Remember Charlie & Sue? ABBA Magazine and UK Fan Club

Lol. Think that ship has sailed. I too remember having to send a postal order to the fan club . Just so you know what you missed... a white cardboard folder with the Abba logo on it, a black key ring with the Abba logo on it, a black and white and a colour photograph of the group, a round Abba logo pin badge 2 Abba logo stickers with Fanclub on them and a white plastic bag with the Abba logo on it. And 4 quarterly news letters . All that for £1.50 ..,,if I remember correctly. That was way back in 1977. Feels like a Bullseye , Jim Bowen moment there....’here’s what you could have won’ .

In fairness, I don't think I filled out the postal order properly. But it seemed a lot of money at the time and I was only 12 or 13 and fairly clueless about such things.

I recall Sue had a curly perm and it was said she resembled Frida somewhat? Charlie I can't recall. I have one or two of the ABBA magazines somewhere- I must have a look to see what he looked like. Wasn't there some kind of penpal section, too? How great was that? Sadly I don't think this is too common these days but I had two- a boy and a girl- we wrote to one another for a few years but I actually can't remember their names or where they lived! Sad. My memory is pretty lousy, but then it was a very long time ago and life really was very different to today.

I seem to recall a song titled The Devil in Miss Jones?

How I wish that had come to fruition. It's possible it turned into one of our beloved favourites. It's been a while since I read any ABBA biogs so I'm unsure.

I think there was a crossword. I didn't much care for that. I longed for more pictures and interviews. We were always left wanting. Or perhaps I was just greedy.

What I did find a bit frustrating about the ABBA Magazine was, although it had strong links with Polar, it didn’t appear to have any such association with CBS in the UK, so any picture discs (Voulez-Vous album, One of Us and Under Attack singles etc), I was completely unaware of until later.

In later years it became the so-called “International ABBA Magazine” so you’d have the editorial bit spread over two pages and in three languages. There was “ABBA Swap” which they always had to point out “doesn’t mean buy or sell” and things like Pen Pals they were quite strict on, stating that any duplicate letters would all be scrapped. It gave the impression that the readers cheated a lot.

One great thing about the Magazine was the offer on rare albums. We got the Ring Ring album and Frida Ensam through it, but many more were offered for sale. The interviews were good. One I remember is Agnetha commenting on Like An Angel Passing Through My Room, a track she doesn’t appear on the final version of. She mentioned it was tried out with different arrangements (which we eventually heard in 2012).

“Dear ABBA” always started with “anything you ever wanted to know about ABBA? Such as, does Frida darn Benny’s socks, or where does Björn get his guitar strings?” I think someone did jokingly ask that once but didn’t get an answer.

I remember those magazines they came out once a month and if they didn't come I used to get very upset about it. LOL.
I still have them but haven't really looked at them for a long time, some of them got a bit Tatty with the pages coming out.
I stopped buying them in later years.