Playing guitar on many of ABBA’s best-known tracks, soft-spoken musician Lasse Wellander has toured with the Swedish supergroup for years and helped create ABBA. Mama Mia! The soundtrack died Friday, according to his family.
“It is with indescribable sadness that we have to announce that dear Lasse has fallen asleep,” the Swede’s Facebook page said on Sunday. “Lasse recently contracted cancer that had spread and passed away in the early hours of Good Friday surrounded by loved ones.”
Describing him as a “great” and “humble” musician, the post calls Wellander a “great husband, father, brother, uncle and grandfather”, concluding that he “is a center in our lives” and it’s incredible that we are now. I have to live without you.”
In October 1974, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus were looking for session musicians when they heard a rock-blues band called Nature playing at a Stockholm club. They accompanied the band to a rehearsal and asked Wellander, the band’s guitarist, if he wanted to record with ABBA. “It was ‘Intermezzo No. 1,’ ‘Tiger,’ and the other two or three, if I remember correctly,” he told the magazine. Guitarist last year.
Founded two years ago, ABBA had a staff of two married couples: Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog. However, the prospect of any marital strife between his new bandmates was not enough to deter Wellander. ABBA was already a household name, releasing two studio albums and winning that year’s Eurovision Song Contest with “Waterloo”. He felt the pop group was “going to be big pretty early on,” he explained. “Powerful songs from start to finish. Even simple pop numbers were very high quality.”
He immediately signed up to be the band’s lead guitarist and said, “He’s played in everything from ’75.”
Wellander joined ABBA as the band toured Europe, Australia and Japan over the next half-decade. His name would appear on every album the band released between 1975 and 1981. visitors. By then, both couples were divorced, and the atmosphere in the recording studio was “a little different from before, for natural reasons,” Wellander recalls. Sunday Express in 2021.
He felt “maybe it’s all coming to an end” and wasn’t surprised when he got the call that the band was taking a break. In 1982, ABBA was apparently made forever.
Wellander continued to work as a “freelancer” in his own words, collaborating with other Swedish musicians. As a prolific session guitarist, he played on 6,331 works and 1,698 albums during his career, according to data collected by the Swedish Artists and Musicians Interest Association through March 2020. In 2018, Wellander was awarded the Swedish Musicians’ Union’s Studioräven Award for his session work.
He also found time to produce seven solo albums for himself. According to a biography on ABBA’s website, two of these albums were on the Top 40 charts in the 1980s.
He continued to work with his former bandmates, playing and contributing to several of Fältskog’s solo albums. ChessA musical about a Cold War era chess tournament by Andersson and Ulvaeus. After a 1984 concept album and concert tour, Chess It was staged in London’s West End and then spread to Broadway.
Wellander was also tapped to contribute to the soundtracks of both ABBA jukebox musicals of 2008. Mama Mia! and more in 2018 Mama Mia! Here we go again.
In 2017, Wellander said he was considering doing “a song or two with the old band” while driving when he received a call from Andersson asking if he could come to the recording studio. the To express.
“I didn’t understand what you meant at first,” he continued. “Then I realized you meant ABBA!”
Andersson, Ulvaeus, Fältskog and Lyngstad reform for the first time in nearly four decades to make 2021s journeyWellander would go on to play guitar on eight of the 10 tracks on the album. “Everyone was so happy and excited,” he said of the registration process. “It really looked like ABBA.”