The Times Magazine 7s I’m sure you’ll be aware- it’s been big news –
London has just seen the
opening of Abba Voyage:
a pioneering show that
has brought holograms
of Abba circa 1982 to the
stage, playing all their
hits. The real Abba – old,
human and fallible – sit in their mansions
in Sweden, counting their krona, while their
uncanny ghosts, still looking young, perfect
and sexy, entertain the tipsy masses in
London, in a move that’s both creepy and
designed to earn as much money as possible.
It’s the most coldly calculating thing you’ve
ever seen. It’s the future.
Except, it’s not. It is the future – that part
is true – but everything else: oh, it’s not cold,
uncanny or bloodless at all. Abba Voyage is
deeply human, unexpectedly emotional
and very, very Swedish. For starters, instead
of booking one of those huge, monolithic,
borderline-inaccessible venues – the O2,
Wembley; all turnstiles and escalators and
endless queues – Abba have built, with their
own money, what looks like a small, modern
church of pop by the Olympic Park in east
London. It’s a building that works for people:
vaulted wooden ceilings, perfect wheelchair
access, gardens outside for drinking, smoking,
eating and dancing. Abba know their audience:
their audience, in their sequin jackets and
disco shoes, will want cocktails and the bar
has, accordingly, taps marked “Mojito”, “Aperol
Spritz” and “Rum Punch”. Service is instant.
No queue lasts more than two minutes.
Ticket-holders are treated like people – not
a vexatious, possibly mutinous herd.
And the show? I don’t want to describe
it in too much detail as I genuinely believe
everyone should see it, and allow themselves
to be both shocked and surprised. You should
go firstly because it is just the most perfect
pop experience. It is dazzlingly beautiful – the
room explodes with stars, snow, seas, eclipses
and rainbows. It is – as Shakespeare would
have put it – an island full of noises, sounds
and sweet airs: a club-hot live band give you
a Dolby-sharp Mamma Mia, SOS, Voulez-Vous
and Dancing Queen, like a discotheque in
heaven. And my God, it’s emotional. I thought
I was coming for classy, camp fun. I did
not expect to burst into tears, three songs
in – only to look around and see that most
A
CAITLIN MORAN
Why Abba Voyage made me cry with joy
It’s the perfect pop experience – like a disco in heaven
ROBERT WILSON
of the audience were, similarly, sobbing. Come
in your sequins but with a handkerchief in
your pocket is the best advice I can give you.
You will cry because Abba Voyage is a
genuinely new invention that will see your
brain forming new synaptic networks even as
you watch and sing along. This is a moment
in technology as pivotal as recorded sound; or
the first cinema tents, the footage of oncoming
trains making audiences scream. For being
able to see Abba – still young, in their glittery
capes, with their slightly clunky dance moves
and wry humour – on stage now, in 2022,
means that we have found a way to take a
memory and show it to everyone. It looks real.
It is real, in any way that matters: your brain
absolutely believes Abba are on stage in front
of you – and yet you are watching something
that, until last week, only existed in older
people’s recall, from years in which many
of us were not even born. It kept reminding
me of Tom’s Midnight Garden, where every
night, 11-year-old Tom wakes to find himself
roaming around in the Edwardian dreams
of the old woman who lives upstairs. The
concreted garden bursts back into life with
the previous century’s trees; they skate on an
iced-over river that long ago disappeared into
underground tunnels; an unwrinkled Benny
and Bjorn explain they have written a new
song, The Winner Takes It All.
I’m so glad it was Abba – with their
Swedish urge to make something with plywood
and rainbows and humour and love – who
were the first to pioneer this technology. They
have now set the standard that will inevitably
lead to us being able to see a hologram Beatles
at Shea Stadium; a hologram Little Richard on
the Chitlin’ Circuit; a hologram teenage Kate
Bush dancing in her bedroom.
Imagine if, say, the Michael Jackson estate
had got there first. It would almost certainly
have been a humourless, pompous, corporate
rewriting of history. Instead, Abba have made
their pop disco holograms singing Waterloo
something that is, astonishingly, a modern
spiritual experience. In this modest wooden
pop church in east London, they’ve conjured
something that is a practical immortality. Here,
Abba have begun to live for ever. Historical
events can be cut and pasted into the modern
day. Memory has been democratised and is
now shareable. You can be inside someone
else’s dreams of the 20th century. We have
begun to be tourists of time. nThree songs in and
most of the audience
were sobbing. Come
in your sequins but
take a handkerchief