ABBAMAIL advises readers to be cautious when reading the following article. A healthy skepticism is always advisable with articles like this:
Will Agnetha ever return?
By Rick Hewett
25 March 2004
The shutters on the fortresslike villa on the remote island of Ekero are locked shut once again, while the front gate is guarded by a bank of high-tech security cameras. It has been here, in this windswept Swedish outpost, that Agnetha F0ltskog, the most enigmatic and misunderstood member of Seventies supergroup Abba, has lived as a virtual recluse for almost two decades, hiding from a world that she had learned to fear.
"I hated the fame. It was horrible. It was fever. It was hysteria," she once said. "Hiding away was a way for me to come to terms with everything and slowly become well again. Silence has been a necessity."
Yet this was meant to be the week that Agnetha, who is estimated to be worth around £20 million, announced her return to an expectant pop world and emerge from her self-imposed exile, embarking on a series of high-profile interviews to reveal to the world just what she's been doing these past years.
In what has been billed as the biggest musical comeback in 20 years, the bright, blonde face of Abba has spent months putting together a new solo album. But now the hype has been put on hold.
All print and TV interviews this week - including a Saturday appearance on Parkinson - have been cancelled. There will be no personal appearances, no signings, no Agnetha.
Warner Music - reportedly bewildered, furious and likely to be severely out of pocket - insists there will still be "limited" publicity of a yet unspecified kind and are still trying to woo her back into the limelight. But today the company finds itself with a comeback album without a comeback kid.
The 53-year-old Swedish star insisted that she would fund My Colouring Book, a selection of 1960s covers, from her own fortune to ensure control of the enterprise and her own privacy.
A deal was struck last year with Warner. A single, If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind - originally a hit for Cilla Black in 1969 - received fulsome airplay on the radio. A massive marketing and promotional campaign was put in place for the album release in a few weeks' time, an apparent sign that the depression and phobias that had accelerated Agnetha's reclusiveness were finally behind her. But then, without warning a week ago, Agnetha went to ground.
So why is she risking commercial suicide, failing to support her own very personal project a full 30 years after Abba's first No 1 hit with Waterloo, and 17 years after the critical panning of her last solo album destroyed her confidence? Brita Ahman thinks she knows why.
Ahman, once Faltskog's closest friend and biographer, says in recent weeks the singer has been made aware she is being stalked by an obsessed fan. The news has left her terrified.
It has brought back terrible memories of the most disturbing episode in her life when, in 1997, she began an affair with Gert van der Graaf, an obsessed Dutch fan 16 years her junior who spent months desperately courting her. After Agnetha ended the relationship, Graaf, a forklift truck driver she had met one day while walking near her home, stalked and terrorised her until she was too afraid to leave her home.
Agnetha, always reclusive after Abba broke up, has rarely been seen in public since the Graaf affair. Many simply refer to her as Garbo Mark 2. She still lives alone and suffers from a fear of heights, crowds, flying and open spaces. When she does venture out she hides her face behind dark glasses and refuses to speak to fans. She is also now a grandmother, and news of the new stalker has made her even more cautious.
"Agnetha has become convinced this person is a threat to her and her family," Brita says. "This particular fan contacted me after I wrote an article about Agnetha for a Swedish paper and he sounded quite disturbed, saying things like Agnetha is the 'anti-Christ'.
"He also claimed her life was in danger. Whether these were empty threats or not they have to be taken seriously, which is why I told her record company. This kind of thing is obviously very worrying but for someone like Agnetha, it is terrifying and obviously she can't cope with it psychologically."
Brita shakes her head, aware that it is not just Agnetha's peace of mind that is at stake. " The record is doomed to fail without her promoting it properly," she says. " It's as much about her as it is about the music." She is not, however, surprised at what has happened.
" Over the years, Agnetha has been quite a troubled person who has always found fame hard to deal with," Brita continues. "She went into hiding almost 20 years ago because she could not cope with the celebrity life, so I was very surprised at her decision to do another album.
"I advised her to go into therapy after the divorce from her second husband 11 years ago, which she did. As I see it, she didn't stay in therapy for long enough and didn't really come to terms with the issues troubling her. Essentially she has dipped her toe back into the whole celebrity thing and suddenly found it scares her."
For almost two decades, the former Abba star has lived as a virtual recluse. Her retreat into a hermit-like existence was all the more surprising for Abba fans who had always regarded Agnetha - and her counterpart Anni-Frid Lyngstad - as smiley, sunny totty, a bright and highly sought-after disco voice in a pin-up's body, sewn up in skintight Spandex. The two girls and their husbands, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, the musical geniuses who wrote and played the songs, seemed to revel in the phenomenon dubbed Abbamania.
Abba dominated the charts throughout the 1970s with songs like Mamma Mia!, Dancing Queen and The Winner Takes It All. The group sold more than 350 million albums - at one point sales in communist Eastern Europe were so high they had to accept payment in oil because countries such as Poland were running out of foreign currency. But no one realised how F0ltskog, only 22 when the band began, suffered under the pressures of fame.
She was born in the small town of Jonkoping in April 1950. From an early age she loved music and became an accomplished singer at school. As Abba's fame grew, though, Agnetha's problems began. She dreaded the arduous touring and was often racked with stage fright. "Nobody who has experienced a shouting, boiling and hysterical crowd can fail to feel fear," she wrote in her autobiography, As I Am. Behind her flashbulb smile, Agnetha apparently longed to be an ordinary housewife and mother to her two children with Ulvaeus.
She got only part of her wish. In 1981, the couple's 10-year marriage collapsed and, when the band split two years later, Agnetha retreated to her secluded 10-bedroom mansion and turned her back on music. In 1990 she married surgeon and karate expert Tomas Sonnenfeld. That lasted three years and little has been heard of her since.
The one thing she craved was seclusion. Why, then, did she feel the need to put herself in the public eye again?
Ronnie Olafsson, showbiz editor of Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, says: "I guess she wants to prove to herself - and the rest of us - that she can still do it.''
The album itself, with its cover versions of favourite tunes, is another indicator of how she treasures her privacy. Agnetha recently said of her new record: "The musical impressions from my teens are in my blood. It has a strong hold on me. I feel deeply for these songs."
But those close to her know she would rather focus on the feelings of other songwriters than her own. As Brita says: "She is happy to praise other singers, explore their work and do it well but there is nothing of herself in this record. These are not her words or her feelings."
Refusing to promote her album is likely to turn a potentially lucrative comeback into a commercial disaster. It may also leave the original Dancing Queen more isolated than ever.
Thanks to ABBAMAILer Robin Andersson, Stockholm, Sweden
