyrics in their natural language.

Part III - The Time is Right - covers Waterloo through to 1982. The material is generally more familiar here; for instance, I could usually be sure of what incidents would be included in each chapter (other fans, as opposed to the general public for whom this book is also written, may be as acquainted with this part of the ABBA story to feel the same).

Fortunately, although a large part of this slab of the book is taken up with recounting events, Palm is not writing a mere overview of the ABBA years. He's writing a biography, and the significance of events on ABBA as people is analysed; he keeps
sight of the biographer's purpose in representing the big picture. Occasionally, this is of necessity a little strained - the psychoanalysis of Frida (p. 508) didn't entirely convince me, for example.

After reading BRIGHT LIGHTS DARK SHADOWS, I've learnt as much as I think I'll ever know about the people that make up ABBA. Ultimately, it's eye-opening and - towards the end - dispiriting reading. But you get a real sense of the demands and pressures that they were going through - the chapter on 1978, supposedly a quiet year for ABBA, makes this plain. As the business side of Polar consumed Stig, and the marriages collapsed, I think it's clear that the ABBA "magic" was a relatively short-lived
alchemy of personality, managerial drive, talent and determination in a specific historical and cultural setting. But it wasn't a fluke - it wouldn't have lasted as long, over as many unambiguously great albums, if it was.

You'll understand a lot more about ABBA, and I think you may even better appreciate the music, after reading BRIGHT LIGHTS DARK SHADOWS. It's the first real biography of ABBA but, more than that, it's the definitive biography. And it's the standard against which all future attempts at retelling the ABBA story will be judged.

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Polar Music indeed!, October 21, 2003

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA (Paperback)

Someone said it's as difficult to write about music as it is to dance to architecture, and I guess Carl Magnus Palm faced a tougher task than most. As any "Behind The Music" aficianado knows, your typical pop group creates plenty of drama, even when their music isn't all that good. Abba is unique in that their story is devoid of drug arrests or lurid groupie tales. Divorces, yes, they had that going in spades, as the band mates were all husbands and wives who broke apart and eventually ended the band, but the partings as described by Palm seem almost antiseptic, even when Benny cheats on Frida with (gasp!) a journalist. The dissolutions feel more like a Bergman movie than "A Star Is Born," but that's not Palm's fault.

Palm does a fine job with the story at hand, telling it in a Joe Friday "just-the-facts" kind of way that commands respect and a healthy amount of interest. He takes care to give us a perspective of the band in its time and place, and notes how badly Abba's music was received in its own homeland because of its excessive commerciality. (People digging your sound meant something was wrong with you, comrade.) He analyzes key moments in the band's creative development with commendable detachment and fairness. It's nice to see he doesn't pile on the negativity over the 1979 album "Voulez-Vouz" or praise 1977's "The Album" as the band's finest hour as others do. He's an especially biting critic after the band breaks up, even ragging on "Chess," but he's careful to always give credit to Benny's tuneful genius, Bjorn's often-clever way with a lyric, and the way Frida and Agnetha's voices, when joined together, created a unique "third voice" which gave the band much of its urgency and power.

I wish he was more willing to take us inside the band by painting some individual scenes in greater detail, making us feel like actual witnesses rather than readers of a police report, even a very good one. Guess the Swedes don't practice New Journalism too much. I didn't get much of a feeling of who the Abba band members really were, except that beyond their era-defining brilliance they seem a bit cold and dull. The only vibrant character, manager Stig Anderson, blusters and rants on the sidelines much of the time as Palm focuses on the band.

But what's here is good enough. Its an absorbing, thorough, and sober-sided account of the life and death of one of pop's most successful and misunderstood bands. If you like Abba even a little bit, you will like this book.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars True Swedish Melancholy, July 10, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story Of ABBA (Hardcover)

After reading this, one understands the high suicide rate in Sweden, especially in the 70s! Though that might sound like a joke, the peronality of Swedish pop culture and the serious, non-emotional vibe that prevailed in the Swedish 70s is obvious here. The amount of public ridicule this group endured in their own country and abroad while simultaneously battling through emotional issues internally, produced the most hilarious irony in pop music...the mega-happy ABBA sound. It would seem as if none of the 4 members of ABBA were particularly joyful people. In fact in some cases, they seem quite egotistical and morose. I appreciate this book because people that have always seen them as shadowy nordic figures that make mechanical yet irresistable pop product, will now see their human side...if they REALLY care to.