tremendous troupers! Abba on reputation, divorce, growing older backwards – and why they’ve lower back to rescue 2021

It all started with a mysterious photo on billboards in every single place the world (and the cyber web). The solar rising above 4 darkish planets; the only phrases Abba: Voyage. by the point an announcement became made on 2 September, it had reasonable claim to call itself probably the most anticipated comeback in pop history.

And the particulars surpassed expectations. no longer simplest was there a brand new album, Voyage, the primary in 40 years: 10 new songs that brought the long-established band collectively within the studio for the first time due to the fact that a break up that had been precipitated by the couples within the band divorcing. now not best that, however there become to be a new “immersive live event”, in a bespoke stadium in London â€" nobody seemed to have observed the planning utility being published on-line â€" featuring futuristic de-aged “Abbatars” enjoying a potentially in no way-ending collection of gigs. within the depths of a depressing yr, it seemed, Abba were coming to rescue 2021.

Anni-Frid and Agnetha within the studio earlier this 12 months. graphic: Ludvig Andersson

The promotion computing device went into full swing. The Sydney Harbour Bridge changed into illuminated in their honour (Abba had been at all times massive in Australia) and BBC radio moved their 6pm news bulletin with a purpose to surest two new tracks, I still Have religion in You and Don’t Shut Me Down. online, there become pictures of crowds listening to the songs for the first time: in a sizzling spring in Iceland; in Stockholm’s Gröna Lund amusement park; in f ront of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. a few of them were in tears. somewhere in London, there were Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, being interviewed through Zoe Ball, Andersson permitting himself a infrequent second of self-congratulation while discussing how they wrote Mamma Mia in 1975 when the band were nonetheless widely assumed to be a one-hit ask yourself, boosted to short reputation with the aid of winning the Eurovision song contest. The refrain, he enthused, where they'd the idea of losing the entire tune out and simply leaving the vocals, “it turned into,” he smiled, “so artful.” within three days, the album received eighty,000 pre-orders within the UK on my own.

all of it made for a wonderful contrast with pictures of Abba’s ultimate public appearance, in November 1982, on Noel Edmonds’ Late Late Breakfast reveal. Ostensibly merchandising a new foremost hits album, it is 5 of essentially the most uncomfortable minutes of tune tv ever broadcast. They sit, twitchy and oddly un-Abba-like, of their 80s outfits (skinny ties, headbands and, in the case of Anni-Frid Lyngstad, spiky, crimson hair), gamely denying they're splitting up, although that the top-rated hits collection has been released in lieu of a new Abba album they've abandoned, unfinished; regardless of the evident waning of their commercial success (their new single has struggled into the lessen reaches of the exact forty, an unthinkable situation even a 12 months before, once they have been having fun with their 18th consecutive right 10 hit); and besides the fact that children that Abba visibly aren’t enjoying being in Abba very lots. When asked for his typical Abba track, Ulvaeus wearily notes that he’s been advised by way of the tv producers what to select: The Winner Takes it all. Agnetha Fältskog is obviously ailing of her pin-up fame: “I’m not simplest a horny backside, you comprehend,” she complains. When the field turns to Ulvaeus and Andersson’s songwriting prowess, it precipitates an icy, brittle trade between the these days divorced Andersson and Lyngstad. Benny and Björn wrote so many impressive songs, she says. “neatly, you by no means mentioned that,” snaps her ex-husband. “ok,” she responds, with a mirthless laugh. “So it’s the primary time.” just a few weeks later, Abba broke up, despite the fact a split was certainly not publicly announced.

lower back within the heyday: Abba performing Waterloo throughout the Eurovision track contest, Brighton, 1974. photograph: Olle Lindeborg/AFP/Getty pictures

And that become presupposed to be that. vastly successful but significantly reviled, Abba have been no longer a band that any person assumed would have any form of afterlife, or be remembered as the rest other than a joke â€" proof that the 1970s were, as the Face magazine memorably put it, the last decade That style Forgot.

in the 80s, it felt as if Abba turned into fully performed. It become so uncool to love us

today, speakme by way of Zoom in their first press interview when you consider that the Grand demonstrate, Ulvaeus and Andersson say they concept exactly the same aspect. “within the beginning of the 80s, once we stopped recording, it felt as even though Abba became fully accomplished, and there could be no greater focus on it,” Ulvaeus says. “It turned into in reality useless. It was so uncool to like Abba.”

“We had a little company, the four of us collectively,” Andersson says. “everything Abba earned went into that company and we cut up it 4 techniques, no rely who did what. and then, once we referred to, ‘neatly, this is it, guys, let’s do anything else for just a little after which we will go returned in all probability in a couple of years and see if we’re still alive’, that changed into that: we bought the business. We didn't are expecting Abba to proceed, i will promise you that.”

