FORTY years ago this week ABBA’s one and only Australian tour was almost derailed by a bomb threat in Perth.
Michael Chugg, now one of Australia’s top promoters, was a freelance tour manager in 1977.
Paul Dainty, then an up and coming promoter, had secured ABBA for their first Australian tour, starting in March 1977.
Chugg, who worked on most Dainty shows in the ’70s, vividly recalls the Perth drama.
It
was around 7pm on Thursday March 10, and took place during their first
of two shows that evening at the Perth Entertainment Centre.
“A
policeman came up to be backstage and said ‘We’ve got a problem,
someone’s called and said they’ve put a bomb in the arena’,” Chugg
recalls.
“I said to him ‘Come on man, that’s bullsh*t, you know someone’s just
made that up’ but he said it didn’t matter and the show had to stop and
the arena had to be cleared.”
It was up to Chugg to break the news to ABBA — mid show.
“I
had to walk on stage and tap Benny (Andersson) on the shoulder and say
‘Excuse me, there’s a bomb scare and you’re going to have to stop
playing and leave the stage’. And they did.”
Chugg was the next voice fans heard, telling them to leave the venue in sections.
“Everyone
was out in three minutes. Of course 45 minutes later the copper comes
back and said there was no bomb, so everyone came back in and the show
went on. But ABBA were just wonderful, professional people. It was an
amazing tour.”
The 1977 tour was the result of some serious
groundwork by Dainty, who’d go on to tour everyone from Michael Jackson
to George Michael, David Bowie to Prince, the Rolling Stones to Oprah
Winfrey.
Dainty was friends with Thomas Johansson, then in charge
of ABBA’s touring, now running the Nordic arm of touring goliath Live
Nation.
“I went to Stockholm, met Stig Anderson, ABBA’s manager,
and a few of the band members,” Dainty recalls. “I was very young, it
was all very new. It took a bit of time, but we got the tour. And they
were big outdoor shows. Looking back now, 40 years later, you realise
what a coup it really was.”
ABBA were one of the many acts championed by
Countdown and Molly Meldrum. It’s
Countdown
folklore how Meldrum saw a handful videos that the band had made to
send around the world in lieu of travelling to promote their music —
they were still seen as a novelty act after their Eurovision victory hit
Waterloo.
Meldrum aired the
Mamma Mia video on
Countdown despite the band’s Australian record label not planning to release it as a single.
Countdown kept playing it, forcing Stig Anderson to intervene.
“The Australian label didn’t want us to play it, but every time we played it on
Countdown
the reaction was incredible,” Meldrum said. “Eventually they decided
it’d only be released as a single in Australia. In Brashs and Myers
people kept asking for this song
Mamma Mia. So they released it
and it was an instant No.1. ABBA and Stig were shocked, but they
decided to release it in the rest of the world and the rest is history.
And obviously it’d go on to be the name of their musical and film.”
In 1976 Meldrum went to Sweden to interview the band, not for
Countdown, but Channel 7.
“I’d
done a children’s show for Channel 7 before Countdown, and they agreed
we could use some of the interview on Countdown,” Meldrum says. “I
couldn’t quite understand their Swedish accents, but likewise they found
it hard to understand me! I told them they had to come to Australia. I
kept pressuring them.”
The band did come to Australia in 1976, but
only as part of a deal sewn up by Reg Grundy for the Nine Network.
They’d perform on a Bandstand ABBA special plus
The Don Lane Show, Celebrity Squares and
A Current Affair. Proving that network rivalries are nothing new, Channel 9 refused to let them appear on
Countdown; the show that had broken them in Australia.
1977
Australian tour locked in, the band blocked out just over two weeks in
their hectic schedule, flying into Australia on February 27 for
promotion in Sydney ahead of the first show on March 3 at Sydney
Showground.
Dainty said the financial deal wasn’t astronomical, despite them
being arguably one of the biggest bands in the world at the time.
“The
cost was pretty fair, it wasn’t life threatening. You were living in
the age when it wasn’t all about touring, because bands were making tons
of money from their records. In that era all those legendary acts were
getting $5 or $8 for every album they sold, and they were selling 20
million — you do the math. That was probably more important than how
much they’d make from touring.”
However unlike some international acts, ABBA did not bring a stripped-down version of their show to Australia to save on costs.
