While the other members, Björn, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad
revelled in the fan worship and the perks of fame, Agnetha yearned only to be
home. “I’m a country bumpkin,” she told her (ex) friend and biographer, Brita
Ahman. “I’m not a showgirl. The others like to party. I like to be by myself.”
Performing in public filled her with dread, and although she understood the
commercial drawing power of her leggy figure and blonde-bombshell looks, she was
never comfortable as a sex symbol.
Her stage fright reached the point that she was unable to perform without
whisky. What the average rock star accepted as adulation, she saw as something
close to intimidation. “No one who has experienced facing a screaming, boiling,
hysterical audience,” she told Ahman, “can avoid feeling shivers in the spine.
It’s a thin line between celebration and menace.”
Then there was the sheer bad luck. In 1979, during a tour of the US, the
group’s private jet flew into a violent thunderstorm while approaching Boston.
Although the plane landed safely Agnetha developed a morbid fear of flying, and
afterwards travelled whenever possible by road. This provided only temporary
relief, for in 1983 she was on a coach which crashed outside Stockholm, hurling
her through a window and into a frozen ditch. She has rarely travelled anywhere
since. When Mamma Mia!, the blockbuster Abba musical, premiered in London in
1999, she was the only member of the group not to be present.
For the last 25 years, her home has been a secluded lakeside farmstead on
Ekerö, eight miles from Stockholm, one of the loveliest of the thousands of
islands around the Swedish capital. Not that it has provided much solace to
Agnetha. Fans regularly turned up her gates. Sometimes she would come out, sign
a few autographs and ask them to leave. Then came the strange case of the man
who wouldn’t go away.
Agnetha’s love life has never been simple. Her marriage to Björn, with whom
she has two children, ended in 1979, by which time both of them were seeing
psychiatrists. Ulvaeus later slipped into the arms of Lena Källersjö, an
advertising executive to whom he remains happily married. Agnetha had no such
luck. She fell first for a Swedish ice hockey star, then for a fashion designer,
and later for her marriage guidance counsellor. In 1990, she married Tomas
Sonnenfeld, a Stockholm doctor, but the union lasted barely two years.
Into the void stumbled the bizarre figure of Gert van der Graaf, a
bespectacled Dutch factory worker. Abba fans first became aware of his existence
in 2003 when Agnetha complained to the police that she was being stalked by a
maniac, and was in “fear of my life”.
Officers raided a rickety wooden cabin on the shores of Ekerö, in which they
found 37-year-old van der Graaf, a decomposing turtle and thousands of mementoes
of Agnetha’s career. The Dutchman was charged with threatening behaviour, but in
a spirited court defence produced a letter from the singer suggesting their
relationship was rather more than that of stalker and victim. It quickly emerged
that the pair had enjoyed a full-blown romance and had been on holiday together
only weeks before Agnetha called in the police.
Sweden was outraged. Brita Ahman says it was the end of their friendship.
“When she told me about it, I was extremely shocked,” recalls Ms Ahman. “I
warned her and said it could be dangerous. Instead she continued to encourage
him. I think it was the point at which many people simply gave up on her.”
Those who remain close to Agnetha say she never had the aptitude for stardom.
That it might have been better if she had stayed in Jönköping, the small town in
southern Sweden where she was brought up, the daughter of a department store
manager, and become the classical musician she seemed destined to be.
Yet Abba would never have reached the same heights without her. Björn and
Benny created those beautifully polished pop tunes, Anni-Frid provided the funk,
but it was Agnetha’s pure voice and arresting beauty that made the group both
eye-catching and irresistible to the ear. No one knows how her comeback will
unfold, but when we see her again we can at least say a proper thank you for the
music.
Agnetha Fältskog's new album, 'A', is released on May 13
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/9933274/Abbas-Agnetha-Faltskog-Could-the-girl-with-the-golden-hair-get-lucky-at-last.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
