Now Frida!!

 22 September 2023

On Stage talk with the producers of ABBA Voyage

“On Stage” host Frank DiLella explored the concert experience “ABBA Voyage”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z6MjTFL-1s

Baillie Walsh and The Art of Immersive Experiences

 Audio: https://shows.acast.com/the-business-of-fashion-podcast/episodes/63e659cef0764e00105bfc86

The Business of Fashion Podcast 

Baillie Walsh and The Art of Immersive Experiences • Friday, February 10, 2023

The film director joins BoF editor-at-large Tim Blanks to discuss how he uses his fashion and music roots to stage powerful experiences including from Abba Voyage and recent Dior Men and Fendi Couture shows.

Film and creative director Bailie Walsh cut his teeth working in London during the nineties and early aughts alongside talents like Boy George, Leigh Bowery and Alexander McQueen. While Walsh calls himself a film director, editor-at-large Tim Blanks, who hosts him on the latest BoF Podcast, describes him as more of a magician. He was behind the hologram of Kate Moss featured in McQueen’s show “Widows of Culloden” in 2006 that went on to be showcased in both London’s V&A Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. More recently, he’s captivated audiences with his immersive virtual concert, Abba Voyage, in London, and his work with Kim Jones, who tapped Walsh to help stage Dior Menswear and Fendi Couture shows in January. Walsh approaches his projects with the goal of completely immersing his audience — and often pushes the limits to do so.

“What I love about being creative or having the opportunity to be creative is a challenge,” said Walsh.

Walsh helped infuse Dior Menswear Fall/Winter 2023 runway with TS Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” Models drifted past massive screens featuring Gwendoline Christie and Robert Pattinson reading the poem, spliced with music from composer Max Richter. Creatives need to live on the edge of fear, according to Walsh. “You have to be scared if you’re a creative person … you’re entering into a journey that you haven’t before,” he said. “That’s the point of doing it.” Music has been a thread throughout Walsh’s career. He’s made videos for Boy George, crafted Abba’s hologram-filled Voyage concert but also used music as a source of inspiration for his Daniel Craig-fronted film “Flashbacks of a Fool.”Walsh spent over two years thinking about how to play with illusion and reality to create Abba Voyage. Throughout the display, there are costume changes, chatter between the artists and shadowy figures still present when the lights are out. Then, there’s a moment the group suddenly disappears — a reminder the show was contrived.

The Innovation Award at the Artist & Manager Awards 2022

 Svana Gisla, Ludvig Andersson and Baillie Walsh received the Innovation Award at the AM_Awards

photo: Svana Gisla

published Nov 19th, 2022  Svana Gisla

published Nov 18th, 2022 - ABBA Voyage

post con actualizaciones

How UK filmmaker Baillie Walsh helped to bring ABBA Voyage to life

 How UK filmmaker Baillie Walsh helped to bring ABBA Voyage to life

By Charles Gant3 August 2022

When Swedish pop group ABBA first started talking to UK director Baillie Walsh to about the concept of ABBA Voyage, the idea was to make it more as a film than as a live stage show. But Walsh, a filmmaker whose work has encompassed documentary, commercials, pop videos and one fiction feature, turned out to be the one who was most adamant ABBA Voyage should feel like a live event, not a film.

“When I came in, it was much more cinematic rather than a live concert with life-size avatars,” explains Walsh, who was appointed director after being introduced to ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus via Zoom in August 2019.

The Swedish quartet had originally wanted to create an audiovisual accompaniment to Voyage, their first studio album since 1981’s The Visitors, and had been developing ideas with Chernobyl creator, Sweden’s Johan Renck, and with producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson (son of ABBA member Benny Andersson). Gisla had worked with Walsh on documentary feature Springsteen And I in 2013 and earlier on Oasis videos, one of which developed into the feature-length concert-tour film Lord Don’t Slow Me Down in 2007. Gisla and Renck also run a production company together, Gisla Renck.

When Renck moved on following the success of Chernobyl, Gisla called Walsh. “I took a breath and said, ‘Well, I’d be mad not to,’” he says. “It’s such a massive opportunity. But it wasn’t clear what this thing was at this point.”

ABBA Voyage is a 95-minute virtual concert in a purpose-built arena at the Queen Elizabeth Park in east London, combining a live band, digital avatars of ABBA (as they looked in the 1970s, with motion capture and visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic), a giant screen, animated sequences and light show. Swedish entertainment company Pophouse is co-developer and lead investor, and the budget is £140m ($168m). The run of the event is open-ended, and tickets are currently available until May 2023.

Walsh began by putting himself in the shoes of the audience. “We’ve got to fill that arena with 3,000 people a night. How are we going to do this, and is a cinematic experience going to fill the arena?

