ABBA – Ring Ring

The Band That Didn’t Have a Name Yet — and the Song That Made Them Figure One Out

When “Ring Ring” was recorded on January 10, 1973 at Metronome Studio in Stockholm, the four people in the room had no group name. The label credit on the original Swedish pressing read “Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid” — a designation that described a working arrangement rather than a band, four solo artists and two songwriters who had come together for a specific purpose and had not yet decided whether that purpose was permanent. The song they recorded that day finished third at Melodifestivalen — the Swedish selection process for Eurovision — when the jury’s favourite was considered the overwhelming frontrunner. They did not make it to Eurovision. The Swedish version went to Number One anyway. The English version went to Number Two in Norway and Austria. Belgium gave it their chart-topper. The four people in that room decided, on the evidence, that the working arrangement was worth formalizing. By the time the Down Under special was filmed in 1976, they had been ABBA for three years and were the biggest pop group on the planet. The song that had started all of it was still in the live set. Of course it was.

Released in March 1973 on Polar Music in Sweden, “Ring Ring” gave the quartet their first domestic Number One in its Swedish language version — “Bara du slog en signal” — before Stig Anderson began the long process of securing international deals for an English-language version. Five British labels turned him down: Decca, EMI, Polydor, Pye, and WEA. In Australia, RCA agreed to a one-off deal. In the United States, a former member of The Zombies named Paul Atkinson, then working at CBS, convinced his boss Dick Asher to release it under the Epic imprint — and it was in that conversation that the group adopted the acronym ABBA as a formal name for the first time. The UK release in October 1973 sold five thousand copies and failed to chart. A remixed version, issued in June 1974 on the back of “Waterloo”‘s Number One success, reached Number 32. The song had needed the band’s fame to catch up with it before it could find a British audience. The band duly obliged.

The English lyric was not Benny and Björn’s work. Stig Anderson — who had written the original Swedish text and who had strong views about what a song needed to cross national borders — commissioned Neil Sedaka to pen an English version. Sedaka was estranged from his longtime lyricist Howard Greenfield at the time — the partnership that had produced “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” having temporarily dissolved — and brought in his then-current collaborator Phil Cody instead. Cody later recalled being handed the title and essentially told to do his magic. The lyric he produced — a girl waiting for a phone call from a lover who has gone silent, simple enough to be universal, direct enough to be immediate — served Agnetha and Frida’s voices without requiring them to be anything other than what they were. Sedaka and Cody had done exactly what they were asked to do, which was make a Swedish pop song feel like it could have been written anywhere. The working title, incidentally, was “Klocklåt” — Clock Tune — which suggests the melody arrived before anyone had a lyrical concept at all.

Engineer Michael B. Tretow, working his first major session with the quartet, had recently read Richard Williams’ book about Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound production technique — the method of stacking multiple musicians playing the same instrument simultaneously to create an immense density of sound. Budget constraints made the full Spector approach impossible, but Tretow found a workable approximation: layering the same instruments in successive overdubs rather than simultaneously, achieving a similar warmth without the expense. It was the beginning of a recording relationship between Tretow, Andersson, and Ulvaeus that would continue across every ABBA album and every major single of the decade. The Wall of Sound on a Polar Music budget, engineered by a man who had read a book about it the week before. Swedish pragmatism applied to American mythology.

The ABBA Down Under special, filmed in 1976 for Australian television, captured the group at the summit of their commercial powers — three years past the original release of “Ring Ring,” one year past the Australian hysteria that had followed the run of “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” “Mamma Mia,” and “SOS” hitting Number One consecutively, and midway through the recording sessions that would produce Arrival and its defining single “Dancing Queen.” Performing a 1973 song in 1976 was not an act of nostalgia — it was an act of acknowledgment. Without that third-place finish at Melodifestivalen, without Anderson’s dogged pursuit of five British labels who all said no, without Tretow’s borrowed Wall of Sound and Cody’s borrowed lyric and Sedaka’s borrowed songwriting relationship, the acronym ABBA might never have been coined at all. The Down Under cameras caught a band that knew exactly where it had started.

Stig Anderson — who had written the Swedish lyric, secured the international deals, coined or approved the ABBA acronym, and co-written more of the early catalog than most histories acknowledge — died on September 12, 1997. He had sold Polar Records and the ABBA trademark to PolyGram years earlier, in a deal whose terms his former clients subsequently challenged in court over royalty payments. The legal dispute between Anderson and the four ABBA members was never fully resolved before his death. The contribution he made to the story of “Ring Ring” — from the invitation to submit for Melodifestivalen, to the island retreat where the song was developed, to the persistence that eventually found it an international release — was foundational. It is the opening frame of everything. The band that didn’t have a name yet needed someone who already knew exactly what he was doing.