“It was mammoth,” Chugg said. “It was really the first of the big
stadium tours that would follow. They had the latest sound system with
them, all this amazing lighting, this incredible inflatable roof that
went over the stage, they had hydraulics on the stage so everything
could go up and down. It was the beginning of what concerts have become
now. And they were so organised. They got off the plane in Sydney and
the whole crew were all in white suits with the Ansett logo on them.
They had doctors, masseurs, hairdressers. All the stuff you have in
tours now, but it was brand new back then. They also had a lot of
merchandise, which wasn’t such a big thing back then, but they had all
kinds of stuff for sale.”
That all came at a price — $9.
“That was quite expensive at the time,” Chugg says. “I remember we
did an AC/DC tour in 1975 and people were bitching because the tickets
were $3.50. So $9 for a concert in 1977 was a lot of money.”
Once
the old-school paper tickets were snapped up Dainty couldn’t add more
days to the schedule, so the band agreed to play two shows in one day in
Melbourne and (twice) in Perth.
“Can you imagine a big band now doing two full shows in one day?” Dainty said.
The week leading up to the first Sydney show saw the state drenched in torrential rain. A major problem at an outdoor show.
“When you’re setting up chairs in the rain it’s not great,” Chugg said.
The rain kept coming. And coming.
“We
debated whether to call the show off,” Dainty recalled. “It was pouring
with rain but it actually made for a magical night. It adds a bit of
drama. It wasn’t ideal but we got through it.”
One casualty — Frida Lyngstad slipped over on the wet stage.
“We’d
used 100 white towels from the Sebel Town House to keep the stage dry,
they never forgave me,” Chugg said. “Frida tripped over but they kept
going.”
By the time the band got to their next stop, Melbourne’s Sidney Myer
Music Bowl on March 5, there were as many people outside listening as
inside with tickets.
That afternoon, a Saturday on the Moomba
weekend, ABBA had agreed to a public appearance on the balcony at
Melbourne Town Hall. Crowd estimates sit at over 20,000.
“That
came up after we’d sold out all the tickets in Melbourne and we got a
call saying they wanted to give ABBA the keys to the city of Melbourne,”
Dainty said.
“It was one of those photos that went around the
world. They were really good with connecting with fans. Even at
airports, they’d walk over to fans, even if they were behind a fence,
before they got in the car. They were a bit like the royal family like
that! They’d go up and down talking to people where they could.”
A
decade before the Town Hall appearance a young Ian Meldrum had been at
the venue when the Beatles also met the masses via the balcony.
“With
the Beatles I’d been down in the crowd screaming ‘I love you Paul! I
love you John’,” Meldrum said. “With ABBA I was on the balcony with
them, that was a real thrill. I remember the crowd singing
Mamma Mia to them.”
Chugg said the Town Hall appearance involved a police escort to get
the band from Melbourne’s Old Motor Inn in North Melbourne — the fancy
hotel of the era.
“It was like a military operation,” Chugg said.
“Our security guys were terrified it was all going to go wrong. But
people were just happy to see them. It was actually much bigger than
when the Beatles did it. The whole tour was bigger than the Beatles,
they were playing much bigger venues. And we’d seen nothing like it
since Beatlemania. It really was insane everywhere they went. It was the
first time a pop/rock act had really captured everyone’s imagination,
in every age and every demographic.”
Luke Rogers was 12 when ABBA toured Melbourne, and went to the Town Hall with two school friends.
“A
camera crew was filming us, they got us to chant ‘We love ABBA’,”
Rogers said. “I assumed I might be on the news, nine months later I saw
myself in
ABBA the Movie.”
Indeed, part of the 100 plus entourage on the Australian tour was a film crew making
ABBA the Movie,
featuring live footage, mostly filmed in Perth, the only indoor leg of
the tour which also took in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but not
Brisbane.
Director Lasse Hallström would later admit he wrote the storyline on
the plane to Australia, based around a journalist trying to interview
the band on the Australian tour.
Unfortunately that journalist was played by the now disgraced Robert Hughes, who’d later find fame in
Hey Dad and infamy and jail time for sexual offences against children.
“That means you don’t see the movie on TV in Australia anymore,” Rogers said.