“My questions were: what do I want to see? Gradually, I came to realise, what I would want to see is life-size avatars, and I would want to go to a gig. So let’s make this as much of a gig as we possibly can. Let’s make this a live concert.”

Learning curve

Born in London and raised in Essex, Walsh attended Colchester School of Art (now part of Colchester Institute), studying art and graphics. In his 20s, a chequered career saw him living in Los Angeles as a coin dealer, before working as an erotic dancer at London’s Raymond Revue Bar, and as a model. “And then, at the age of 25, I realised I wanted to be a director,” he says.

Walsh was part of a fashionable London 1980s set clustered around performance artist and club promoter Leigh Bowery. He made a series of short videos and films featuring his friends, including the 1987 music short Boys, sampling dialogue from Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party.

Boys caught the attention of UK pop star Boy George, who asked Walsh to direct two music videos (‘After The Love’, ‘Generations Of Love’) – launching Walsh’s professional career. But it was his pop promos for Massive Attack, beginning in 1991 with ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, filmed in Downtown Los Angeles in one continuous shot, that won the biggest plaudits. He went on to direct videos for artists including New Order, INXS and Kylie Minogue.

Walsh made his feature debut with documentary Mirror Mirror, chronicling the life of New York transsexual performer Consuela Cosmetic. The film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in 1996.

His career seemed to reach its apex a decade later with the 2008 fiction feature Flashbacks Of A Fool, backed and distributed by Disney in the UK, and starring Daniel Craig as a fading Hollywood star, reflecting on his youth.

“The experience of making that was one of the best times in my life,” says the director. “Sadly, it wasn’t received well, so that wasn’t so great.”

Walsh met Craig when he starred in Love Is The Devil in 1998, directed by Walsh’s partner at the time, John Maybury, and the two have been friends ever since. Craig committed to Flashbacks Of A Fool, and honoured that commitment despite beginning his run of James Bond films with Casino Royale in 2006. The actor also served as executive producer on the film.

“The reality is, it’s a very small film,” says Walsh. “I wrote it for Dan before he became Bond, and after he became Bond, he still generously wanted to do it. But what that brought was a lot of baggage, Bond baggage, and they released it like a Bond film. That was out of my control and out of Dan’s control, and it just didn’t work.”

Walsh returned to work in music videos, commercials and documentary, and was busy with the 46-minute Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story for Apple TV when the call came for ABBA Voyage.

Creative choices

Walsh’s role was to devise “what this beast was going to be”, as well as a visual treatment for each song. Principal photography included two motion-capture shoots: one shot over five weeks with the four ABBA members (who are now aged between 72 and 76); and the other with younger body doubles executing the same dance routines.

Choreographer Wayne McGregor guided this process, putting the movements of the quartet into young bodies. ILM then transformed the motion-capture data into avatars – or ABBAtars, in the lexicon of the project.

The lifelike look and feel of the avatars is also in part thanks to the concert’s vast LED screen, made by ROE Visual, which utilises 65.3million 2mm pixels in total, and runs at 50 frames a second – thus using 3.2 billion pixels per second.

The virtual stage behind the digital characters uses digital lights that are an extension of, and are aligned with, the physical lighting in the arena. For this reason, ABBA Voyage needs to be shown in a purpose-built arena – and any clone shows globally will need to replicate the space constructed in London.

The critical and commercial success of ABBA Voyage naturally leads to speculation that this particular hybrid could become a new event model for legacy or deceased acts, but Walsh sounds a note of caution.

“I think [Abba] was the best band to do this with. First of all, because they were so involved. And without an artist’s involvement, possibly it becomes a cynical money-making exercise. ABBA’s motive for doing this was creative. They’re creatively curious.

“Could you do this with Prince? What we did with ABBA was we brought them into 2022. And we were able to do that because ABBA were there to help us make choices of how they wanted to be presented. You couldn’t move Prince from where he left, because Prince was such the master of the creative behind his own persona.”

Similarly, the Rolling Stones have been touring consistently for many decades, and – unlike ABBA, who had last appeared together onstage in 1981 – there is no single fixed image of them as a live band. “There isn’t that need that ABBA fans had to see ABBA,” adds Walsh. “My feeling is that with a band that’s still around [having creative input], with their back catalogue, and they hadn’t been on tour for 40 years, that’s as good as it’s going to get.”

Legacy

The success of ABBA Voyage may help place Walsh back on the map of a film industry that has perhaps, over the years, struggled to get a clear fix on his varied creative career. The director himself acknowledge all his diverse experiences have fed into the project.

“I pulled on every thread of everything I’ve ever done,” he says. “I don’t want to have it be the last thing I do, but I certainly did put everything I had into it. All of those ideas come from a life, come from my life. Every job I’ve ever done, whether that be bingo calling, or erotic dancing, or putting on fashion shows, or whatever it is, there’s all of that in there.”

