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Four pleasant Swedes chiming away in phrase-book English, their faces round and blank as aspirin..
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Because the band -- composed of keyboard player Benny Andersson, his girlfriend (later his wife) Anni-Frid Lyngstad, guitarist Bjorn Ulvaeus and Bjorn's wife Agnetha Faltskog -- rarely toured, Abba could seem as featureless as a supermarket bar code.
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For one thing, they had a way of making English sound like Esperanto.
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And their famous choiring sound, exalted but weirdly anonymous, could have been the ambient hum from...>>>
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some bland consumer Utopia, a room-temperature limbo of airline food and spandex and unisex haircuts.
