In April 1974, a photograph was taken at the Dome in Brighton. Four Swedes in satin and silver platform boots, one holding a guitar shaped like a thirteen-pointed star, a conductor in the orchestra dressed as Napoleon. The story attached to the image was simple: two happy couples celebrating together. The photograph did not show that only one of those couples was actually married.

Björn and Agnetha had been since July 1971. Benny and Frida would not marry for another four and a half years. When those marriages eventually ended, they did not take the band with them. Björn and Agnetha filed for divorce in January 1979, and it was finalized in July 1980.

ABBA kept recording, and the song the world hears as the sound of that divorce, The Winner Takes It All, was written by one half of the divorcing couple and sung by the other. He has called it fiction. She has described it differently. The story begins long before Brighton, in Norway, November 1945.

Frida Lyngstad was born on November 15th in Björken, a village in northern Norway, six months after the war ended there. Her mother, Synni, was nineteen. Her father, Alfred Haase, was a German sergeant who was already married and who went home when the occupation ended. In postwar Norway, a child with a German father was a target.

Early in 1947, Synni, her own mother, and the baby crossed into Sweden, fearing reprisals. By September, Synni was dead of kidney failure at twenty-one. Frida was not yet two. Her grandmother, a seamstress, raised her alone in Torshälla, a small town outside Eskilstuna.

She grew up believing her father had drowned when his ship went down on the way back to Germany. He had not. She made her stage debut at eleven at a Red Cross charity event. At thirteen, a local dance band hired her, and for the next eight years she worked dance halls around Sweden.

In September 1967, she won EMI’s New Faces talent contest. The dance halls taught her something that would matter later: performing is not a mood. It is a job. It has hours.

It produces results whether or not your life is in order that night. Agnetha Fältskog’s beginning looks different. Born in Jönköping on April 5th, 1950, she grew up with a father who ran amateur revues, and she was singing on stage and writing little songs as a child. By fifteen, she had left school to sing with a local dance band.

At seventeen, after a breakup, she wrote a song called Jag var så kär, I was so in love. The band put it on a demo tape, a producer heard it and wanted her without the band. She recorded it on October 16th, 1967. By January 1968, it was number one in Sweden with more than 80,000 copies sold.

Her first hit was a breakup song, and she wrote it herself. Then there were the men. Björn Ulvaeus, born in Gothenburg in April 1945, sang and played guitar in a folk group. Benny Andersson, born in Stockholm in December 1946, played keyboards in a pop band called the Hep Stars.

They met in June 1966 and started writing songs together almost at once. By the spring of 1969, when the women entered their lives, the partnership everything else hangs on was nearly three years old: two men writing. Benny met Frida backstage at the 1969 Melody Festival, the Swedish heats for Eurovision. A song he had co-written finished second.

She was competing too and came fourth. They became a couple. In May of that year, Agnetha sang on a pair of television tribute shows for composer Jules Sylvain and met Björn there. By the accounts that survive, the attraction on both sides was quick.

In April 1970, the two couples took a holiday together in Cyprus. They sang on the beach just for fun, and it turned into an improvised concert for United Nations soldiers stationed on the island. Four people, a beach, and an audience nobody planned. The version everyone knows is that four friends fell in love, formed a group, and Europe fell in love with them.

Almost all of that is true. The piece the myth leaves out is that the first time the four performed together as a stage act, a cabaret show called Festfolk, which meant both party people and engaged couples, opened in Gothenburg on November 1st, 1970, and almost nobody came. Agnetha remembered a few couples scattered at tables in a nearly empty room. Björn later called it the low point of everyone’s career.

They shelved the idea. On July 6th, 1971, Björn and Agnetha married in a village called Vum, and Benny played the organ at the wedding. The man who would later co-write the song about that marriage’s end played the music at its beginning. In March 1972, the four recorded People Need Love, the first record credited to all of them.

It reached number 17 in Sweden that August. As with most ABBA songs, the words and music were the men’s. The women sang them. Nobody in 1972 thought that was strange.

It was an ordinary division of labor. On February 23rd, 1973, Agnetha and Björn’s daughter, Linda, was born. A month later came the album Ring Ring. Around them stood the outside voice that would shape the group’s public life: Stig Anderson, head of the Polar Record Company, where Björn and Benny worked as producers.

Stig became their manager and wrote the lyrics to Waterloo. That song won the Swedish heats on February 9th, 1974, and left for Brighton two months later. On March 23rd, 1976, ABBA closed the studio doors at Metronome in Stockholm to begin work on a new album, Arrival. The first song they recorded that spring was Knowing Me, Knowing You.

Stig Anderson supplied the title. Björn wrote the words: two people, an empty flat, packing cases, memories in every room. Agnetha and Frida sang it. The version everyone knows says that song is the sound of Björn and Agnetha’s marriage coming apart, written in real time.