Since ABBA Voyage opened in May, Walsh has been busy regularly attending the event, checking on performances and lighting cues, and imposing creative tweaks. That work has come to an end, and he will now take a break at his second home in Iceland.

“Because I’ve been so immersed in this through recent years, I don’t have a feature film project on right now,” he says. “Obviously, I’ve got sitting in my drawer lots of things I would love to do, lots of scripts that are sitting there. There are TV series that I would love to get started – or restarted in the case of Pussycat Lounge, based on my year at the Raymond Revue Bar, which was developed with Tiger Aspect and has now returned to me. But first I need to go away and take some time and a breath and figure out what it is I’d like to do.”

https://www.screendaily.com/features/how-uk-filmmaker-baillie-walsh-helped-to-bring-abba-voyage-to-life/5173139.article

Super Trouper - Baillie Walsh

 Alex Bilmes 

Super Trouper

Baillie Walsh, the mastermind behind ABBA Voyage, the blockbuster “virtual concert” in London, on the making of a game-changing spectacular, the future of live performance, plus his own amazing adventures in the worlds of pop, performance, music and film

21 Jul 2022

The British film director Baillie Walsh is a man of many parts. He broke through as a director of music videos, initially with Boy George and then the Bristol trip hop collective Massive Attack, for whom he made the promo for the magnificent “Unfinished Sympathy”, from their era-defining 1991 album, Blue Lines. Later he directed memorable videos for Kylie Minogue, INXS, New Order and Oasis.

Walsh has made numerous award-winning commercials; acclaimed shorts; documentaries about music (Springsteen & I); and about filmmaking (Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story). He has written and directed a feature film, 2008’s Flashbacks of a Fool, starring that same Daniel Craig as a faded Hollywood star — narcissistic, hedonistic — forced to confront his past in 1970s Britain. (Don’t worry, Daniel, it’ll never happen!) For the finale of an Alexander McQueen fashion show, in Paris in 2006, he created a hologram of Kate Moss. I was in the audience for that show. It was beautiful, ghostly, and oddly moving.

Testimonials from prominent collaborators are not hard to come by. Moss, no slouch herself in this department, talks about his “sense of style and incredible taste.” Kylie mentions his incredible “capacity to convey emotion.”

“At his heart,” says Daniel Craig, “Baillie is a showman. The incredibly hard work that goes into all his projects is for one purpose: to move an audience, to give them a totally new experience, to affect them emotionally and spiritually and send them away with smiles on their faces.”

All of which could accurately be said of the 62-year-old’s latest project. It is perhaps his most high profile, and ground-breaking, to date. ABBA Voyage, which embarks seven times a week, including matinees, from the purpose-built, 3,000-capacity, spaceship-like ABBA Arena in Stratford, east London, opened in May to reviews that might reasonably be characterised as ecstatic. “Jaw-dropping,” marvelled the Guardian. “Mind-blowing,” panted the Telegraph.

I saw the show in early July. It is that rare thing: an event that exceeds its hype. It is, not to sound too fulsome, an astonishment. It is, also, a potential game-changer for the music industry and even for the idea of “live performance” — whatever that means after one has seen it.

ABBA Voyage has been described as a “virtual concert”. The former members of one of the most beloved and successful pop groups of all time — that is, Agnetha Faitskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — do not appear on stage in person. But they do appear. (ABBA disbanded in 1982; although they reconstituted the group five years ago, and have since released new music, it’s been over four decades since they gave a public concert.)

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Instead of flesh and blood ABBA, the show is performed by life-sized, animated CGI avatars of the four members, restored by technology to their pop star primes. (ABBAtars, the producers call them.) But it’s also performed by the real ABBA, in the sense that they sang the songs, and danced the dances, in a studio in Sweden, and motion-capture technology allowed those performances — the singing, the dancing, even the chat between the songs — to be combined, on “stage”, with a live 10-piece band and a spectacular light show. The effect is uncanny. It’s not quite correct to say one feels oneself to be present at an ABBA concert in 1979. You are aware (just about, and sometimes not even) that it is 2022, and that in real life the members of ABBA don’t look like that anymore. But you are also conscious that you have entered another world — a virtual world, which is not to say you’re not in it — where you can be thrilled and moved by the power and beauty of some of the most familiar songs in the pop canon, those gorgeous, melancholic bangers that only those four people, together, could have made. The show might be virtual, but the feelings it evokes are genuine. I know, I felt them.

ABBA Voyage benefits from the talents of thousands of technicians and creatives: among others, a huge team from Industrial Light & Magic, the Hollywood visual effects powerhouse; the brilliant British choreographer Wayne McGregor; Swedish costume designer B Akerlund, whose clever modernising of the band’s stage wardrobes gives the show its convincing retro-contemporary feel; the live band; producers Ludwig Andersson and Svana Gisla. But if the Voyage is a trip, and it certainly is, then Baillie Walsh is the man at the controls.