Then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser requested an audience with ABBA, which required him coming to Melbourne.
“I
took him backstage to introduce him to the band,” Dainty recalled.
“There was no political angle, it was just that tour was on such a big
level that that kind of thing happened.”
“I had to throw Malcolm Fraser and his family out of the dressing room,” Chugg added. “We were trying to get the band on stage.”
Rogers went to the second Melbourne show, which took place at 2.30pm on Sunday March 6 (with another at 8.30pm that night).
“It was the only afternoon show ABBA ever played,” Rogers said.
“I
don’t remember a whole lot of the concert. I remember it being very
loud. But I’m so glad I went to that concert. If I hadn’t gone to an
ABBA concert I’d still be in therapy because they mean so much to me.”
1977 was a pivotal year for ABBA, with both couples still loved up on their Australian tour.
“The
timeline suggests Bjorn (Ulvaeus) and Agnetha (Faltskog)’s second child
was conceived some time during the Australian tour,” Rogers said.
“It
was a real peak of their career. They were incredibly happy. By 1977
they were already incredibly successful but the fame aspect really
exploded on that tour. I don’t think they realised just how huge they
were until that tour. But they had to squeeze a lot into a short amount
of time in Australia as Agnetha didn’t want to be away from her daughter
Linda, who was four at the time.”
The set-list for most of the Australian concerts was identical, although Bjorn’s lead vocal on
Rock Me was dropped at some Melbourne shows after he came down with food poisoning.
The band played most of their biggest hits —
Waterloo, SOS, Money Money Money, I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do, Knowing Me Knowing You, Mamma Mia, Fernando, So Long and
Dancing Queen.
There were key tracks from the album
Arrival (which had sold over a million copies in Australia the year before)
When I Kissed the Teacher, Dum Dum Diddle, That’s Me and
Why Did It Have to Be Me.
However the band also included a mini-musical,
The Girl With the Golden Hair, based around
Thank You For The Music — an ABBA classic now but unknown at the time and still months away from being released when aired on the Australian tour.
“It was a bold thing to do,” Rogers said. “When they did the songs
Frida and Agnetha (Faltskog) dressed in wigs. They included a song
called
Get on the Carousel which was used in
ABBA the Movie but never got released. They used a part of that song in
Hole In Your Soul which would be on the next album,
ABBA the Album.”
That album arrived at the end of 1977, at the same time as
ABBA the Movie.
However
despite being filmed in Australia, the movie wasn’t a blockbuster, the
album also struggled to match previous glories, peaking at No.4.
“By
the time of those 1977 concerts Australia had been immersed in ABBA to
such an extraordinary proportion it had totally reached saturation
point,” Rogers said. “They were over exposed, they were absolutely
everywhere. People were fed up with them. After they left that 1977 tour
it was like the country collectively sighed with relief. Australia had
had enough of them.
Arrival sold 1.2 million here, I think
ABBA the Album sold 250,000. There was no comparison.
Abba the Movie barely made a ripple in Australia, but through Europe and the UK the album and the film were enormous.”
There was talk of a possible 1979 tour of Australia, after a Japanese tour, but it never happened.
“There
was no way they could have filled the same kind of venues they did in
1977,” Rogers said. “By that time Agnetha and Bjorn were divorced and
Benny and Frida were having problems. Things had changed.”
It was a mammoth tour, with around 150,000 tickets sold, but ironically the band never particularly liked touring.
“They were happier in the studio,” Meldrum said. “It was almost like they did those tours just to keep the public happy.”
The band famously knocked back what would have been a billion dollar offer for a select number of live shows.
“They
don’t need to tour, there isn’t the desire and they probably feel
they’ve got the memories and it wouldn’t quite be the same,” Dainty
said.
Dainty still keeps in touch with the band — he was one of the producers of the
Mamma Mia stage show and worked with Ulvaeus on bringing the
ABBAWORLD exhibition to Australia.
For Melbourne, he’s seen the vindication of ABBA being belatedly hailed genius pop songwriters.
“Even
now people come up to me and admit they never thought it was cool to
say they liked ABBA,” Meldrum said. “For some people they were almost a
guilty pleasure. But those songs will last forever. They truly are some
of the best pop songs in the world.”
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| ABBAWORLD Melbourne 2010 |