Fältskog and Lyngstad, unluckily, are nowhere to be seen. Nor did they turn up to the announcement of Abba’s return in London, in its place releasing a few prepared fees (“Such pleasure it turned into to work with the group again,” Lyngstad provided). they are, I’m informed, deeply involved with the Voyage live reveal, but the assurance that they wouldn’t must take half in promotional activities touching on Abba’s reunion turned into part of their reason behind agreeing to it in the first place. “They didn’t take an awful lot persuasion, but we did should tell each of them that they don’t should speak to you, Alexis,” Andersson presents. “no longer you individually,” he provides, abruptly, “but the media.”

The video for I nevertheless Have religion in You â€" certainly one of 10 new Abba tracks

the 10 new songs on Voyage were written, in Ulvaeus’ phrases, “absolutely style-blind” â€" deliberately ignoring some thing trends have taken region in pop over the years considering the band’s death, partly with a purpose to catch Abba’s usual essence and partly, Andersson concedes, “as a result of in modern stuff, there’s nothing to feel I might grasp on to, nothing I might emulate”.

“We decided early on that we’re no longer going to study the rest,” Ulvaeus says of the latest charts. “We’re just going to do the songs, the finest songs we are able to right now. That meant writing lyrics I could get some of my innovations of these previous forty years into, and add some form of depth that, optimistically, comes with age and that makes it distinct from the lyrics I wrote forty years ago”, which seems like a delicate method of suggesting that Voyage’s contents lean more towards the considerate, incisive Abba of The Winner Takes it all and their notable, agonising meditation on parenthood Slipping through My Fingers than, say, the Abba who furnished the Nineteen Seventies with Bang-A-Boomerang, Dum Dum Diddle and Put in your White Sombrero.

The band within the studio. picture: Ludvig Andersson

You should say that this “vogue-blind” method appears to have labored. I still Have religion in You and Don’t Shut Me Down have been greeted with a strange combination of elation and a form of collective sigh of reduction: the previous a huge, bittersweet ballad in the vein of thanks for the song or The Winner Takes all of it, the latter a fresh illustration of Abba’s idiosyncratic method to disco, à la Dancing Queen. possibly their rapturous reception changed into potentiated by using events of the previous 18 months, a musical equal of the line that continues appearing on posters backyard West end theatres in the mean time: “The display all of us want at this time.” We are living in very doubtful instances, and there’s a definite sense that individuals want some thing comforting and professional from leisure. And here had been Abba, forty years on, sounding exactly like Abba, the manner you remembered them out of your childhood or your early life.

Ulvaeus and Andersson, who by means of default locate themselves on the centre of all this pastime, appear weirdly calm. in case you agree with in lagom, an untranslatable Swedish observe that roughly capacity “simply sufficient” or “every little thing sparsely” and informs an underestimation and equability that’s speculated to outline the countrywide psyche, neatly, Abba’s songwriting crew appear to be its living embodiment. they're relatively an awful lot precisely as you could expect from looking at historic Abba video clips â€" Ulvaeus twinkly and avuncular, Andersson a bit cooler and extra businesslike â€" and are now and again given to arguing among themselves about music: at one aspect the interview is briefly halted for a discussion about even if or no longer you could append the adjective “bubblegum” to Abba’s work (“How can you say that Dancing Queen is bubblegum?” Ulvaeus frowns).

They don't supply off the air of guys unduly concerned about their band’s eagerly awaited virtual return to the stage. No, they didn’t mind the five weeks Abba spent closing year at Ealing Studios in London to support create suitably useful Abbatars; “being on a stage collectively, recording everything, singing these 24 songs or whatever it turned into, performing them as we might have accomplished if there turned into a stage, but in entrance of seventy five guys with computer systems and a whole lot of cameras”. It sounds an unusual event for a band of their 70s, who remaining performed a gig in 1980, however they insist now not. “We labored from noon to 5, in all probability,” Ulvaeus says. “we would drop in and it became like going to work after a while, you comprehend?”

And no, they weren’t perturbed by way of the technique of “de-growing old” applied to the pictures, in order that the Abbatars seem to be now not like the individuals of Abba now, however Abba of their Nineteen Seventies heyday. “You should recognize,” Ulvaeus says, “that we are confronted via our younger selves all the time on television, in images and all of that. each person asks us if it have to have been very weird, however for me, I don’t suppose so. It’s fully herbal. all and sundry should have their own avatar.”