Slim, tanned, and handsome behind dark glasses — so youthful, in fact, that one wonders if this is really him, or a CGI avatar of his younger self? — Walsh arrives on the dot for his Esquire interview, at a hotel in Soho on a Tuesday morning (he lives just around the corner), orders a cup of English breakfast tea and settles himself at a quiet table. He talks for close to two hours, with barely a pause: about ABBA, avatars, his three decades and counting in film and music, and his own extraordinary backstory, from teenage tearaway to Top of the Pops and beyond…

The conversation below, as they say, has been edited and condensed. (A lot.)

Let’s start with how you got involved with the ABBA project. What happened?

One of the producers, Svana Gisla, I’ve worked with many times. I made Springsteen & I with her. A Kylie video, an Oasis film. And she was working with [Swedish director] Johan Renck on this project, and then he had this enormous success with [acclaimed HBO series] Chernobyl. So he saw a film opportunity and didn’t want to do this. [Raised eyebrow.]

Lucky for you!

Lucky for me. I had a Zoom call with Benny and Bjorn and they said yes on that call. That’s where it all began, three years ago.

How far developed was the idea when you signed up?

Johan had done a road map and there was a set list, which came from ABBA. But it was a very rough idea. They knew they wanted to make younger versions of themselves, that was ABBA’s idea. Whether that was going to be holograms or whatever, that was still up for grabs. So I came on board and there was a gradual process of: “What is this thing going to be?” The creative process on something like this is long, because it’s so big. You’re not doing one song. You’re asking, “What is this monster, what can it be?” So, my first job was to sit down and think about what I would want to go and see. I always played it like that. Then it was about talking to ILM about what would be possible. Ben Morris, the creative director there, was really brilliant to work with. And he loved the challenge, the idea of having life-sized avatars, and wanting to feel like they are really there.

Was there a Eureka moment where you said, “I know what this should be! It’s a live concert given by CGI performers!”

There was a few. When I realised, first of all, they have to be life-sized, that the audience has to feel like they are there. I knew it wasn’t going to be holograms. Holograms are so limiting, in the sense that you can’t light them. So then it was, “What does that mean?” We want life-size avatars but we want to see them really big, in detail, like you have at a concert, with the big screens. So we want those iMAG screens.

IMAG screens, for those of us who don’t know…

Those big screens, so when you go to see Beyonce, and she’s the size of a bean, you can see her close-up. But this isn’t the O2, where you’re so far away you can’t see or hear or feel what’s going on.

Your arena is much smaller than that.

That’s part of the success of the thing, I think, that arena. It’s really quite intimate. You can see every face in there, and the excitement spreads. I mean, there are many reasons for the success of this, so far. Lots of magic has happened. I’m a part of that, but the fact that it’s ABBA, the fact that they are still alive, and contributed enormously to this, and their soul is in this. The fact that they haven’t toured for 40 years, so there’s a great hunger to see them live, in whatever form. The arena, which is the perfect size, I think. And also so well designed, so comfortable. It doesn’t feel like you’re going to a horrible, beer-stinking arena, with turnstiles. From the moment you arrive, it’s already exciting. Like, “What the hell is this?”

Because it could have been a disaster.

Yes. It could have been a disaster, so easily.

Because it’s a very weird idea.

Yes! Totally. The whole thing I fought against is the tech, being led by the tech. The tech should be the least important thing. The important thing is the emotion. I want people to laugh, dance, cry. And you’ve got to be really careful with that. It’s multi-layered, because you are playing with the past, the present and future. And all of those big questions. You can’t throw that in people’s faces. The concert isn’t a big intellectual idea. And I never tried to intellectualise it. But I knew there were lots of big ideas under the surface.

There’s a lightness of touch to it that’s very appealing. And, of course, in the moment, unless you’re weird, you are not trying to deconstruct it. You’re just enjoying yourself. But afterwards I certainly was provoked to think about mortality, ageing, nostalgia…

But you can’t be heavy handed with those things. All I ever thought was, if I’m feeling emotion, if the ideas for presenting the songs resonate with me, then I’m on to something. Because I am the audience. So if it chokes me up, it’s going to choke everyone else up.

There are some people who feel that emotion stimulated by technology is somehow cheaper. That it’s inauthentic, in some way. That a concert given by avatars is fake.

The interesting challenge was: how can we fall in love with an avatar? That was the challenge. I wanted to do that, to fall in love with an avatar. And I did! The soul of ABBA is in those avatars. Their voices, those speeches, everything they say, the soul is there. It’s irrelevant that it’s an avatar. I mean, it’s helped by the fact that it’s ABBA, and their music is very emotive. That’s a massive advantage. If it had been Black Sabbath, it would have been harder to fall in love with the avatars. But ABBA’s songs, everyone has a connection to those songs. They are part of our DNA. They are part of who we are.

