Benny Andersson – "We learned from The Beatles"

And now to meet the man behind those 40 (plus one) amazing songs... Along with Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA's chief melodist, Benny Andersson, comprises what is finally - after years of being dismissed as pop lightweights - regarded as one of the great songwriting partnerships, up there with Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, Holland-Dozier-Holland and Wilson-Love. And with the Voyage album, their first for 39 years, and the ABBA Voyage concert spectacular featuring virtual avatars going on 'til well into 2023, ABBA are poised at last to be hailed as true immortals. But what was it like to make their first ABBA music since 1982? How have they managed to pick up after so lon-----g? "It was like it had been three weeks, not 40 years," Andersson tells Pete Paphides in this rare interview.

- By Pete Paphides

Through the lens of a MacBook camera, the high eaves and variously shaped windows of Benny Andersson’s RMV Studio studio in Stockholm, Sweden reveal what may have once been a church. The light that streams through the windows this afternoon reveals a grand piano and at least one studio console. Just out of shot (for now) is the trusty Synclavier which has withstood four decades of daily music-making from the only member of ABBA who witnessed the group’s imperial years from a seated position.

After ABBA ceased trading at the end of 1982, a total of 39 years elapsed before their spectacular resurrection with the Voyage album and the eponymous shows in East London’s specially created ABBA Arena, which presented a digitally recreated version of the group’s younger selves alongside a hand-picked 10-piece live band. During that time, Benny and Björn Ulvaeus collaborated on two musicals – cold war drama Chess and Swedish literary epic Kristina Från Duvemåla – and saw the ABBA songbook slowly but surely come to be regarded as comparable to the very greatest pop music produced in the 20th Century.

For the guy who wrote those melodies, though, a line of continuity runs through the manic years of megastardom depicted in 1977’s ABBA The Movie in somewhat nightmarish terms, right through to the present day. Every morning, this is where he comes every day, panning for melodic gold.