Abba’s ‘Abbatars’. picture: Abba Voyage

You get the impression that Andersson and Ulvaeus could always were like this. They look baffled via the advice that reputation on the dimensions Abba done within the Seventies could have brought with it a level of drive: the handiest time they felt stressed, they say, was after they realised they have been a music short for an album due in two weeks, an issue they remedied through the elementary expedient of writing tremendous Trouper in a night. “No, I’d say no force,” Andersson says with a frown. “I consider living in Sweden helped; being Swedish helped. No fuss here. individuals acknowledged us, they nevertheless do, every person does, however they under no circumstances stricken us â€" no hysteria, nothing like that. It’s cool. We’ve been in a position to work right here.†

we are confronted by our younger selves the entire time

And nor had been they unduly troubled by using the vital opprobrium hurled Abba’s way in their heyday. “You know, in Sweden, there turned into this modern circulation in track, and we had been the enemies,” Ulvaeus says, “and personally I didn’t pay consideration to all that â€" it didn’t imply shit to me, in spite of the fact that they hated us, as a result of we got so tons response from the complete world. correct from the start, we had modern colleagues, musicians, who favored what we were doing.” this is actually true, and approval got here from unlikely quarters, too: the intercourse Pistols famously admitted their single pretty Vacant became according to SOS, and a starstruck Sid Vicious as soon as pursued Agnetha and Anni-Frid through Stockholm airport, a lot to their distress.

quite other than a natural tendency to lagom, Andersson and Ulvaeus have had a long time to get used to the theory of Abba’s return. Plans for the live reveal had been hatched 5 years ago and the first of Voyage’s new songs had been accomplished in 2018, youngsters you may argue their return has its true roots in the early 90s, when Abba’s put up-break up recognition began to develop at a startling expense.

A jokey Australian tribute band, Björn again, all started to do exceedingly respectable business, progressing from playing colleges to performing at studying competition at the behest of headliners Nirvana: these days, Björn once again is a worldwide franchise, with umpteen models of the band performing in distinct territories. In 1992, Erasure had a UK number 1 with an EP of Abba covers. In 1994, Muriel’s marriage ceremony, an Australian comedy movie with Abba’s track as its spine, grew to become a worldwide hit: so did The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the barren region, another Australian movie in which Mamma Mia played a pivotal function. Yet an additional most excellent hits compila tion, Abba Gold, became released in 1992. This time, it sold 30m copies: it’s presently the second biggest-selling album in British history. someplace along the manner, crucial opinion changed into vastly revised. instead of a shaggy dog story, Ulvaeus and Andersson’s oeuvre began to be spoken of in awed terms, because the work of the most desirable pop songwriters of their era.

both profess bafflement as to what took place â€" “It’s difficult to fathom, you be aware of, I really don’t get it,” Andersson shrugs â€" but the certainty is doubtless rather prosaic: a era who had grown up with Abba’s song as young infants, at an age when the alleged coolness or in any other case of track has no bearing to your tastes, had come of age.

As Abba’s posthumous famous person rose, the offers to reform begun coming in: the most famous got here in 2000, allegedly involving a potential charge of $1bn for a tour. in keeping with Ulvaeus and Andersson, the offers by no means reached them. “someone instructed us something about a sponsored tour, happening the street, doing a hundred gigs, however it was on no account placed on paper,” Ulvaeus says. “but then, every person knew we wouldn’t do it.”

The songwriters say they under no circumstances as soon as regarded reanimating Abba, preferring to tend the band’s legacy via different strategies: the wildly a success 1999 jukebox musical Mamma Mia!, its subsequent movie version and sequel, a visiting exhibition called Abbaworld and an Abba museum in Stockholm that comes complete with lifesize recreations of their studio, their dressing room and the cabin on the island of Viggsö the place Andersson and Ulvaeus repaired to work.

The band in 1982 â€" the yr they cut up up. image: TT information agency/Alamy

within the absence of a reunion, speculation grew. On the rare activities Abba’s four members had been noticed together in public, it became a news story â€" the indisputable fact that four of them stood collectively at the launch of an Abba-themed Stockholm restaurant was heralded by means of Billboard magazine as “a momentous event which became captured on digital camera” â€" possibly because it turned into viewed as symbolic of a thaw in frosty own family members between two former married couples. Andersson says nothing could have been extra from the truth. “We’ve been seeing every other in the course of the years, assembly for this and that: we are friends. I imply, Björn and Agnetha have children and grandkids to gether, so they ought to be on speaking terms! I’m friends with Frida, too, so no problems there.”