Talk a bit about the process of creating the avatars. How did you do it?

Basically, we were in a studio in Sweden for five weeks, with ABBA. And we filmed them with 160 cameras, in motion-capture suits. We went through the whole set list, and more, and they performed those songs for the cameras. It was a very bizarre, amazing experience. You’re in this kind of NASA-style studio, with monitors and cameras everywhere, and 100 people in there taking all the data. A very bizarre situation. As individuals they are really lovely people, but the moment you bring those four people together, something happens. This strange alchemy. Which is a really rare thing. I mean, I’m sure it happens when the Stones come together, or when the Beatles came together. This extraordinary energy. I don’t want to get all woo-woo about it. But it’s perceptible. When they came together on that stage, on the first day, it’s goosebumps. It’s a magical thing. And that’s why I feel so lucky to have got this gig and to have been able to do what I’ve done, with ABBA. I can’t think of another band who would be better than them for this project. I’m spoilt now. I’m fucked, really. I’ve made something that hasn’t been done before, which is a really rare opportunity. How am I gonna top this?

That was going to be my last question. I was going to leave your existential crisis for later.

Thank you!

Now that you mention it though…

I haven’t had time to think about it. I’ve been on this project for three years and I’ve had four days off. I finish on Thursday and go to Iceland on Saturday.

For a holiday?

I’ve got a house there. This’ll be the first time I’ve been in three years, but it’s where I go and spend time alone. I look at nature, and look at sky, and go fishing, and it’s good for my head. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to work this time. I’m expecting an enormous crash.

Clearly, you’re going to have a terrible time.

Terrible! It’s going to be awful. No, but I have just had the best job that I’ll probably ever have. I hope that’s not true. But I think it’s the best job I’ve ever done. I’ve worked for a very long time and there are peaks and troughs. But the scale of this is what makes me most proud. It’s big!

It feels game-changing in many ways, and it does open a Pandora’s box. What does this mean for live performance? What does it mean for musicians? For audiences? Could you do it with the Stones? What would it mean if you did?

Of course you could. Charlie [Watts] isn’t around, so you’re going to miss that. But yes, you could.

You couldn’t do it with Prince, for example, presumably because you can’t do the motion-capture part?

No, but you could do it. Especially with the way technology is moving. You could do it posthumously. But one of the things that is great about what we’ve been able to do is, we’ve been able to update ABBA. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s past, present and future. It’s about being able to reinvent ABBA for 2022. It’s not about recreating the 1979 Wembley concert. That wouldn’t be interesting. You can watch that on YouTube.

What about the Stones, then? Would it be desirable to do this with them?

That’s not for me to say. It’s not desirable for me. Because I think I’ve had the best band to do this with. The Stones have been on tour since year dot. They’re still on tour now. Of course, it would be exciting to see Mick in his heyday. But Mick is still so great live, at 78. Unbelievable. Not only running about the stage, but singing at the same time! I can’t walk and speak! He’s still doing it, and that’s what you want to see, with the Stones.

There are ethical concerns, too. Especially the idea of doing it with dead people.

Well, Whitney! They made a hologram of her. I didn’t see it. I saw bits of it on YouTube. But the first word that comes to mind is “grotesque.” Because that’s just a money-making exercise.

Is this going to be rolled out to other countries?

Yeah, I think so. You could do Vegas, you could do New York.

Will you be involved in those?

I hope so. This is my baby and the idea that someone else is going to take it and remodel it in some way that I found really annoying… I hope I am involved. Maybe we can add something to this that will knock people’s socks off even more? Because we do have the ability to change the show. We recorded more songs, filmed more songs. Maybe we can improve it?

One more question on the ethics of it. If a contemporary artist came to you, say Beyonce, and asked you to do the same for her as you’ve done for ABBA, to put on a virtual Beyonce concert that could play every night of the week in cities around the world, forever, and she need never leave the house again, would you? Because that idea worries people who love live music.

Yes, but I think they shouldn’t worry. Because first of all, Beyonce loves to perform. She’s not going to stop, because she is a genius performer. That’s who she is. That’s her being. And I don’t think this is going to replace anything. It’s part of the entertainment world now. But people want to see live concerts, and people still want to perform them. You think Bruce Springsteen is going to stop touring because he could do a virtual show? His life is touring. And most of those people who perform, it’s who they are. The Stones don’t want to sit at home with their feet up! They want to be on stage. They love that adoration. Who wouldn’t? 100,000 people screaming that they love you? Gimme more! So I don’t think people should be worried. They should be excited. And it’s not just music. The idea of how theatre can use this. The immersive quality of it. That thing about not knowing where the real world ends and the digital world begins. All that is really interesting. I want to see what other people do with it. I want to be excited and blown away and confused. I really look forward to seeing where it goes.

