ABBA: the soundtrack of my whole life Why is ABBA suddenly appearing in our lives now? My sister-in-law asked me in a family reunion when I told her that I was writing a case of ABBA. Many people will think that the main reason is because I am an ABBA freak. Nothing could be further from the truth. The main reason is because it seems to me that we do have a lot to learn from Björn and Benny’s career. One of the longest-lived and most productive creative couples in the history of music. They met on 5th June 1966 and, and they are still active and successful today. However, my sister-in-law’s question remained in my teacher’s mind. In class I jokingly say that this is the question of José Mourinho, a famous football coach: Why? It is also the question of the researcher, the journalist, the academic, the businessperson. It is the question that drives us forward as human beings. Man seeks explanations. There are many businesses from which many things can be learned, but why ABBA? It was then that I realized ABBA was the soundtrack that had been with me all my life. I was born in Galicia, in the Northwest of Spain, in the early sixties of the last century. From there, when I was just a child, I watched them, live and in black and white, win the Eurovision Song Contest. It was 1974. At that moment, ABBA was born. The group, designed by Stig Anderson, was formed after that triumph, to manage the success. For the next eight years they swept the world. They went as far as Australia where, when a special TV program about their visit to the country was broadcast, it had a 54% audience share, beating the record set by the broadcast of the man landing on the moon a few years earlier. I saw them born. [...]

'ABBA Song by Song' takes a detailed look at every single song by Swedish supergroup ABBA. All of their worldwide hits, the gems hidden on their albums and B sides, and lost songs performed in concert or hidden in the vaults for decades.

Births, deaths and marriages, No1 singles, drug busts and arrests, famous gigs and awards... all these and much more appear in this fascinating 50 year almanac.Using a page for every day of the calendar year, the author records a variety of rock and pop events that took place on a given day of the month across the years.This Day in Music is fully illustrated with hundreds of pictures, cuttings and album covers, making this the must-have book for any pop music fan.

The first comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre from its origins, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical offers both a historical account of musical theatre from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of key works and productions that illustrate its aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings.

Revel in the bright lights of ABBA’s show-stopping musical career, and hear the whispers from the shadows that lurked behind. Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba is the first true, full-scale biography ever written about the band. With lucid prose and an inquisitive eye, author, Carl Palm, covers all aspects of the band’s lives and careers. The period before the group formed; their global domination throughout the 1970s; their marriages and divorces; their business empire and; their eventual, inevitable split.

Cut through the haze of rock reference with the updated second edition of this illustrated encyclopedia. There are over 1800 entries on the stars who have shaped rock history, whether they were destined to become icons or bygones, influential or infamous. Each entry provides essential facts and opinion on songwriters, musicians and producers and includes a sidebar of star-rated recommended albums. There are over 600 images to complement the text and a full album listing for each act at the back of the book.

From the turn of the century to the 1960s, the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley dominated American music. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart--even today these giants remain household names, their musicals regularly revived, their methods and styles analyzed and imitated, and their songs the bedrock of jazz and cabaret. In The Poets of Tin Pan Alley Philip Furia offers a unique new perspective on these great songwriters, showing how their poetic lyrics were as important as their brilliant music in shaping a golden age of American popular song. Furia writes with great perception and understanding as he explores the deft rhymes, inventive imagery, and witty solutions these songwriters used to breathe new life into rigidly established genres. He devotes full chapters to all the greats, including Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstain II, Howard Dietz, E.Y. Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Leo Robin, and Johnny Mercer. Furia also offers a comprehensive survey of other lyricists who wrote for the sheet-music industry, Broadway, Hollywood, and Harlem nightclub revues. This was the era that produced The New Yorker, Don Marquis, Dorothy Parker, and E.B. White--and Furia places the lyrics firmly in this fascinating historical context. In these pages, the lyrics emerge as an important element of American modernism, as the lyricists, like the great modernist poets, took the American vernacular and made it sing.