The speaker was wrong when he said "What a joy to play with the BBC Top of the Pops Orchestra". The song was actually performed playback to a recording that we made the night before at the CBS Studios in London. Full playback was most commonly used in the programme, and the complicated rules of the Musicians' Union in England stated that foreign artists who wanted to use full playback had to record the background in England. British artists however were allowed to use the mastertapes from their recordings. The reason for this strange rule was, of course, to protect domestic job opportunities. The recording had to be done within a period of three hours including background, overdubs and mixdown. There was a controller from the Musicians' Union on hand to see that the three hour time limit was not exceeded. So the version of Mamma Mia that is played was actually recorded and mixed in under three hours the night before.

During the Australian tour in 1977 the production company was forced to employ as many Australian musicians on stage as there were Swedish musicians, whether they actually performed or not. The choice was to have a twelve-piece string section on stage to play in a couple of numbers. They appeared on a hydraulic stage behind the main stage to great effect. Actually, they were really first-class musicians, so they were a real bonus. But the point is, that if the production company had choosen not to bring any extra musicians on the tour, the Musicians' Union would still have charged salaries for them, money that probably would have ended up in the union's purse.

Forced double employment also existed in some states in the USA. On one occasion, I remember that we were called to a meeting with the tour management a couple of hours before we were due to appear at the Radio City Music Hall in New York in October 1979. We were given strict instructions not to enter the stage during a certain time, not even to quickly get a guitar tuner or something else. The reason for this was that some of the doubly-employed staff (that didn't actually do anything) should have their dinner break and could not be "responsible for security." If I remember correctly the restriction was from one hour to half an hour before the concert, and it involved several thousand dollars in penalty payments for infringement.

Anyone who thought that there was a lot of bureaucratic hassle in Sweden, certainly saw things differently after working in other countries during those years. The above are just a few examples.