You live round the corner from here. Did you grow up in London?

I was born in London and then moved to Essex when I was young. And brought up there, all around Clacton-on-Sea, those terrible seaside towns. Working on Clacton pier, being a bingo caller, that was the start of my showbiz journey.

Do you come from a showbiz family?

No. My mum was a pharmacist, my dad was a rogue, a gambler, with all of the disaster that brings. And my mother brought up three kids on her own, pretty much. I have an older brother and a younger sister.

What kind of boy were you?

I was a rogue, too, a runaway. At the age of 14 I ran away for a month, and was in London with my friend. Can you imagine?

What were you doing?

Stealing. Shoplifting from Portobello antique shops and selling it on the Market. I was a terrible, horrible child.

Where were you living?

At the Venus Hotel on Portobello Road, with my friend’s sister. She had two children and she lived in one room in the hotel, and we lived there too. But I got caught, in the end, and put into a home, a halfway borstal. And that fixed me. I was only a couple of weeks but it scared the life out of me. And then I decided, somehow, I was going to go to art school. I was always in trouble at school, for fighting, but this teacher picked up on the fact I had some kind of talent and nurtured me, and I got into Colchester art school, doing graphics.

When was this?

I was there from 1976 to 79.

During punk.

Yeah. But I wasn’t a punk. I was more of a soul boy. It was [famous Essex soul club] Lacy Lady for me.

And after you finished art school?

Well, I didn’t want to be a graphic designer. I didn’t want to be trapped behind a desk. It wasn’t for me. Back in those days you didn’t think about a career. I just went on the adventure. I became a coin dealer, by accident.

How does a person become a coin dealer by accident?

It was when there was a gold rush on. We used to set up in hotels and buy gold and silver by weight, and the person whose business this was, was a coin dealer. I knew nothing about coins. But the great thing about it was, we travelled all over the world. And of course, I’d never travelled. I was 19, 20, and I moved to California. And I got bored of that after six months, came back to London for a holiday, and I got a job dancing with the girls at the [legendary Soho strip club] Raymond Revue Bar. Basically, erotic dancing.

Hang on. You need to explain this.

OK. So, I was staying in this really crummy flat where there was newspaper on the kitchen floor. And I saw an advert there for people willing to appear naked on stage. And I thought, “I could never do that.” So: great, you’re gonna do it. Things that are fearful, you do them. I love that. That’s the whole thing about being creative. I love to be shit-scared. So I called up and I got the job.

Did you have to audition?

Yeah.

You had to take all your clothes off and dance around?

The first audition was just take your clothes off and stand and pose and turn around for the choreographer, Gerard. And I later went to visit him at his flat on Charing Cross Road. And there’s this bay window that looks out onto the National Portrait Gallery, the Garrick Theatre, the neon lights, I’m 20 years old, and it’s like, “This is the best flat in the world!” And the dancer I took over from had the flat upstairs, so he moved out and I moved in, and I still live there today. I’ve been there 40 years, my whole adult life. And I think I might stay.

So the Raymond Revue Bar…

My first taste of showbiz!

It’s a load of girls getting their kit off on stage and…

Yeah, you’re a prop. You’re naked, and you have simulated sex. There’s a scene. You’d come out and pretend to play tennis, and then the music would change and suddenly it would be a sauna scene, and there’s a bench, and the lights change and you’re pretending to throw water over the girls… It was a real experience. I never got used to it. The audience are men. They want to see naked girls. They’re not happy when they see you up there.

How long did this last?

About a year? And while I was working there, I met Antony Price, at the Camden Palace. And he became my first boyfriend.

And Antony Price, for those who don’t know, was an important fashion designer…

The designer for Roxy Music. He was a real hero of mine when I was a kid. When I was 14. All those album covers, all those clothes… And because I was a dancer, Antony asked me to stage his fashion show, at the Camden Palace. So at the age of 21, I did that. At the time it was a really big deal.

Your first directing job.

Yes. I learned so much from that, and from him. His style and taste and knowledge of film and music. Just an unbelievable man.

Was that the end of your career as an erotic dancer?

Well, then I became a model. That was great. Modelling gave me the chance to try lots of things and meet lots of people. And I was successful. Modelling was a different world then. I made a living from it for a reasonable amount of time. I enjoyed it for a while, then it gets dull. It becomes a job. The glamour wears thin. And then I was getting dancing jobs as well. You know, dancing with Bananarama.

I don’t know! Tell me about dancing with Bananarama. When was that?

1987, I think. I got a call from [now famous Strictly judge] Bruno Tonioli saying, “Do you want to dance on Top of the Pops?” So, I went, “Lifelong ambition!” So, me, Bruno, and his boyfriend then, Paul, were the backing dancers for Bananarama on Top of the Pops.

