Björn Ulvaeus

It is time for us to talk about Chess.

Composed by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, famously the Bs of ABBA, with lyrics by Björn and Sir Tim Rice.

Chess is demonstrably a great and popular musical theater score, in spite [laughs] of the fact that it has only ever struggled somewhat on Broadway.

And here is my proof, because you may regard Chess as a musical that doesn't work, and you would be within your rights to say so.

So this song famously features ABBA's Gimme Gimme Gimme.

And she actually got personal permission from Benny and Bjorn for this because they very rarely give permission for samples.

Yeah.

But they let Madonna sample this.

Because she rung them up.

Like, the fact that she just went, oh, I'll just ring them.

Let's just call Bjorn up.

Let's just do it.

And it's funny because we've got another band whose name is an acronym made up of the first letters of their names.

There's Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anifrid, I believe that's what you say, which is A-B-B-A.

ABBA.

Big ABBA fan?

Benny

and Bjorn did the music for chess.

They didn't do that

song, did they? Yeah, they wrote the whole musical.