There is a saying that it is impossible to please all of the people all of time. It’s pretty safe to say that when one person views what they perceive to be an act of generosity, someone else is going to consider the same act as having been completely stingy. This is especially evident within the ABBA fan community. It can easily be said that since Mamma Mia! was unleashed upon the world five years ago there has been considerable more activity in relation to ABBA than there has been in all the years following their last recording until 1999. Sure the 1992 release of ABBA Gold is credited as a revival of sorts for ABBA, but considering that in the eighties and the start of the nineties ABBA was relegated to bargain bin collections with little to no attention to quality, anything done with any remote sense of care looked like a bloody miracle. ABBA Gold’s success was an unprecedented success that ultimately paved the way for a box set and the albums to be remastered later on in 1997. While the nineties revival looked to be going at a steady pace, it took the unexpected success of Mamma Mia! to kick the ABBA engine into comparatively high gear. In the years following the quality and quantity of ABBA related products have increased. The remastered albums were again redone giving them the treatment they should have had in 1997. The packaging for each album was improved and the inclusion of liner notes from Carl Magnus Palm, who has extensively researched ABBA history to provide factual accounts of ABBA’s legacy as opposed to the previously used British journalist’s who’s only claim to fame in the world of ABBA is that he happened to be a journalist who was assigned to report on ABBA while they were still together. That journalist was prone to quote unsubstantiated rumors as fact and had been telling them for so long that they have become the urban legends of ABBA’s legacy. Even ABBA Gold was given the remastered and repackaged treatment also bringing in new liner notes from Carl Magnus Palm in an effort to bring it up to the new standards set forth by replacement remastered albums. A new double CD greatest hits collection called “The Definitive Collection” was brought forth in an effort to address the main complaints about ABBA Gold in that it’s sequencing of the songs lacked any rhyme or reason. This superior collection put the songs in chronological order of release as singles and included a couple of nice bonus tracks to entice us collectors who obviously have the “main” content in various incarnations. In addition to enhancements of the audio products several DVD products have been released, including the video counterpart for the Definitive Collection, a redone version of the ABBA Gold DVD (mainly released in response to a less than high quality released version from Brazil to ensure a quality version of the product is available to those who wanted it and subsequently used in a combination CD and DVD deluxe package). The success of these packages have given rise to remastering efforts for the ABBA In Concert special which has been released and the work currently being done to restore ABBA: The Movie for DVD release sometime in 2005. These last five years have seen the quality of ABBA products increase to show the level of quality and respect you’d expect to find for a group that had spent several years dominating the charts of many nations. While many fans would love to think it was their persistence at demanding a quality product that has predicated all this, the simple truth is that the success of Mamma Mia! is once again bringing the songs of ABBA to the masses and expanding the commercial viability of ABBA beyond the constituency of the fan base. And while a lot of fans are critical of Mamma Mia!, the fringe benefits of the popularity of the show is Universal’s ability and desire to put higher quality ABBA products on the market which ultimately benefits us as fans of ABBA. If all it took was complaints from the fan base to make anything happen, it wouldn’t have taken until after Mamma Mia! hit the stages of the world to see ABBA’s catalogue handled with the care and attention that it enjoys today. But these high quality efforts on the part of Universal are not escaping the criticism of part of the fan base that just never seem to be satisfied. The 2001 remasters also saw the artwork of the original albums redone for the CD format, which means the three albums that pre-date the ABBA logo have now prominently feature the ABBA logo and all the albums underwent having their original fonts replaced and track listings redone to provide a consistent look across all the albums. This has caused considerable ruckus among the militant purists who feel the changes have bastardized the original works, despite the fact that the 12-inch vinyl record album has died out as a popular format and become a product for specialized niche markets. And what a lot of these militant purists tend to overlook is that for other artists, about the only thing ever retained from the look of the original album in their transition to the CD format is the cover artwork only. Often times the back cover of the LP is complete replaced when the album transitioned to compact disc. What was once on the back either makes it into the interior of the CD booklet or it’s dropped altogether. Another criticism is that always causes controversy is the presence of bonus tracks. Again, militant purists are adamant that bonus tracks should not be on the album, and if they must be included, be relegated to a second disc. But why employ such a blatant waste of capacity? Many LPs have run times of approximately 30 minutes to about 45 minutes. CDs have the capacity of up to 80 minutes. It’s a waste of resources to not take advantage of the capacity of the CD and load up any extras onto the same disc. In some cases, what’s been added to the CD would have been added to the original LP if the LP format had the capacity to contain the other songs. Besides, when you’re having to shell out the same amount of money for a CD of an older album with only 30 minutes of music as you do for a more current album where the artist has filled the disc with closer to an hour’s worth of material, it feels like you’re being ripped off. If these fans are so militant about recreating their albums as they originally were on vinyl, why aren’t they bitching to the labels to release double-sided CDs so they can recreate the need to flip the record over to play the second side too? While I tend to feel that over they years, we ABBA fans have been treated to a lot of nice opportunities to enjoy ABBA especially in the last few years, one of the things I do have to agree with those who feel that we as ABBA fans are a little more hard done by than fans of other groups is that Björn and Benny in particular have been very adamant about not releasing unfinished or unreleased works in their entirety. They did relent to a point with the creation of the ABBA Undeleted medley and a couple of unreleased songs featured in the box set, as well as “I Am The City” being released on the More ABBA Gold collection. Fan requests for full versions of “Just Like That” and alternate versions of songs such as demos fall on deaf ears when it comes to Björn and Benny. In comparison to one of the other successful Swedish pop bands, Roxette, Björn and Benny seem downright stingy when it comes to not allowing alternate versions of songs be released. With Roxette, fans there have been treated very well by Per and Marie with b-sides to singles containing remixes, re-recorded versions in different styles, and even demo versions of songs. In many of these cases, it’s Per singing the demos where the album version features Marie, so it gives fans an opportunity to enjoy the same song in a couple of different ways. It helps keep the songs fresh because it’s not always the same version you hear. One of the things I wish they would give consideration to is allowing the original songs to be remixed by some of today’s remix artists as a potential way to continue keeping ABBA fresh for a new generation. In many ways it would be a way to release a “new” ABBA product without actually having the group get back together. Almighty Records, by continually redoing ABBA songs with generic session singers under the brand name of ABBAcadabra have shown they would probably cream their shorts at the chance to remix the songs with Agnetha and Frida’s vocals. I can only imagine how excited they must have been to be selected to remix songs for Agnetha’s new album this year. So whether or not we as ABBA fans have been spoiled in the last five years or have been hard done by is subject to interpretation. But the fact remains, we’ve had a lot of products made available to us in the last few years and some more in the year to come that it’s still pretty good to be an ABBA fan, even if has been over twenty years since they together as a current group. Ryan Cameron | 