Which song?

“I Heard a Rumour.”

I’ll look it up on YouTube.

You should. [I did. The trio certainly carry off their cycling shorts.]

When does the film directing start?

At the age of 25 I saw 1900, the Bertolucci film. And that blew my head off. I just thought, I want to do that.

What was it about that film?

Just the epic quality, the skill in the filmmaking, the beauty, the emotion, the characters, the storytelling… it had everything. Now, I’m never going to make a film like 1900, but I started making little films with my mates. Super 8 and video cameras. And then I made one video in 1987, with [performance artist, nightclub legend, fashion icon] Leigh Bowery, who was a great mate.

You knew these people through nightclubs, that amazing scene in London in the 1980s?

Yes, exactly.

Were you a Blitz kid?

No, after that. Taboo, Leigh’s club, in Leicester Square, that was the best for me. That was the summit of my nightlife.

It’s always striking, that so many influential creative people came from that very select, underground world.

Everybody was there. [Film director] John Maybury was my boyfriend at that time. I went out with John for 17 years. I learnt a lot from him. They were amazing times.

All the most important future fashion designers and photographers and artists and filmmakers and pop stars in one room in London, dancing. It's hard to imagine this happening now…

Because of social media, I suppose. People are on their phones all the time. They don’t go out anymore. It’s one important point about the ABBA show [which insists the audience switch off their phones.] I had to really fight for that. Because otherwise they spend the whole concert filming it.

People can’t process a show, or anything else, unless they mediate it themselves.

It’s just like, “What the fuck are you doing?” It’s such madness.

You wonder what people think they are going to do with all that footage. What’s it for?

I know. Is it about ownership? “Look, I filmed this!”

So the ABBA phones policy came from that?

Yes, for all those reasons. But it was a very contentious idea. Lots of the suits, they disagree. They think that’s what everyone wants. I said, no, nobody wants that. They want to experience the show. They don’t want it ruined. The moment you put a phone up, everything’s abstract. You’re not in the moment. It’s insane. Stop!

So back to the career. You’re making a film with Leigh Bowery.

Yes, I wanted to make a pop video. So I made a track, a series of samples, called “Boys”. And Leigh is the lead in it. And Boy George saw it. This was ’87. And he asked me to make a video for him. And that was it, I was away. I made one called “After the Love”, and then “Generations of Love”, in 1990. That changed everything for me, because Massive Attack saw it. Basically it was the story of Soho, at that time. Thatcher had been in power for a long time. I was just seeing homeless people everywhere. It was really bad. So I got all my mates dressed up in drag, as prostitutes. Leigh styled it. I made a porn film, so we could project it for a scene inside one of the porn cinemas. I went and presented it at Virgin, and persuaded them. They paid the bill. And the next week I got a letter saying if you EVER show this film anywhere, we’ll sue you. But I got away with it. And it was a calling card. I still think it’s my best video. I have such fond memories of it.

And that’s what got you Massive Attack.

What a gift! To be given that album. I got the first four singles. Goosebumps, immediately, “Unfinished Sympathy” is one of my favourite songs ever, still. So beautiful. Extraordinary. And because they were the biggest band of that year, and I was associated with them, suddenly I had a career. Hate that word, career. I had the possibility of a working life, of becoming a director, I was up and running.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"Unfinished Sympathy" was such a distinctive video: one take, [the singer] Shara Nelson walking through Downtown LA, apparently oblivious to everything around her. And that’s it.

It hadn’t been done before. I wanted to challenge myself, I wanted to be scared. “Can I do this?”

It’s the antithesis of one of those videos that’s all about trying to sell the image of the star, the band.

But the song gave me this. That thing of when you are really hurt, and you are walking down the street and you are completely and utterly within yourself. You are not noticing anything that’s going on around you. We’ve all been there, right? Just destroyed by love. I wanted it to be that unbroken thought. This inner voice. That came from the music. But at the same time I was very aware that I was going against the tide, which I knew was a really good idea. Always a good idea. Because every [other] video at the time, it was [director] David Fincher, and it was all about fast-cuts.

His stuff with Madonna?

Yeah, it was all fast cuts. Make it as bright and shiny and fast-cutty as you can. And I’m sorry but “Vogue” is a fucking genius video. And David Fincher did it very well. But we went against the grain, made it really gritty. And Massive Attack’s music always smelt American to me. It sounded so big, so epic. I really wanted an international visual language for them. Take it away from Bristol, from the UK. So Downtown LA. In fact, the first video I did for them was “Daydreaming”, which I set in the Deep South. But yes, opportunities were coming thick and fast at that time.

You were very successful for a while.

