Bryan Lockhart – Abba’s mouth organist
Local man Bryan Lockhart has stunned the music world by claiming he is the fifth Abba – and as a result is owed more than £750m in lost earnings by the Swedish supergroup, writes Nigel Eels.
Mouth organist Lockhart, 63, claims he was unfairly dismissed on the eve of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest which Abba won with their hit song Waterloo, which he wrote.
“Bjorn’s a bastard,” he said. “Benny’s a fat, bearded bastard. And don’t get me started about them two women. There aren’t words strong enough to describe my hatred for them.
“They fired me on trumped up charges – and now, 36 years later, I want my money.”
Lockhart says he not only co-wrote many of Abba’s hits with Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, but “gave them the idea for the others.” He says he would have come forward earlier, but was “waiting to see how things panned out.”
Speaking from his council house yesterday, Lockhart described how he joined the group in 1973 after Bjorn and Benny heard him playing his mouth organ in a Malmo shopping arcade.
“I’d been lured to Sweden on a promise by some woman I met through a dating agency,” he said. “She bought me a drink, after which I remember little else until I woke up in my underpants with my wallet missing.
“Fortunately she’d left my mouth organ. I was reduced to begging for krona for the flight home when these two funny-looking blokes in satin flares asked me what tune I was playing.”
Lockhart claims the tune, a sea shanty he had written five years earlier, was “almost identical” to that of Waterloo.
“They took me to their recording studio and introduced me to those women and said that they were looking for fifth member of the band and did I have any other tunes?”
Over the next six months, Lockhart claims he wrote almost all of the Voulez Vous album, and “a fair chunk” of Arrival.
“I’d be standing there playing a melody and they’d just nod and smile and scribble in a notebook. It was only later, when I heard The Winner Takes It All and Thank You For The Music, that I realised I’d been diddled.”
Lockhart claims he was fired on the eve of Eurovision after Benny and Bjorn accused him of having affairs with their then wives, singers Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.
“It was rubbish,” he said. “They were jealous, that’s all.”
Lockhart returned to the UK where, according to his medical records, he became the fourth BeeGee, the sixth Jackson Five and the fourth Funboy Three.
“I’ve got no quarrel with them,” he said. “They all paid up. But Abba’s a different matter. I just want what I’m owed, that’s all.”
A spokesman for Abba refused to pick up the phone.
