COULD ONE BILLION DOLLARS EVER TEMPT THE MEMBERS OF ABBA TO HIT THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE AGAIN?

Despite billion dollar plus offers to reform and set out on a long awaited world tour for long suffering fans, the four members of ABBA continue to get older and make the possibility of any such reunion ever more unlikely by the year. There was some unsubstantiated rumours circulating last year in some australian woman's magazines that Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were for the first time in around 30 years giving some serious consideration to hitting the international stage together and putting all the years of wasted oppurtunity behind them all. Apart from the odd collaberation for various soundtracks and musicals between Andersson and Ulvaeus since ABBA unofficially disbanded in 1982, and a handful of solo albums from both Faltskog and Lyngstad in their native Sweden, the four members of ABBA literally crawled into an artistic hole and even when they crawled out occasionally to record some music it never matched the pop laden panache of ABBA's definitive output between 1975 and 1978. ABBA never officially split, but at the time of the band's unofficial split, band members were reportedly recieving death threats if they ever performed live. The two marriage breakdowns in the band probaly had little to do with ABBA calling it a day. Considering these alledged threats would have been made against the members of ABBA at a time when the gloomy shadow of John Lennon's assassination in New York was still sending shockwaves through the celebrity world and had many live performers on edge to some degree, you couldn't have blamed either Andersson, Ulvaeus, Faltskog or Lyngstad for swapping a life of superstardom for one of relative safety in their swedish homeland, away from the stage where potentially they could have been targetted by some crazy son of a bitch like David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon dead, or army nutcase Nathan Gale, the man who shot heavy metal guitarist Dimebag Darrell and four other people dead in 2004 at a DAMAGEPLAN gig in the US state of Ohio.