David Sanderson, Neil Fisher
Saturday April 17 2021, 12.01am
BST, The Times
ABBA will sound slightly different from the pop perfection of the 1970s as they perform on their “avatar tour” next year, Bjorn Ulvaeus,
the band’s songwriter, has admitted.
There is little the band members can do about the aging of vocal cords.
Ulvaeus says in an interview with The Times today that Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, now sang in a lower pitch.
"Their voices are about one tone lower, perhaps," he said.
“It still sounds very much ABBA,” I insisted, however.
The four members of the band, who rose to world prominence when they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo,
Before splitting in 1983, they have recorded five new songs for the tour, their first new material in nearly 40 years.
Ulvaeus, whose marriage to Faltskog broke up in the 1980s, as did Lyngstad’s with Benny Andersson, the other band member,
said that it had been easy to recreate the studio chemistry that led to such classics as Dancing Queen, Super Trouper and
Knowing Me, Knowing You. Despite the marital splits the four had remained close.
“We are really good friends and we see each other quite often,” he said.
“Being together in the studio again, it was so familiar. It all came rushing back in seconds. We had fun. You have to have fun. "
The tour, which will feature holograms on stage, was pushed back to next year by the pandemic, allowing more time to perfect
the technology of their “Abbatars”. The show will feature at least two new songs, I Still Have Faith in You and Don't Shut Me Down.
The band has retained a loyal following while attracting new fans with the Mamma Mia! musical and two films.
Ulvaeus, 75, has explained how the band members were “photographed from all possible angles” to create the avatars. "They made
us grimace in front of cameras, ”he said. "They painted dots on our faces, they measured our heads."
He said that none of them was keen to tour. "We never were, really," I confessed. “We had a ten-year career and out of that we may
have toured six months. "
Ulvaeus agreed that it would be weird to see a virtual version of his younger self of him. The band are also collaborating on a Pippi Longstocking
musical, which they hope will open in Sweden before touring in Britain and the US.
Ulvaeus said that he had written lyrics for the new ABBA songs while Andersson did the music, as they had done since the 1960s, when they
teamed up in a folk band called the Hootenanny Singers.
"Benny was always the musical genius and I was the word man," he said. "So it's a natural development." As natural as the voice lowering
with age.
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