ABBA is Bjorn Again
Young Chang
Rod Leissle and his friend John Tyrrell were sitting around in
1988 -- they were co-workers at a research laboratory in Melbourne,
Australia, at the time -- thinking of ways to start up a successful
band.
They knew they needed the following ingredients: Fantastic songs,
a cool image and 20 hits.
“But you can’t just write 20 hit songs,” said Leissle, who founded
the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again with Tyrrell. “It takes 10 years
for that to evolve, if you’re any good at writing songs ... That’s
when I realized that we had to be ABBA.”
Literally.
“Everything pointed toward ABBA,” Leissle said of his thought
process at the time. “Somehow we gotta just be like ABBA. But rather
than be just like ABBA, let’s just basically be ABBA. So that’s what
we did.”
Today, Bjorn Again has surpassed the status of a tribute band.
Having developed almost a cult following in the last 14 years, the
group, which is scheduled to perform at Orange Coast College on
Saturday, has put on shows around the world, including at such
high-profile venues as the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Cannes
Film Festival and at The Forum in London.
They have a telegram from ABBA member Bjorn Ulvaeus under their
belts -- it read, “It was always my belief that anyone who looks like
me ought to have a successful career” -- and the memory of being
invited to Benny Andersson and Ulvaeus’ studio in 1992 is one to
cherish.
“It’s just gone a million miles above and beyond what was expected
it would do,” Leissle said. “We just thought it would be a fun thing
to do on the weekend ....We thought it’d last six months or a year.”
With the huge success of the band, Leissle and Tyrrell have
assumed a management role at the group’s headquarters in London for
the last five years. Leissle, on bass, and Tyrrell, on drums, perform
occasionally nowadays.
The four regular Bjorn Again musicians have stage names that play
off the names of the original band. Instead of Ulvaeus, Andersson,
Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Bjorn Again consists of
Bjorn Volvo-us, Benny Anderwear, Agnetha Falstart and Frida
Longstokin.
Bjorn Again’s Web site claims the group’s genesis involved a crash
between a helicopter and an extraterrestrial platform shoe. The
current four are said to have been on that helicopter, suffered
almost complete amnesia and been left with only cool songs in their
heads.
“We’ve always tried to maintain an element of mystery about what
the band’s all about,” Leissle said. “If we said, ‘Yes, we love
ABBA’s songs and we’re getting on stage and singing them,’ it could
be a little sycophantic. We just wanted to come up with a story that
shows a humorous side of what we’re about. We’re a tribute to ABBA
but we also are a bit of a parody on the whole ‘70s thing as well.”
Leissle was not a huge fan of ABBA when the Swedish group was
topping charts in the mid-’70s, especially in Australia. He and
Tyrrell were more into Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.
“But because ABBA was so popular in the ‘70s, a lot of it rubbed
off on us. And I must say there were bits of it that I secretly
confessed I like,” Leissle, 43, said. “It’s not the sort of thing you
admitted to your mates.”
In an e-mail interview, Tyrrell also admitted that despite his
preference for harder music as a teen, he’d find himself humming to
the ABBA songs that his sister, “mum” and dad would play.
His first reaction to Leissle’s ABBA-revival idea was shaky.
“I thought he was crazy,” the co-founder wrote. “But when we
discussed how we would actually go about it, especially with talented
performers and a good sense of humor in the show, the idea came
alive.”
Leissle said he isn’t quite sure why ABBA continues to have such a
wide appeal in Australia, with everything from ABBA revival music to
films such as “Muriel’s Wedding” and “The Adventures of Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert.”
“I think it’s ‘cause they represented something that seemed quite
different,” Leissle said. “The fact that they wrote such simple,
honest, catchy songs, I think was appreciated. But then again that
was the base of a lot of their criticism. People saw it as being a
sort of cheesy throwaway pop. Australians really embraced it for some
reason or other.”
Their best known song today is, of course, the track Leissle calls
the “Rolls Royce of ABBA songs” -- “Dancing Queen.” The group used to
receive the most attention in Australia and Europe, but the Broadway
musical “Mamma Mia!” which features ABBA hits, has acquainted more
Americans with the Swedish sensation.
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