ABBA Voyage, ABBA Arena, London, 25th August 2022

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD! If you haven’t been and want to keep the magic for when you do stop reading now!

When it was announced a year or so ago that ABBA were reforming and would be performing I knew that we would have to go. ABBA has long been a guilty pleasure of ours. The fact that the band would not, in fact, be playing live but instead would be what became dubbed ABBAtars of their 70’s selves didn’t matter one bit.

I’d read online somewhere that it was one of the most expensive “live” music shows ever put together costing in the region of $175 million with the money put up by a company called Pophouse owned by *checks notes* one Björn Ulvaeus…

We’d booked to go on my birthday and decided to stay in a hotel close to the arena. Despite spending $175M on the show they seemed to have spent the best part of $1.75 on signage making it a bit like trying to find the end of the rainbow. A number of times we could see it and it felt close and then we were sadly dashed! Anyway, we got there and it was much smaller than I expected and I wondered if that was due to a limitation of the technology.

We were secuirty checked and then we were in to a large space where they were selling the usual over priced food, drinks and tee shirts. We spent some time milling around here taking pictures before going in to the arena itself which pretty impressive in itself. The stage, shrouded in screens at this point, looked enormous and they were playing some weird Brian Eno-esque music.

We were on the front row but what we hadn’t appreciated was that there was a large standing section in front of us and while we were raised above this the heads below still were distracting and sometimes in the way. Any future return visit we would elect to be slightly higher up to get a better view. Not that the view was bad by any means.

The show was supposed to start promptly at 19:45 but just like a “real” gig it started late. I did wonder if this was because someone forget to put CD in on time!

Although I knew that this was all CGI and the musical equivalent of a Marvel film I was not prepared for just how jaw dropping the technology was. From the moment the lights went down and ABBA appeared I was easily prepared to believe that we had been transported back to the 1970’s and they were there on stage in front of us.

Rather than just effectively mime along to the hits what they had done was supplemented the four band members with a ten piece live band who played along side. I assume that they had lifted the vocals from the original tracks and had the band play along. It was all incredibly effective and when the band were on stage next to the ABBAtars it just looked seamless.

It was setup just like a “real” concert with members of the band talking to the audience in between the songs including the inevitable “hello London!” There was also a very local joke about the adjacent DLR station which will need to be changed for the clone shows that they are bound to be planning for other cities around the world.

I had expected a run through of ABBA Gold but that was not the case with the setlist containing some lesser known tracks as well as the obvious big hitters. It was clearly too expensive or possibly too time consuming to film them for all tracks and three they didn’t appear in at all. One was done by the band and another two had some adventure cartoon to accompany them. I have read since that they have recorded some other songs so that the set can be changed in future thereby ensuring its longevity.

When the group were on they had the usual stadium trick of having large sized screens either side of the stage onto which was projected their faces. This is where the technology was truly astonishing in that you could see the the pores on the skin. It worked well for all band members with the exception of Björn who was, I thought, the least convincing but that did not at all take away from the sheer technical achievement. All this was supplemented by lighting that not only was on the stage but also all around the arena including some quite beautiful lights from the roof making it an all encompassing experence.

Not only did I greatly enjoy the experience it was very clear that eveyone else in the packed arena was also have a similarly great time proving that ABBA are longer a “guilty pleasure”. Helen said as we were walking out “when are we going again?” so I guess we will be back and I can’t wait!