The fact wasn’t just that there changed into no economic incentive to reform ($1bn seems like an astronomical amount until you component in that Mamma Mia! has grossed $4bn in its stage incarnation by myself), however that Abba had not ever been exquisite fans of performing are living. Their success had more to do with being pioneers of track video â€" most directed with the aid of Lasse Hallström, later to find Hollywood repute directing What’s eating Gilbert Grape and The Cider house rules â€" than slogging around the world’s venues. Andersson thinks they played fewer than 100 concerts throughout the 10 years they were together. Fältskog in selected found the gigs an ordeal: she suffered from stage fright (“nobody who has experienced facing a hysterical viewers can avoid feeling the shivers in their spine,” she told her biographer man y years later. “It’s a thin line between social gathering and threat”). Her pain became compounded by using a fear of flying, sparked when the band’s inner most jet became hit via a tornado throughout their 1979 US tour.

All of which explains the attraction of an approach made in 2016 by means of Simon Fuller, manager of the Spice ladies and David and Victoria Beckham, and creator of Pop Idol, American Idol and its umpteen world spin-offs. “Simon got here and he had a concept about us: we will go on the street but we didn’t ought to be there ourselves,” Andersson says. “And we said, ‘Wow, do you feel so?’ And he noted, ‘Yeah.’” A contend with Fuller to provide what the clicking release referred to as “an mind-blowing new virtual truth event” turned into announced in 2016.

Abba began writing and recording again: at the start, Andersson says, just two songs supposed for the display, “because if we had gone out on the street, we would have had a couple of new songs â€" every person has”. but “once we obtained started, that definitely got me cooking â€" you recognize, perhaps we can do a few others, work on things which have been round for a long time, not figuring out what to do with them.”

You may also think there became a level of trepidation worried in the 4 returning to the studio, in all probability fuelled through the sheer weight of expectation striking over new material from one of the crucial successful, and now revered, bands in historical past. but â€" lagom once more â€" both insist no longer. “It became simply fun, basically, to try and see if we could do something,” Ulvaeus shrugs. “I consider all and sundry become fully conscious that if what we did was no longer as much as the typical that all of us desired, we would just forget about it. There became no drive in that respect.”

If what we did became now not as much as the common that we all wanted, we would just forget about it. There was no force

“I suppose what I felt changed into Agnetha and Frida had been so satisfied about doing this,” Andersson says. “And it’s kind of comprehensible, isn’t it? I mean, they haven’t been doing much for the remaining 40 years: they’ve achieved a couple of albums each, however they haven’t actually been singing tons, so doing this become … seeing them being satisfied about what we have been doing, them liking the tunes. That became …” â€" he sighs happily â€" “best. It become the exact same as it had always been. We came into the studio, the manage room, I had made copies of the lyrics, we performed the backing tune, the women sang alongside and requested questions, and then they took the sheets of paper into the studio and commenced singing. I have to tell you, once they got here within the studio, i assumed: perhaps I should still have requested them first, before we deliberate all this, in the event t hat they can still sing. however after the first day, I didn’t need to be concerned.”

in spite of this, the deal with Fuller came to grief. “We needed to abandon it as a result of he changed into speaking about doing a hologram display,” Andersson says. “have you ever considered a hologram display? You have to take a seat smack within the core, which you could’t have any lights, that you can’t have the rest going on, so we stated, ‘No, we can’t try this’ … Simon Fuller desired to do a television reveal” â€" a BBC and NBC special become also announced â€" “and we concept, ‘What do we want to do a tv demonstrate for?’ That’s no longer the element. Making a video isn't the aspect.”

in its place, they approached the George Lucas-founded, Disney-owned visual effects business Industrial easy & Magic, attempting to find support with a promo clip they had been making for I nonetheless Have religion in You. “They mentioned, ‘we are able to try this for you, and we can put it on stage, too,’” Andersson says. “so that’s how it started. Then we determined possibly three years ago that it changed into too advanced to tour â€" the expertise, the exceptional alterations. So we needed to decide to position it somewhere, and London changed into the first choice.”

The band’s coming near near “concert residency”, set to begin in may also 2022 in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is, with the aid of all money owed, in contrast to the rest a pop or rock band has tried before. It involves the construction of an entire three,000-means arena; the participation of movie director Baillie Walsh and the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor; a ten-piece are living band; and the ministrations of each Industrial light & Magic and a group of workers of “800 animators from internationally” to be able to create the Abbatars. It has cost an unlimited sum of money, lots of it Abba’s own â€" based on the exhibit’s producer Svana Gisla, Brexit and Covid have helped push it wildly over budget â€" however specific particulars of what it’s going to be like are maddeningly difficult to come back with the aid of. I discuss with Gisla, her co-producers Ludvig Andersson (Benny’s son) and Walsh, and are available away much more perplexed in regards to the specifics of the demonstrate than I began.

