LONDON – Cheers erupted around a specially built 3,000-capacity hexagonal arena on Thursday night as members of Abba – one of the giants of pop music – slowly appeared below the stage, leading the way for a classic ’70s hairstyle, to perform their first concert in more than 40 years.
As a synthesizer flares and lights flicker, singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad swings her arms up to the sky, revealing a giant cloak decorated with gold and fiery red feathers, while she she sings slow burning disco of “Visitors. ” Benny Andersson, poised before his performance, grinned like he couldn’t believe he was on stage again. Bjorn Ulvaeus, the band’s guitarist, focuses on his instrument. Agnetha Faltskog twirled her arms as if in a hippie trance, adding her voice to the chorus.
Soon, Andersson took the mic. “I really am Benny,” he said. “I just look good for my age.”
The spectators – some of whom had already left their seats to dance, with glasses of rosé wine in hand – burst into laughter as the comment went straight to the heart of the event. The members of Abba on stage are not real; they are meticulous digital reinventions made to look like the group in its 1979 heyday. The real Abba – whose members are all at least 72 years old – is watching from the stands.
Thursday’s concert was the world premiere of Abba Voyagea spectacular 90-minute competition taking place in London seven times a week until at least December, likely to run until April 2026, when the license for Abba Arena expires, with the site designated intend to build a house.
During the show, digital avatars – known as Abbatars – performed a series of hits with support from a 10-member live band and an array of lights, lasers and special effects. For “Spanish tinted”Chiquitita, ” The group sang before the eclipse. For the stadium’s discotheque “summer night city,“It occurs in pyramids made of bright light, with rings of Saturn spinning in the background. The avatars also appear as 30-foot tall figures on large screens on either side of the stage, as if filmed at an actual concert. At one point, they started appearing in dozens of places on stage as if in a spooky music video.
Baillie Walsh, the show’s director, said the event was meant to be “sensory overload”.
The project, which Walsh says has pushed digital concerts beyond show holograms have made headlines in the past, as a result of years of covert work, protected by hundreds of non-disclosure agreements. That included five weeks of filming the real Abba in a motion capture suit in Sweden; four double bodies; endless debates about predefined lists; and 140 animators from Industrial Light & Magic (known as ILM), a visual effects company founded by George Lucas that often works on Hollywood blockbusters.
Svana Gisla and Andersson’s son Ludvig Andersson, the event’s producer, said in an interview last Friday that they’ve had to deal with a series of problems during the eight years they’ve worked to program development, including fundraising challenges and malfunctioning toilets.
“It was stressful,” Andersson said, looking tired and sucking on a mango vape pen. “But, make no mistake,” he added, “there is nothing more exciting than this.”
The idea started around 2014, says Gisla, when she was invited to make a music video for the band that involved a digital avatar, a process that was “a nightmare,” she said. Around 2016, Simon Fuller, the producer behind the “Idol” and Spice Girls franchises, suggested a show starring a 3-D version of the group “singing” while supported. by a live band. (Fuller is no longer involved.)
The group needed to get creative because Faltskog and Lyngstad made it clear that they didn’t “want to go down the road,” Andersson told The New York Times in 2021. But the quartet wanted to put new music on the show, so it didn’t. secretly reunited to create a few songs, then became something more: “Voyage”, Abba’s first new album in four decadesreleased last year.
The team quickly realized that holograms could not be scratched; nor a bunch of other technologies. “We kissed a lot of frogs,” says Gisla. It was only when they met a representative of Industrial Light & Magic that she felt that they had found a company capable of creating “really compelling digital people” who could “run, spinning, performing in headlights”. The key, Ulvaeus said in a video interview, is “for them to connect emotionally with the audience.”
During test shoots in the fall of 2019, the male members of the team “plunged in without hesitation,” said Ben Morris, ILM’s creative director. (Musicians’ biggest concern? Shave their beards off.) “But we started playing some songs and she slowly slid off the stool, got up, and said, “Put my stick away,” Morris recalls.
The following spring, the band was filmed for five weeks by about 200 cameras in Sweden, as the band kept playing its hits. British ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor and four body doubles were selected from hundreds of people who hoped to review, with the aim of learning each of the band’s movements, poses and expressions so they could imitate them. its members, then extended their movements to develop the show’s final choreography.
Steve Aplin, ILM’s motion director for the event, said they went through “hundreds” of literal iterations of each avatar to get them right, and also the stylist’s sample clothing. B. Akerlund design. The most difficult to achieve was Andersson, he added, because “his personality was the sparkle in his eyes”.
While the Abbatars were being developed, the 10-piece band was being formed, and Gisla was raising funds (ultimate budget was £140 million, or about $175 million, she said), developing an arena. capable of handling all the technology and trying to keep the big project to a close. A potentially dangerous moment came in December 2019, when the team submitted a planning application to the London government with the word “Logo” on the building’s technical drawings instead of “Abba”, with the hope that Hope no one investigates further.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, a project that “already seemed ludicrous before Covid” became “doubly ludicrous,” says Gisla, as she is asking backers to believe in the idea that 3,000 people will want to dance side by side in the near future. The arena’s soundproofing material was almost stuck outside of England when a ship stuck in the Suez . Canal; The wood for the facade of the building is of Russian origin, but was obtained from Germany at increasing cost after Russia invaded Ukraine.
When asked what he’s been through while working on the project, Walsh replies, “Nervous breakdown,” then laughs.
Abba Voyage isn’t the only Abba-themed event in London; TV series “Mamma Mia!” music in the West End also regularly attracts birthday parties and birthday parties. Gisla said that like a West End gig, Abba Voyage would have to sell about 80% of the seats to make a profit. Tickets start at £31, or $38, although a few of those cheap seats are available for the first run. Attendees pay more — starting at $67 — for a seat on the dance floor in front of the stage.
Andersson, the producer, said he clearly hopes Abba Voyage will be a commercial success – as will the members of Abba, who are investors – but he stressed he’s happy for the team “created something beautiful” after a lot of hard work. Ulvaeus said he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the group’s contemporaries considered a similar undertaking: “Of course if they asked me for advice, I would say, ‘It takes a long time and it’s very expensive. ‘”
At Thursday’s premiere, the audience was split between invited celebrities in the stands (including the king and queen of Sweden) and members of Abba’s fan club on the dance floor, but in both parts, people hugged each other in joy at the sound of their favorite songs, and danced and sang along. It doesn’t seem to matter that the band on stage isn’t original in the flesh. For “Waterloo”, Abbatars simply introduced a big video of their 1974 Eurovision performance and dance their way off stage as the crowd cheers wildly.
Jarvis Cocker of Pulp said he fell into “a state of confusion” before the performance. “I felt very emotional at certain times during that performance, which I’m calling a show but it’s not – it’s a screening,” he said. He added, “But I don’t know what it means for the future of humanity.” He suggested that avatar shows featuring the Beatles and Elvis Presley wouldn’t be far behind.
Fans outside were overly concerned about the show’s effects on the live music industry. Teresa Harle, 55, a postal worker who attended with a friend and ran to the front of the arena to get the best view, said she found the avatars so convincing, she even waved goodbye to Faltskog at the end of the show.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Harle said, “although we’ll be back tomorrow and Saturday.”
