HOW WE MET

BJORN ULVAEUS AND BENNY ANDERSSON : Bjorn Ulvaeus (left) and Benny Andersson were one half of the Seventies supergroup Abba. Benny, 50, was married to Anni-Frida Lyngstad and Bjorn, 51, to Agnetha Falskog. The two women were the other half of Abba, but by the time the band split in 1982, both couples were divorced. Benny and Bjorn have continued to work together, most notably on the musical Chess, written with Tim Rice. Both have remarried and live in Stockholm.

BJORN ULVAEUS: I first met Benny in 1964. It was summertime at a music festival, somewhere in the west of Sweden. Benny was with a group called The Hepstars. I was playing guitar with a folk group called The Hoote Singers. Benny and his guys seemed like a nice bunch and I asked them along to a party I was having because I was starting my national service the next day. I can't remember much about that night except that we talked, mostly about music, and he seemed like a nice guy.

I was in the army for about a year - it should have been 18 months but I managed to get out early - but I was still doing some gigs with the band. At that time the music scene was great. We were listening to all sorts of stuff from England and America and I was particularly into Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. The next time I saw Benny was at a gig that the Hoote singers did in Gothenberg. We had a drink afterwards. I think we went back to my place, and that night we wrote a song together. It was called "It Isn't Easy To Say" and The Hepstars recorded it later. Let's just say it wasn't the best song we ever wrote.

I liked Benny instantly. He was obviously talented and I found him easy to talk to. We both had this love of music and had much the same tastes. Right from the outset Benny was the one who was the heavyweight as far as the music was concerned. He also has this very dry sense of humour and if anything, he was even funnier then.

I think we first worked together in about 1966 or early 1967 when The Hepstars' guitarist had gone to Spain and not come back. Benny rang me up and asked if I would be stand-in guitarist for a tour of Finland. I said yes immediately because I knew it would be great fun. We became great friends during that time.

In 1967 I had met Agnetha and Benny met Anni-Frida a few months later. Both the girls were singers and we all used to go out together. Stig Andersson, who was later to become Abba's manager, ran a recording studio in Stockholm and asked if Benny and I would go and work with his company, producing other artists and writing, and we did. By then, Benny and I were writing a lot of songs together. It's always been the same way - I do the lyrics and he does the music. We did an album in 1970 of all that stuff we had written, and for one of the tracks we decided that we needed some female backing singers, so we asked Agnetha and Frida. That was the first time the four of us worked together. And after that album we did a tour in Sweden. We called ourselves by our own names but it was a bit of a mouthful and that's why later we shortened it to just our initials: Abba.

The tour made us realise that we could work together, the four of us. In 1972, we put out a single, "People Need Love", which was a big hit in Holland, Germany, Sweden and Japan but I don't think it was released in the UK. When "Waterloo" won the Eurovision in 1974, I knew that we were really on our way. I wanted success in England more than anywhere else; for me it was the home of pop. But I think people in England decided that we were one hit wonders. After "Waterloo", we only had a couple of minor hits there for about 18 months and then "SOS" got to number six and we were on the way up again.

Then it kind of went crazy. I look back on those times and it sometimes feels like it happened to someone else, especially when you see yourself on telly from that time, which I try to avoid if I can. Those clothes! Talk about bad taste, they were awful. We didn't really have a rock and roll lifestyle: we were two married couples. I think we lived a completely different life to all those other bands at the time. But Abba was an extraordinary thing to go through. We went through it together, and that's why we're so close.

When Agnetha and I separated and eventually divorced, I think people assumed that it was because of the pressures of the band, but really we had drifted apart and it would have happened no matter what our jobs were. I didn't realise it at the time but the songs we were writing then were much more sad. You can hear it in the last two albums, songs like "Winner Takes It All". I still keep in touch with her. She is very well and living her life.

Abba never officially broke up. In 1982 we just said we were going to have a rest and that was it. Benny and I started working on Chess with Tim Rice a year later and that took all of our energies. We have a new musical now, Kristina From Duvemala, which took us five years to write. We're now looking for the next idea but we'll keep on working together, I know we will.

The reason our professional relationship has endured is that we are very good friends who trust each other on every level. I was like the brother Benny never had, and I suppose he was that for me too. We didn't have to express these feelings, they just existed between us and were understood by us both. We're quite different in many ways. He's more stable, I think. He has an abundance of self-confidencein situations where I have none. Maybe the two together make a kind of whole.

BENNY ANDERSSON: We met when we were on the same bill at an outdoor festival. Bjorn and some friends asked us along to a party and that first night we talked a little and played guitar and we said maybe we could do something together one day. He was off into the army the very next day. I think we got on well together - and we still do - because when we met we were both writing songs, we were the same age and we were sharing the same sort of experiences in life. Later, when he got out of the army, we saw a lot of each other in Stockholm and we became good friends.

It was in 1970 when we really started working together a lot and the girls became involved as well. I think Bjorn and I decided that it was stupid for us to sing when we had two such great singers close to us. We did a tour, the four of us, doing this horrible cabaret stuff with sketches and monologues and trying to be funny. During the cabaret we did a little chunk of our own stuff and for some reason that seemed to go down best with the audience. It gave us the feeling that maybe that was what we should be doing. It was then that Bjorn said we should try to make a pop record in English.

Those early days were good fun and very exciting. The writing and the recording were great. We did play live, but the thing for us was to make good records. I remember at the Eurovision in Brighton, as the votes were coming in and it was obvious no one could beat us. From that moment we all knew that it had happened, we were about to achieve what we had been working for. The Eurovision felt like the only way we could come out of Sweden and really make it abroad. I know our music seems to have much more cred these days, but it wasn't that nobody liked us at the time. I remember a lot of musicians coming to see us - Jimmy Page, from Led Zepplin, came to see us once.

I think the reason that Bjorn and I work so well together is that we complement each other. He is a nice guy as well, but in a working relationship it helps if you know you are both giving 100 per cent. Everything is equal and we both feel that. We always agreed: there might have been stuff that I thought we should use and he didn't like that much, but then we didn't use it. There was total collaboration and unity behind everything we recorded.

I don't know what it is about Bjorn that means we get on so well. We are not the same type of person, we have different views about things. He is a very patient man. But when it comes to what we work with we always have the same feeling for its depth and for the best strategy of how to work with things. We share that: we want to agree on what is going to happen.

I don't have a brother but Bjorn is my brother. Nothing will alter the fact that we are true pals. We don't meet very much socially, we don't go out to dinner every other week or anything. But we do still see each other a lot, and as with a brother, anything could happen and he would still be to me what he has always been. We never talk about those matters, but we know it anyway.

I would still like to know why the we had the success we did with Abba, to actually grasp what happened. But I have no idea. I mean, we wrote good songs, we made good recordings, the girls are great singers, but there are hundreds of good singers, songwriters and bands. That's not the reason for it. There is something else which can't be defined which has nothing to do with us in a way. I know that our music is very popular now. I've heard about the cover bands and I know Bjorn gets annoyed that they have these funny Scandinavian accents, but it doesn't bother me at all. Our music was used in some films recently -

one was something about a wedding, wasn't it? [Muriel's Wedding] I look on that as a tribute.