I flew to London to see ABBA's digital avatars
I flew to London to see ABBA's digital avatars
And it was worth it.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
I’m back from vacation and I’m a new woman. —Kate
It’s important to know that ABBA themselves are not present at the ABBA Voyage arena concert in London. You may not understand why my friends and I planned an entire trans-Atlantic trip for what essentially amounts to an (elaborate and technologically impressive) sing-along IMAX experience. Indeed, we sometimes wondered that ourselves when we struck up conversations with our neighbors in line for drinks (two bottles of prosecco) or merchandise (a t-shirt for me, a knitted vest with the words “ABBA” across it for my friend Jehan). “We bought these tickets a year ago!” we proudly announced, as, I imagine, the full vibrance of our face jewels, bell-bottoms, and wide eyes came into crazed focus.
I have long known as much about ABBA as the next person who grew up with parents born in the ‘60s. They’d come on the radio during long car rides and eventually made their way into my workout and getting-ready playlists. But it wasn’t until my friends and I discovered our shared love for Mamma Mia!—something I wrote about a few years ago—that the music really cemented itself in my life.
Then, as so many sentences now begin, the pandemic hit. I couldn’t be in the same room as my friends, let alone indulge in this thing we loved. The in-theater singalongs, karaoke rooms, and even casual “fuck it, should we just put on Mamma Mia!?” nights in each other’s apartments stopped. We’d attempt to recreate the magic over Zoom, or on my stoop just barely tethered to my apartment wifi—poor imitations of a time when my daily life wasn’t plagued by questions I was too scared to ask out loud: Will this ever end? Will life ever feel normal again? Will I travel, be in a room with crowds, feel joy without the presence of lingering fear, again?
Of all the pandemic workarounds, “hologram concert” would have been last on my list to try. Similar to its inside-out version, “Roblox concert,” the concept seemed like a version of a future that I had no interest in. (When I bring the concert up to people, the first thing they usually mention is Kanye getting Kim Kardashian a hologram of her dead father.)
Here is where the ABBA production team, who has been hard at work on the concert since 2016, would rush to clarify that what’s on stage at the ABBA Arena in London are not holograms, but digital avatars (“ABBAtars”) of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, preserved as OG fans would remember them in the 1970s. That distinction doesn’t really matter once you’re watching four very real looking pop stars rise onto the stage to perform “The Visitors.” It’s their real movements, thanks to five weeks of motion capture suits, and it’s their real (pre-recorded) voices—accompanied by a real live band.
"To be or not to be, that is no longer the question," Benny’s digital counterpart announces somewhat ominously following the show’s opening numbers. But it’s true: It took just a few seconds before the entire crowd abandoned any skepticism or uneasiness with the format, and screamed, danced, and sang along just the same.
Voyage is ABBA’s first album in 40 years. Last summer, they dropped its first two singles: “Don’t Shut Me Down” and “I Still Have Faith In You.” Both grapple with the band’s decision to reunite, to bring new music to the public and, ultimately, a new show. My friends and I listened to the songs together in the park, and chose to interpret the latter’s lyrics as a promise. “Do I have it in me?” they ask. “I believe it is in there.” When we booked our tickets for the concert in September 2021, we had to have faith that we would make it until June 2022, that the world would not once again shut down, that the worst wouldn’t happen, and I’d get on a plane for the first time in two and half years and walk into a room of thousands of people and dance.
“We do have it in us,” I screamed along with old friends and my new best friends the ABBAtars, thinking back to when I first heard those lyrics, wishing I could beam even just a glimpse of this moment to the version of me then. “New spirit has arrived / The joy and the sorrow / We have a story and it survived.”
How lucky I was to survive, to be standing there, surrounded by joy and love and excitement and relief and…well, listen. I did test positive for COVID shortly after. I’m okay now! But I guess that’s fitting, too.