Agnetha Fältskog: If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind

The wonderful Agnetha Fältskog, without whom ABBA would just have been ABB (or possibly just BBA), was interviewed in Friday's Guardian by Alexis Petridis.

I didn't realise what a big star she was in Sweden before ABBA were formed, enjoying a run of hit singles as a teenager:

So the Triumph Spitfire-driving Fältskog was young, successful and famous, but she says today that if she could go back and give her advice, it would be “don’t be so worried all the time. Try to relax and have fun. You know, I was a little worried person about everything, so that’s the advice I would give her: try to have fun and enjoy yourself.”

Is she different now? She laughs. “No, I’m the same. I think a lot. When I do things, I worry a lot for many days before. I’m just that sort of person. It can be good, because you want to do things right. I have a lot of humour, but I’m also a very serious person when it comes to different things and sometimes it’s not so funny. Things happen in the world and I think everything affects you.”

This seems a very Fältskog answer. Behind the Svenska Flicka image, she was the member of Abba who seemed to most embody the deep strain of melancholy that ran through a lot of their music. Her favourite songs were always the sad songs, primarily The Winner Takes It All, which seems surprising, given that it is often depicted as less a song than an act of cruelty: Ulveaus impelling his ex-wife to sing a song he had written about their recent divorce from her point of view: “But tell me does she kiss, like I used to kiss you?”

If I Ever Thought You'd Change Your Mind comes from her ninth solo album, My Colouring Book, and reached number 11 in the UK singles chart in 2004.

But it's an older song than that, written by the British film composer John Cameron and first performed by the folk duo Edwards Hand in 1969. I came across it because it's a track on the Kathe Green album Run the Length of Your Wildness that I wrote about recently, and there's also a Cilla Black version, which benefits from her not attempting to use the 'big' voice with which she murdered so many songs.

And another thing I didn't know about Agnetha Fältskog is that, before ABBA, she was a songwriter. Alex Petridis writes:

There is a fabulous moment in an old Swedish interview around the time of Abba’s formation, where the journalist lauds Fältskog’s skill as a dependable hit-maker then adds, almost dismissively, that Ulvaeus writes songs too “with his friend Benny Andersson” and that one of them has done quite well in Japan.