I’ve just got hold my hands on the ABBA Little Golden Book, which popped out earlier this year.
Little Golden Books has been churning out these “biographies” for pop stars and other cultural icons, and you might detect a bit of a theme in a lot of the titles:
While these get classified as books for kids, the main audience is clearly adults with a nostalgic fondness for the brand. Given the hyper-bland writing style, I did wonder if these were AI-generated, but author Jeneanna DeBois is listed as the author of five other Little Golden Books titles and appears to be an actual person.
Obviously, when you’ve only got 24 pages and an illustrator who thinks everyone should look like Andy Gibb, the capacity to really tell the story is pretty limited. Only 4 albums get a name check (ABBA, Arrival, Gold and Voyage) and there’s an inevitable simplification of everything. No throwing tins of fish backstage here!
That said, I can’t excuse outright errors. Here’s a particularly egregious claim:
In 1973, the band entered an international competition called the Eurovision Song Contest. They sang “Ring Ring,” a song from their first album, and came in third place. The next year, they entered the contest again and sang “Waterloo.” With their dazzling costumes, matching dance moves, and upbeat music, they wowed the crowd—and the judges. ABBA won!
Nope, not true. ‘Ring Ring’ was written explicitly for Melodifestivalen, the Swedish qualifier for Eurovision, and placed third there. So it never got to Eurovision at all. And it wasn’t just “a song from their first album”, it was the title track. So that page needs to be redone if there’s ever a second edition.
For more ABBA fact checking, look at all the inaccurate reporting from Woman’s Day. And for more ABBA madness, get into the view of ABBA Voyage from the cheap seats and the songs ABBA wouldn’t dare release as singles.
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