The piece the myth leaves out is that it was recorded in March 1976 and released as a single in February 1977, nearly two years before the couple separated and more than three years before their divorce was final. Björn has said it was an image in his head, not a marriage. Decades later, he allowed that it might have been a premonition of something. In the autumn of 1978, two things happened in the same season.

On Friday evening, October 6th, Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad, together for nine years and engaged for most of them, finally married in a small church on Lidingö, the island outside Stockholm where they lived. They told almost no one. According to the Belgian magazine Yupi, which had their confidence, the reason was simple: they wanted to avoid the crowds that had turned up when Björn and Agnetha married in 1971. The guest list was close relatives, intimate friends, Stig Anderson, and, by that magazine’s account, Björn and Agnetha.

That same late autumn, Björn and Agnetha separated. The public did not know. On December 13th, the group recorded Chiquitita, a song about consoling someone whose heart is broken, and Agnetha sang the lead. Twenty-seven days later, on January 9th, 1979, the four of them sat in their seats in the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York, waiting their turn at the Music for UNICEF concert.

They signed the royalties over to UNICEF. In mid-January, Björn and Agnetha announced they were divorcing. The band told the press the divorce would not change the work, and it did not. Voulez-Vous came out in April 1979.

In the spring of 1980, Björn sat down with a bottle beside him and wrote a lyric he first called The Story of My Life. By his own account, the bottle was empty before the words were finished. Sources disagree on whether it was brandy, scotch, or whiskey. He recorded a demo himself.

People who heard it told him he should sing it. He decided the sensible thing was to give it to Agnetha. The sessions ran from June 2nd to June 18th, 1980. Some of the people in the room felt tears coming when Agnetha and Frida stepped up to the microphones.

Björn has said it was strange to hear her sing it, that it was more like an actress at work, but deeply moving. Agnetha has said much the same thing from the inside. Singing it, she has said, was like acting apart, and she could not let her own feelings take over. The sequence matters.

The sessions were in June. The divorce was finalized in July. The single came out on July 21st. When Agnetha stood at that microphone, she was still legally married to the man who wrote it.

And the two of them have never quite agreed on what the song is. Björn’s account is that it is the experience of a divorce but fiction, and that neither of them won or lost. Agnetha told the Mail on Sunday in 2013, Björn wrote it about us after the breakdown of our marriage. Björn married Lena Källersjö on January 5th, 1981, about six months after his divorce became final.

By one account, the priest was the only person who knew beforehand. In mid-February, Benny and Frida announced they were divorcing, just over two years after their wedding on Lidingö. The press reported that their marriage had been difficult for years and that Benny had already met another woman, Mona. He married her that November.

On March 16th, 1981, a little over a month after the announcement, ABBA went back into Polar Studios to record a song called When All is Said and Done. Björn wrote the words. He has said that Benny and Frida’s split was at the back of his mind and that he asked both of them for their approval before the group started work on it. Frida sang the lead.

When she was done, the band threw out the backing track they had recorded and rebuilt it around her vocal. Years later, she said all her sadness was captured in that song. Go back to Torshälla, a thirteen-year-old hired by a dance band. Eight years of dance halls.

Performing is not a mood. It is a job. On March 16th, 1981, the job had hours, and she did it. The rest of the year followed the same pattern.

The band kept working on what became The Visitors, recording it from March through November and releasing it on November 30th. It was their last studio album. It carried two songs about the end of a relationship. Agnetha sang the second, One of Us.

For its video, she spent a day in director Lasse Hallström’s own apartment playing a woman moving into a new flat. She has said she had to hang the pictures on the wall herself. In the winter of 1982, Frida began a solo album in English produced by Phil Collins. By then, one account says, the group was spending less and less time together.

In August, ABBA recorded a new song, Under Attack. They had meant to make another studio album. Instead, they released a compilation of past singles with two new songs added. On December 11th, 1982, they took part in a British television program, the BBC’s Late Late Breakfast Show, live by satellite from a studio in Stockholm.

It was the last time they performed together as an active group. Nobody announced anything. There was no farewell tour and no press release. Björn told the NME in 2014 that they took a break in 1982, that it was meant to be a break, and that it still is one.

This was never really a story about two divorces. It is a story about who got to say what they meant. Go back to the photograph. April 6th, 1974.

Silver boots, a star for a guitar, a conductor in a Napoleon costume, and two couples who looked like one happy idea. One couple was married and the other was not. Not yet. The unmarried pair would marry in 1978 and announce their divorce in 1981.

The married pair would separate before the decade was out. The world thinks it remembers how ABBA’s marriages ended. What it actually remembers is how they were written.