There’s loads of talk of “the digital meeting the actual” or “twiddling with emotion” or “growing an immersive experience”: any makes an attempt to dig deeper are rebuffed with the reassurance that “you’ll have to come and spot it”.

“The word is ‘avatars’, so you’re creating new models of Abba, correct?” says Walsh, who made his identify directing big attack’s acclaimed movies, went on to work on Alexander McQueen’s groundbreaking trend indicates and has directed a series of documentaries about everyone from Oasis to Daniel Craig. “So we actually filmed Abba, then Wayne McGregor took all their movements and prolonged these movements into more youthful physique doubles, so that you’ve received the soul of Abba in these younger our bodies, and we mix all of them together, but it’s no longer in 3D. They gave me this building where we might do a live concert that isn’t holograms, that americans are going to wish to come to repeatedly, with a flat screen. That become my largest challenge: how will we make this journey immersive, a are living journey, with pretty much a flat monitor?”

donning movement capture fits. picture: Baillie Walsh

So if you happen to go into the venue, you’re going to be observing a giant monitor?

“We don’t in reality wish to display that, truly, I’m sorry to assert,” Walsh says. “If we describe how we’re doing something, it’s as if we’re displaying in the back of the curtain too soon. It’s beside the point how we’ve achieved what we’ve accomplished. I need you to return and cry.”

What is apparent is that it’s all incredibly complex â€" complicated adequate to give its creative crew sleepless nights, being concerned, as Ludvig places it, “that you just may fuck it up â€" is this going to be taking it too a long way? is this pushing it too hard?” indeed, it’s so complex that Ludvig wonders aloud if his father and the relaxation of Abba would have observed yes had they well-known what it would entail. “I think had they well-known â€" had any person prevalent â€" what we had been , or what finally it turned into going to become, there may additionally were a unique reply lower back then.”

The reside show might be an event that no person has ever had before

“The tech aspect, the probability of doing some thing nobody has ever done before, that became so tempting and tough to face up to,” Ulvaeus says. “This task has been meandering, but it has a sort of role and a direction, and it’s going to be staggering to look what it turns into. It could be, I consider, an adventure that no one has ever had earlier than.”

the 10-piece are living band will function on stage and engage with the Abbatars. James Righton (most reliable-well-known to indie music fanatics as frontman of the now defunct Mercury prize winners Klaxons, and to the wider world as Keira Knightley’s husband) was working on a solo undertaking at domestic when he acquired a name “absolutely out of the blue” from his chum, movie director Johan Renck, one other producer on the Voyage mission. “He stated Abba were doing a reunion and there turned into new music. i used to be gobsmacked. and then he noted, ‘Would you wish to be a part of it?’ and also you say yes, don’t you? There’s no maybe. I had a gathering with the producers, had a Zoom call with Benny, which became surreal, and located o ut” â€" his voice takes on a a bit incredulous tone â€" “that I had to find the band. I had to attain out to people I knew, and in hushed tones, say, ‘Abba are reforming and they want a band, do you need to audition?’”

some thing it is, precisely, the Voyage exhibit is already a industrial success: demand for tickets after the preliminary September announcement changed into such that the web page crashed. Andersson hopes it is going to have the lifespan of a West end theatre display â€" the lease on the property is for four and a half years and, as he chucklingly notes, “the celebrities of the reveal will on no account tire”. There are vague plans to build different theatres in different cities. Svana Gisla talks about it being a gamechanging adventure for pop music. “When the display opens, each person else is going to try to leap on the bandwagon and do it. but I feel this simplest works as a result of Abba are concerned. in case you are attempting to do it posthumously, artists aren’t able to give permission, consent or creative enter. It simply turns into a movie.”

the bizarre aspect is that, their creative input to the reveal although, Abba have already ceased to exist once more, apart from within the digital world. each Andersson and Ulvaeus are insistent that there might be no more tune: they wrote two songs that didn’t make it on to the album, however they have been left unfinished, and are going to stay that manner. “here's it,” Andersson nods. “It’s got to be, you be aware of.”

Then his mind wanders again to the Abba seated awkwardly on the sofa of Noel Edmonds’ Late Late Breakfast exhibit. “I didn’t in reality say that ‘this is it’ in 1982,” he says. “I under no circumstances talked about myself that Abba become on no account going to occur once again. but i will be able to tell you now: here's it.”

On the other facet of the Zoom display, Ulvaeus vigorously nods his assent. “Yeah,” he says, quietly.

Abba Voyage opens on 27 can also 2022 on the Abba arena, London. The album Voyage is out on 5 November by the use of Polydor.