Biography
Born Stikkan Erik Leopold Anderson on 25 January 1931 in Hova, Sweden, the future music executive who died on 12 September 1997 first earned his living as a primary-school teacher. He briefly pursued performing ambitions by fronting the short-lived outfit Stig Anderson And His Mashed Creampuffs, yet his genuine gift surfaced in songwriting. Comic numbers such as “The Girls Who Know Are Found In The Country” and “Rockin’ Billy”—the latter a Scandinavian and Dutch success for Lill-Babs—quickly established his reputation. Anderson launched Sweden Music to administer his catalogue, then co-founded Polar Music alongside studio engineer Bengt Bernhag. Early dividends arrived through the Hootenanny Singers, the Swedish folk ensemble that included Björn Ulvaeus. After Ulvaeus struck up a friendship with Benny Andersson of the Hep Stars, Anderson urged the pair to collaborate and later made them partners in Polar Music once Bernhag took his own life.
Intent on securing an Eurovision victory for Abba, he proposed the title “Waterloo.” The quartet triumphed at the 1974 contest and thereafter grew into a global phenomenon while Anderson maintained firm oversight of what became Sweden’s second-most lucrative enterprise after Volvo. He continued supplying words for the Andersson/Ulvaeus partnership throughout the decade. By the early 1980s, however, his efforts to lighten the group’s tax load had spawned dubious enterprises, among them oil trading, and triggered an investigation that placed Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog at risk of imprisonment. The three artists responded by suing Anderson for withheld royalties and severed their long-profitable association. In 1989, amid the peak of Abba nostalgia, he sold Polar Music to PolyGram Records. That same year he instituted the Polar Music Prize under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, an annual award given to one popular and one classical musician. One of his last projects before his death was the book Abba: The Name Of The Game, produced with Tony Calder and Andrew Loog Oldham, which offered an engaging glimpse into the band’s inner workings.
Intent on securing an Eurovision victory for Abba, he proposed the title “Waterloo.” The quartet triumphed at the 1974 contest and thereafter grew into a global phenomenon while Anderson maintained firm oversight of what became Sweden’s second-most lucrative enterprise after Volvo. He continued supplying words for the Andersson/Ulvaeus partnership throughout the decade. By the early 1980s, however, his efforts to lighten the group’s tax load had spawned dubious enterprises, among them oil trading, and triggered an investigation that placed Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog at risk of imprisonment. The three artists responded by suing Anderson for withheld royalties and severed their long-profitable association. In 1989, amid the peak of Abba nostalgia, he sold Polar Music to PolyGram Records. That same year he instituted the Polar Music Prize under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, an annual award given to one popular and one classical musician. One of his last projects before his death was the book Abba: The Name Of The Game, produced with Tony Calder and Andrew Loog Oldham, which offered an engaging glimpse into the band’s inner workings.