When Michael Ingvarson finished university in 1994 he never thought he’d spend the next 22 years in an ABBA cover band.
Ingvarson has played in BABBA as “Benny” for most of his adult life, belting out the hits of the Swedish pop icons.
“And we’re not sick of playing them,” he said.
The band started not long after Ingvarson finished studying music at the University of Melbourne.
“I got a call from a girl I went to uni with,” he said.
They and three others got together for a Battle of the Bands competition at the Royal Derby Hotel in Fitzroy.
“There were 450 people at our first gig,” he said.
“It got a pretty good response – we thought well … we’ll do this for a while.”
Two decades later – twice as long as the originals – BABBA is still going with numerous Australian and international tours under its belt.
“At our peak we were doing 180 shows a year,” Ingvarson said.
The band was a regular fixture in Geelong in its early days, he said.
“At one stage we’d play down there every Friday.”
Often the gigs wouldn’t finish until 3am and the band wouldn’t get back to Melbourne until 5am, he said.
BABBA mimics the originals down to their Swedish stage-accents, Ingvarson said.
“We feel like we do justice to their songs by playing them correctly with the right harmonies in the right places.”
For Ingvarson, one of BABBA’s biggest accolades was Molly Meldrum’s description of the band as “dare I say it, as good as Abba”.
“He played such a huge role in getting ABBA known in Australia,” he said.
Ingvarson would go on to marry BABBA’s original Frida, who played with the band for 13 years.
Unlike the real Frida and Benny they’re still together with three children.
The current line-up features its original Bjorn (James McDonald) and drummer (Paul Edsall).
