When Abba broke up in 1982, Agnetha Faltskog walked away from the public eye. In her first major interview for three decades, she talks about the loves and losses of the intervening years – and about ending her seclusion to record an album once again

Passengers arriving at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport trundle through to the feel-good beat of Abba’s greatest hits. Honestly, it takes restraint not to execute a few dodgy disco moves as the tunes blast out from huge screens advertising Abba The Museum.

Once Sweden’s second most important export after Volvo, Abba is still, more than 30 years after disbanding, helping to sell the country’s brand to visitors. The new monument to the group’s decade of dancefloor dynamite is timely, as Agnetha Fältskog, always the most retiring of the Abba four, has emerged from her Swedish island home to release an album of new songs.

But my first glimpse of her is the 1978 Agnetha, all 1970s knitwear, high boots and pale blue eyeshadow, as the video for ‘Take A Chance On Me’ beams out across the arrivals hall. Then she’s full screen, eyes full of inky emotion, lips sticky with gloss, a bit tremulous, voice sliding magnificently from euphoria to anguish.

Since Abba abandoned a half-finished album in 1982, Agnetha has mainly hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The catalogue of disasters includes two broken marriages and a series of failed love affairs, a road traffic accident in 1983 – when she was thrown out of the window of a bus on a solo tour – an accumulation of phobias, the suicide of her mother in 1994 and the persistent attention of stalkers, with one obsessive ruining her last album release in 2004 (her first since the 1980s) when his threats caused all interviews to be suddenly cancelled.

We meet in a brick, wood and slate house overlooking a sparkling lake on one of the many islands that surround Stockholm. This is home to Jörgen Elofsson, the co-producer and writer of her new album A. I am hanging out in the kitchen, a little bit tense, as she’s somewhere in this house having her make-up done. Then she pads into view, en route to the bathroom, in white towelling dressing gown and slippers, hair in rollers, smiling broadly, with a friendly ‘Hi’ to everyone. She exudes a Zen-like calm, the advantage no doubt of spending decades standing on her head because, as she tells me later, yoga and meditation helped rescue her from depression.

She is excited about her album and a little nervous, but it is full of lushly orchestrated numbers, every track about love and heartbreak, including a seductive duet with Gary Barlow. Her voice throughout sounds fantastic. ‘I will always be compared with Abba, with what was. I can only produce a good album, otherwise why would I do it? We had a joke about it. I said: “If I sound like an old woman, we won’t give it out. After a few times,