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Tag: Benny Andersson

  • Stars and royalty watch ABBA’s return in digital stage show

    By Associated Press

    LONDON: “ABBA Voyage” is certainly a trip.

    Four decades after the Swedish pop supergroup last performed live, audiences can once again see ABBA onstage in an innovative digital concert where past and future collide.

    The show opens to the public in London on Friday, the day after a red-carpet premiere attended by superfans, celebrities and Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. The guests of honor were pop royalty — the four members of ABBA, appearing in public together for the first time in years.

    They were in the audience, though. Onstage at the specially built 3,000-seat ABBA Arena next to east London’s Olympic Park were a 10-piece live backing band and a digital ABBA, created using motion capture and other technology by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects firm founded by “Star Wars” director George Lucas.

    The voices and movements are the real Agnetha Faltskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — choreographed by Britain’s Wayne McGregor — but the performers onstage are digital avatars, inevitably dubbed “ABBA-tars.” In unsettlingly realistic detail, they depict the band members as they looked in their 1970s heyday — beards on the men, flowing locks on the women, velour pantsuits all around.

    The result is both high tech and high camp, a glittery supernova of stupefying technology, 1970s nostalgia and pop music genius.

    For many in the audience, it was almost like being taken back in time to watch ABBA perform classics including “Mamma Mia,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “SOS” and “Dancing Queen.” The peppy 90-minute set also includes tracks from “Voyage,” the reunion album the band released last year.

    It’s a fusion of tribute act and 3D concert movie that transcends that description. At times it was possible to forget this wasn’t a live performance, though when the backing singers stepped forward to belt out “Does Your Mother Know,” a surge of live-music energy shot through the arena.

    The four band members — two married couples during ABBA’s heyday, though now long divorced — got a rapturous ovation when they took a bow at the end of Thursday’s show, 50 years after they formed ABBA, and 40 years after they stopped performing live.

    Watching one’s younger self perform must be a strange sensation, but the band members, now in their 70s, said they were delighted by the show.

    “I never knew I had such amazing moves,” Ulvaeus said.

    Lyngstad agreed: “I thought I was quite good, but I’m even better.”

    Ulvaeus said the audience’s reaction was the most gratifying part of the experience.

    “There’s an emotional connection between the avatars and the audience,” he said. “That’s the fantastic thing.”

    Producers bill the show as “revolutionary.” Time will tell. Like the first audiences to watch a talking motion picture a century ago, attendees may leave wondering whether they are watching a gimmick, or the future.

    The Times of London reviewer Will Hodgkinson judged the show “essentially an ABBA singalong with added sound and light show,” though he called the effect “captivating.” Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis called the concert “jaw-dropping” and said “it’s so successful that it’s hard not to imagine other artists following suit.”

    Gimmick or genius, “ABBA Voyage” is booking in London until May 2023, with a world tour planned after that.

    The fans who attended Thursday’s show are just delighted ABBA is back.

    “I’m so excited,” said Kristina Hagman, a Swede who has been a fan since the 1970s.

    “I was bullied so much because you were not allowed to like ABBA at that time, because it was so commercial,” she said. “But now we are taking revenge.”

  • ABBA back after 40 years with new album, virtual stage show

    By Associated Press

    LONDON: ABBA is releasing its first new music in four decades, along with a concert performance that will see the “Dancing Queen” quartet going entirely digital. The forthcoming album “Voyage,” to be released November 5, is a follow-up to 1981’s “The Visitors,” which until now had been the swan song of the Swedish supergroup. And a virtual version of the band will begin a series of concerts in London on May 27. “We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it,” ABBA said in a statement Thursday. “They say it’s foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we’ve recorded a follow-up to ‘The Visitors.’” The group has been creating the live show with George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. They say the virtual versions of themselves are “weird and wonderful,” and go beyond holograms.”It was suggested to us that we could go on tour as a hologram. And this is now four, five years ago,” Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA’s 76-year-old guitarist, backup singer and co-songwriter said at a news conference Thursday. “And we found out very soon that that wasn’t even possible because holograms is an old technology, but I mean, the vision was there of having our digital selves, that even was a possibility.” “And also,” said Benny Andersson, 74, who plays keyboards, sings and writes songs with Ulvaeus, “we want to do it before we were dead.” Ulvaeus added, “it’s good if you do that before you dead. Because it gets more accurate then.”They sang and played together for hours every day for weeks, using motion capture and other techniques to create the 22-song, approximately 90-minute show. “We dressed up in a leotards with dots or little things on them,” Ulvaeus said. “And we had dots in our faces and helmets with cameras. And there we were, the four of us on stage together doing these songs.”They say it was hard work but a great pleasure, but for one thing. “I’d say the only big problem was that we had to shave our beards,” Andersson said. “I’ve had my beard for 50 years.” The planned show spurred the making of the album, which features the new songs “I Still Have Faith In You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down.” It began with sessions in 2018 and was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.”It was so joyful to be together in the studio again, the four of us,” Andersson said.The show will come 50 years after the founding of the group that consisted of two married couples for most of its existence, and whose name is an acronym of the first names of its members, Agnetha Fältskog, 71, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75, Ulvaeus and Andersson. Their music has remained ubiquitous in the decades since their breakup, in part because of the stage musical “Mamma Mia!” and the two films that followed it. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Last week the group launched a website with the title ” ABBA Voyage,” teasing the new announcement. Tickets go on sale Tuesday.