It is has been announced on the ABBA website that Gorel Hanser has died.
Who, you are probably asking, is Gorel Hanser? Well, she has been described by many aficionados of the band as ‘the fifth member of ABBA’. Her time with them started long before they were even ABBA and continued up until the present day.
Hanser was hired as a secretary by ABBA manager Stig Anderson in 1969 but soon worked her way up to become the Vice President of Polar Music – the company formed by Anderson that licensed all of ABBA’s releases around the globe. She dealt with the press, accompanied them around the globe and became a trusted friend and confidante.
Down the years, Hanser only occasionally gave interviews. One such occasion was in 2024 when she spoke to the BBC on the 50th anniversary of their Eurovision win. She remembered being back in Stockholm on the evening of the victory. “We had buttons to press to get everything moving. A couple of days later they came into the office and everything was the same as usual.
"We were all so happy and taken by the victory in Brighton, but it was like ‘now we have to work’ and we have to use this and do our best and get everything so that everyone can jump on the wagon and be with us.”
Asked what her favourite Abba song is, she says without hesitation: “Dancing Queen. I don’t remember exactly when I heard it the first time. But I remember when it entered the Billboard charts when it was Number One – then we had champagne in the office the whole day.”
After the band cut ties with Anderson in the late 1980s, it was Hanser who picked up the reins and essentially looked after ABBA's legacy. They repaid her loyalty and regrouped – privately – on the occasion of her 50th birthday in 1999 to sang ‘happy birthday’ to her in Swedish.
And it was Hanser’s office that handled the famed $1 billion offer for the band to reform around this time. “It’s hard to believe, but they talked about it, but it wasn’t something that you could persuade them to do. They didn’t want to go on tour again – so it’s not a question of money.
"Money has never been the drive for them. The drive has been to write good songs, to produce them to make good performances.”
