Göran Bror Benny Andersson was born 16th December 1946 in Stockholm, and was raised in the suburb of Vällingby. Music entered Benny's life when he was very young. At the age of six he got his first accordion, and started playing together with his father Gösta and his grandfather Efraim.
When Benny was ten years old, he got his first piano, and started taking lessons. That did not last very long, though, and it is fair to say that Benny is a completely self-taught musician.
As a teenager he became a member of the band Elverkets spelmanslag, and it was at a concert with them that Svenne Hedlund, a member of up and coming pop band the Hep Stars, happened to hear him. The band had just lost their original organ player, and when Svenne heard Benny, he thought that he would be an ideal replacement.
In October 1964 Benny became a member of the Hep Stars, who by that time had already released one not very successful single. Shortly after Benny joined the group, they recorded three tracks in one day - A Tribute To Buddy Holly, Farmer John and If You Need Me - and a few days later they also recorded a song called Cadillac.
The Hep Stars managed to secure an appearance in the TV pop show Drop In in early 1965. They performed Cadillac and put on a great show, shaking their heads and running about, knocking out the Swedish teenage audience. In March 1965, A Tribute To Buddy Holly entered the important radio chart Tio i topp, and on 17th April it was followed by Farmer John and Cadillac, both of which became Number One hits on that chart.
This success was also mirrored on the sales charts, and their very first entry was the Cadillac single which soon reached Number One, swiftly followed by the Number Five hit A Tribute To Buddy Holly and two consecutive Number Ones, Farmer John and Bald Headed Woman.
Up until the autumn of 1969, the group would notch up a total of 20 Top Ten hits, including 9 Number Ones. As these statistics show, the Hep Stars were without a doubt Sweden's biggest pop band of the 1960s.
By the end of 1965, the group had released two albums (We And Our Cadillac and the live album Hep Stars On Stage), and Benny had also written his first song for the group, No Response. Up until that point, the group's repertoire had consisted completely of covers, but The Beatles having showed that it actually was possible for artists to write their own material, Benny thought that he would give it a go.
The group was rewarded with a Number Two hit, and Benny's next song Sunny Girl was Number One for five weeks in 1966 (it also charted in The Netherlands). The group continued to mix covers with Benny's songs throughout the rest of their career.
The next Number One hit after Sunny Girl was Benny's Wedding (with lyrics by Svenne Hedlund), which he also played five years later at the wedding of Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog. Like all successful bands at that time, the Hep Stars were on a never ending concert tour and were especially busy during the summer Folkpark season.
Just a few days after Wedding had hit Number One on 31st May 1966, Benny and the rest of the Hep Stars were invited to a party by another popular group, the Hootenanny Singers. One of the members was Björn Ulvaeus, and this was when Benny met him for the first time.
Later in the summer, the two friends composed their first co-written song, Isn't It Easy To Say, which along with a cover of Björn's No Time appeared on the Hep Stars eponymous album, released in December 1966. As further proof of the group's popularity, The Hep Stars was the first Swedish album to enter the combined singles and albums Top 20 sales chart (this was a time when people in general bought more singles than albums).
The release of the album was preceded by the major hit I natt jag drömde (a cover of Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream), and two Number One singles, the Elvis Presley cover Don't and Benny's Consolation, both of which spent a staggering 10 weeks at the top of the charts.
Disaster struck quickly for the Hep Stars, however, when they travelled to Kenya, Africa in February 1967 to start shooting a feature film. The project was financed out of their own pockets, and one of many problems with the film was that they did not have a script for it.
The film had the working title Habari-Safari, but was never completed. The one positive outcome of the project was that the group found the song Malaika in Africa. Their recording of the song became a Number One hit in May 1967.
The hits continued throughout the year, which ended with the release of the Christmas album Jul med Hep Stars ("Christmas With The Hep Stars"). In December 1967, however, the group's reckless spending and neglect to pay taxes caught up with them, and they were declared virtually bankrupt in one go. However, Benny took a deep breath and with the help of advisors he managed to work off his debt within a couple of years.
During 1968, more and more of the group's hits turned out to be Swedish-language, and they gradually started drifting into the MOR field. In the summer of 1968, the group was also joined on lead vocals by Svenne Hedlund's fiancée Charlotte "Lotta" Walker, and her voice was to grace the remainder of the Hep Stars hits. The two albums released this year were Songs We Sang 68 and It's Been A Long Long Time.
In the spring of 1969 the group staged a successful floor show, but ironically this also meant their undoing. Benny, Svenne and Lotta felt that light entertainment was the right direction to head in, while the rest of the Hep Stars wanted to return to the straight rock'n'roll of their early days. It was decided that Benny and the two lead singers would leave the group when their summer Folkpark tour ended in August 1969.
Before that, however, the floor show had taken the group to Malmö, and this is where Benny met Anni-Frid Lyngstad for the first time. By the autumn, the two of them were engaged. In September, Benny took over as producer for Anni-Frid's records, his first assignment being the single Peter Pan. The song had been written by Benny with Björn Ulvaeus and was the first collaboration between three future ABBA members.
By this time, Björn's and Benny's partnership as songwriters was the main outlet for Benny's creativity. Their first success as co-composers had been Brita Borg's recording of Ljuva sextital (with lyrics by Stig Anderson), a Top Ten hit in the summer of 1969. In the autumn of 1969 the pair started recording tracks as Björn & Benny, and in the spring of 1970 their first single She's My Kind Of Girl/Inga Theme was released.
1970 saw further recordings, eventually resulting in the album Lycka ("Happiness"), which included Hej gamle man! ("Hey Old Man!"), the first recording to feature all four future ABBA members. By the time the album was released in late 1970, Björn was also engaged to Agnetha Fältskog, and late 1970 and early 1971 saw the two engaged couples appear on stage with their failed cabaret show Festfolk.
Further Björn & Benny single releases during 1971 (Det kan ingen doktor hjälpa ["There's No Cure For That"] and the major radio hit Tänk om jorden vore ung, later given the English title If We Only Had The Time) were followed by an increased amount of production and songwriting commitments for other artists, as the pair became house producers at Polar during the autumn.
In March 1972, the first ABBA single People Need Love was recorded, and as Björn and Benny gradually stepped back from their other commitments - Benny was a part of the last Hootenanny Singers Folkpark, which tour took place in the summer of 1972 - ABBA grew to be one of the biggest popular music success stories of the 1970s.
ABBA's last recordings in 1982 were followed by Björn's and Benny's collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice on the musical Chess. A concept album was released in the autumn of 1984, and in May 1986 the musical opened in London's West End. The musical was a huge hit, both on record and on stage. In 1988 Chess opened on Broadway, but failed to repeat the success of the original production and had to close after a run of two months.
Although the mid- to late-1980s were very much focused on the different realisations of the Chess project, Björn and Benny also wrote and produced most of the tracks on two albums by the Swedish pop duo Gemini (Gemini, 1985, and Geminism, 1987).
The release of the second Gemini album in the spring of 1987 was followed by Benny's first ever solo release, the autumn 1987 album Klinga mina klockor ("Ring, My Bells"), which reached the Top Ten. Two years later he released his second solo album, November 1989.
In the early 1990s, Benny took an interest in the Swedish girl group Ainbusk Singers, and wrote the music for some of their songs, including the Number One hit single Lassie in 1990.
In 1992 Benny and Björn started writing songs for Ainbusk Singers lead singer Josefin Nilsson's debut solo album Shapes, produced by Benny and released in the spring of 1993. Like both of his solo albums, the Ainbusk-related projects were all released on Benny's own Mono Music label.
