12 Friday May 27 2022 | the times
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Pop Will Hodgkinson
Abba Voyage
Abba Arena, E
HHHHIHolograms are fine but
the real thing is still best
Finally, it was here after a 40-year
wait: the Abba reunion with not a
single real-life member of Abba
performing. Five years in the making,
with its own purpose-built
3,000-capacity arena, Abba Voyage
featured a live band made of ten
musicians, playing 20 favourites from
the Swedish sensations’ backcatalogue alongside four 3D digital
versions of Abba’s younger selves
enacting dance routines, all created
by George Lucas’s special effects
company Industrial Light and Magic.
Would this be a bold new concert
experience or a total Abba-rration?
To get a sense of what a big deal
this was, you only had to spot the
actual king and (dancing) queen of
Sweden in the crowd. It was like a
light entertainment Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, neon beams
making way for four bright figures
that did look like mid-70s Abba. And
when the women’s apparitions threw
off their sparkly cloaks to launch into
Hole in Your Soul, it was very exciting.In 1976 Abba fantasised about all the
things they could do if they had a little
money. Almost half a century later, the
band are working with much bigger
numbers.
As they launch their virtual reunion
featuring futuristic holograms, the
Swedish musicians need to recoup £
million to cover costs, a task made all
the harder by their decision to shun al-
most all corporate sponsors.
The band revealed that so far about
380,000 tickets have been sold for the
seven-month Vo y a g e residency
at a purpose-built 3,000-capaci-
ty venue in Queen Elizabeth
Olympic Park in London.
Attendees will hear all the
classic Abba hits as well as
songs from the new album, al-
so called Vo y a g e, and see
much younger-looking
3D holographic “Ab-
batars” of Benny An-
dersson, 75, Agnetha
Fältskog, 72, Anni-
Frid Lyngstad, 76,
and Björn Ulvaeus,
77, on stage along-
side a live ten-
piece band.
But despite the
large sums invest-
ed in the latest
Gimme gimme £140m to
cover Abba’s virtual gigs
Laurence Sleator motion-capture technology, the band
have refused to countenance any mass
sponsorship, opting instead to work
with a single partner, Oceanbird, an
environmentally conscious Swedish
maritime company that will act as the
tour’s exclusive logistics provider.
The decision not to branch out with
other sponsors has left the project in
need of investors and fans, however.
“We also need lots of people to come
and see it for a very long time,” Ludvig
Andersson, Benny’s son and the
project’s music producer, told The Tele-
graph. Asked previously why no
band had tried to do a virtual
performance like this, he
replied: “Because it’s so bloody
expensive.”
Depending on the show’s
success, it could run in London
for three more years or go else-
where, with a world tour a possibility.
“We’ll see,” Benny Anderson told Va -
riety. “This has to get on its feet first. We
have to see how attractive it is. We’ve
sold 380,000 tickets or so. It’s good for
a couple months. We need to see if it
sells more tickets. But there will be pro-
moters coming in from the US to see if
there’s something that will be suitable
for their market.
“I think we’re exactly in the right spot
here in London. The English people
have always treated us like we were
theirs for some odd reason, for which
I’m very humbly grateful.”
The risky but “very appealing” deci-
sion to shun sponsors was made after a
particularly bad experience when the
band were in their pomp.
“The last commercial we ever did was
[in] 1975,” said Ulvaeus. “It was for a
Japanese TV brand called National,
and we did some ludicrous changes to
Fernando. We felt so ridiculous doing it,
so never again.”
To create the 95-minute perform-
ance, Abba’s first concert in 40 years,
the quartet dressed up in motion-cap-
ture suits and pre-recorded the per-
formance and all the vocals. They were
then helped by George Lucas’s Indus-
trial Light and Magic, the special effects
studio behind the Star Wars films, to
create the immersive experience.
“It’s now, and it’s the future,” Ludvig
Andersson said. “It’s sticking to how the
songs are, in their arrangements, but
sonically adding a contemporary level
— as any current artist would today.”
The technology is so advanced that
gigs can be changed at short notice
without the band re-recording any-
thing. “That’s the funny thing — we’ve
been watching them now for six or
seven weeks, and I swear every night
they do something slightly different,”
he said.fAn Abba fan shows
off a Waterloo tattoo