In a Stockholm film studio, two local circuses emptied their dressing rooms into one bright frame. Acrobats, clowns and a knot of friends crowded around the four members of ABBA, the Swedish pop group, while a photographer tried to turn controlled chaos into a record sleeve. On November 3, 1980, that sleeve wrapped Super Trouper, the seventh studio album by ABBA, released on the Polar Music label.
A spotlight and a lost London shoot
The title answered a practical problem. A Super Trouper is a type of stage spotlight, the kind that follows a performer and turns a dark hall into a single bright circle. The group had first wanted to be photographed at Piccadilly Circus in London surrounded by circus artists, but permission never came. So the cover was shot in Stockholm instead, with performers from two local troupes and friends of the band standing in, and designer Rune Söderqvist shaped the image that would sit in a million British homes before the year ended.
By the time the album appeared, ABBA were already riding one of the strangest hits of their career. The single The Winner Takes It All had arrived that July and become a worldwide success, a song built partly from the divorce of Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog. It was a ballad about losing everything, sung by the person living that story in public, and it set a sombre tone for an album the world expected to be pure celebration.
The last-minute title track
Super Trouper itself almost did not exist. The band had recorded a song called Put On Your White Sombrero in September, then decided it did not fit. In October, still inside Polar Studios in Stockholm, they wrote the title track as a replacement, and it was released as a single the same day as the album. That kind of last-minute fix could have produced filler; instead it produced the title of a record that would define their early 1980s sound.
The album marked a deliberate turn. After the disco-leaning Voulez-Vous, ABBA returned to a more straightforward pop style, with songs written during a January trip to Barbados and others finished after a short tour of Japan in March. Yet the material was not simple. The Piper drew on a Stephen King novel about a fascist leader, Me and I explored a divided personality, and the closing track The Way Old Friends Do was recorded live during a 1979 concert tour.
On some European vinyl pressings, that closing song hid a small piece of mischief. The applause at the end was cut into the run-out groove, so on a turntable the clapping could loop forever unless the needle was lifted. It was a fitting joke for an album that refused to end quietly: Super Trouper became the sixth ABBA album to top the British chart, and the best-selling album in the United Kingdom in 1980 despite arriving in November with a million pre-orders already placed.
The success stretched far beyond Britain. The album led the charts in Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Norway and Sweden, and reported worldwide sales passed eight million copies. A year later, the marriage of Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson, who produced the record with Björn Ulvaeus, would end, making Super Trouper the final ABBA album recorded while the two were still married.
Four decades on, the album keeps returning in new forms. It first appeared on CD in 1983, was remastered four times between 1997 and 2011, and for its 40th anniversary in 2020 it was pressed as a double LP with half-speed mastering at Abbey Road Studios. The title track still does what a Super Trouper does: it finds the band in the dark and fixes them in a circle of light.
The title track still does what a Super Trouper does: it finds the band in the dark and fixes them in a circle of light.