Abba’s Frida Lyngstad: “Eminem is one of my favourites”

The 70s pop veterans admit, however, to having "never quite understood" punk

In a new interview, 70s pop veterans ABBA have professed to being fans of Eminem.

Speaking about their position in the musical world in comparison to the punk contemporaries of their time, songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus stated, “I never quite understood it. There was a musical element missing. The rage, I could hear that. But young men have always been angry, that was no different from other young men.” Continuing, singer Frida Lyngstad then added, “Punk never got into my heart. You hear the anger now in rap, for example, but it’s different and I like that very much. Eminem is one of my favourites,” before Ulvaeus went on to nominate the rapper’s 2002 hit ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ as a particular personal prefernce.


Elsewhere in the recent Guardian interview, the band – who had hits with the likes of ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ and ‘Voulez-Vous’ and are currently the 14th best selling artists of all time – spoke about their lack of contact with drugs, despite being embroiled within the music industry for so long. “The strange thing is, can you remember ever being approached by someone who came up to us and said, ‘Hey look, I’ve got some really nice drugs here?’” joked Ulvaeus.”Squeaky clean. But it’s all true”.

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The pair, who – alongside bandmates Angnetha Faltskob and Benny Andersson – won the Eurovision Song Contest and shot to fame with ‘Waterloo’ forty years ago, then went on to elaborate about their experiences at the time. “Coming from Sweden, we were always regarded as outsiders, we were never part of that scene,” said Ulvaeus. “I recently read Graham Nash’s [of Crosby, Stills & Nash] Wild Tales,” Lyngstad added. “And to compare the lives we led and the music we wrote and the tours we did to that, it’s just so totally apart from that scene, but it was a very interesting book. He really writes openly about drugs – all kind of drugs – and I suppose that was the environment there and then. But we didn’t live in it.”

It was announced yesterday (April 10), meanwhile, that Eminem is to team up with Rihanna at this year’s MTV Movie Awards on Sunday (April 13). The pair are set to perform their single ‘The Monster’, taken from Eminem’s ‘The Marshall Mathers LP 2’, for the first time at the ceremony, before heading out on tour together for a string of huge US shows this August.

The pair have a history of collaboration, with Eminem previously rapping on Rihanna’s 2010 song ‘Love The Way You Lie’. They also performed the track together at the MTV VMAs that same year.

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