Yeah. I only made thirteen videos. And then the world changed, budgets shrank, the demands from the record companies grew. And I thought, if you want me to basically make advertising, I’ll go off and make a ton of money doing that.

Which is what you did.

It’s what I did. I don’t say I made a ton of money but I earned a living. And the great thing about advertising, as nasty as it can be, is that you get to hone your craft. You’re filming, you’re on a set, you’re working with people. That’s really important, because making films is next to impossible, right? I’ve never been lucky at that.

Was it always in your mind, throughout the Eighties and the Nineties and beyond, to make a feature film?

Always. Always to make movies. And I wrote many and nearly got them made and spent years trying, as you do with films.

And, finally, you got there, with Flashbacks of a Fool.

Yes. And there were really good things about that and really bad things about that. The great thing was, I wrote that for Daniel Craig before he was Bond, right? We’re mates. And he still wanted to make it after he became Bond, which was wonderful. Because that meant all the effort that I’d made when I tried to get it made before he was Bond, and failed, had not been wasted. When he became Bond that gave him enormous power. He could get anything made. And he was generous enough to sprinkle some of that glitter on to me, and to allow me to make that film. The trouble with that is, that this small art film is then sold as a Bond film. Which is a disaster. Because if you deceive an audience, they don’t like it. You can’t sell candyfloss as popcorn. People want to know what they’re buying, so when it’s released as a fucking Bond film, and it’s a small little art film that should be in two cinemas and possibly grow from there, it’s a disaster. And critics don’t like it, either. No one likes it. I still have a fondness for Flashbacks, but I was really hurt by the response to it. When you put that much heart and soul into something, and you have a joyous time making it, and it’s received with a shrug of the shoulders and a “whatever”, it’s tough. The opposite to what the ABBA thing has been. This is all five stars. Every review. I’ll never have reviews like this again. But the reviews for Flashbacks knocked me, they knocked my confidence. I doubted myself. I felt misunderstood. It was really, really annoying. “No one understands me!”

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How did you recover from that?

Well, cut to two years later, someone sends me a link to Flashbacks on YouTube and I read the reviews on there. It blew me away. Floods of tears. Because what I wanted, it did happen, people did get it. So I’m not saying the film is a success, or good. But the response I wanted did happen, and that was a beautiful thing. So I’m really fond of the film. I know it’s flawed but I think there are great moments in it, and I learnt from it. I would love the opportunity to make another feature film. I still have that ambition. Even though film now, somehow, has really lost its lustre. It’s really shocking.

Why is that?

The demise of Weinstein, I think. It died with Weinstein. It was dying anyway, but that finished it off. Because when he was at his pinnacle, the monster that he was, but how fucking great were the films? And the stars! Now, apart from Tom Cruise, there are no movie stars left.

The independent film scene in the Nineties and Noughties was rocking.

It was so exciting. And it’s gone. It’s such a tragedy, obviously, that Harvey was such a monster. Not only for the obvious reasons, for the people affected by his behaviour, which is a tragedy. But also for cinema. Now, the world’s a different place. That was the zeitgeist, that was the time. And now cinema is not nearly as interesting as it was. So yes, I do want to make films, but the idea of making an arthouse movie and going to Poland to show it at a fucking festival, is not interesting. I want people to see it!

What about TV, where all the action is? Is that appealing?

Yeah, I have a TV series I’d love to make. It’s called Pussycat Lounge, based on my year at the Raymond Revue Bar. Set in that period. [Production company] Tiger Aspect had it. That didn’t go very well. Got it back from them. And right now no one is interested. I think that because I do so many different things, it’s kind of hard to place me.

You’re a victim of your own versatility?

Maybe. I always try to treat everything I do with the same enthusiasm. I don’t think there’s a difference between all these things [videos, and films, and shows]. But people in Hollywood don’t think like that. They want you to repeat everything. We all know that.

They would rather you did another ABBA Voyage than made a TV show.

Exactly. Although having said that, I do love putting on a live show, seeing people’s reactions, having an adoring crowd. And it also seems to me that this golden age of TV is coming to an end, too. Five years ago, every director wanted a TV show. Now it feels like that’s dying. There’s too much stuff, right? I’m just overwhelmed when I go on to Netflix. That was the great thing about growing up in my period: you had to wait for the single to come out. You had to wait for Top of the Pops on Thursday, to see that performance. Now we’re just fucking overwhelmed.

Not least by social media. We’re all on our phones.

I think social media is a terrible thing, I don’t do any of it. It’s just noise. I think it’s the least creative thing ever. And if I was on it, because I’m obsessive, I would want to do it well, and that’s a full-time job. It’s all-consuming. I wouldn’t have made [the ABBA] show if I was on social media. I wouldn’t have had time!

Also, don’t know about you but I have never been moved by a post on Instagram. I have never been enlightened by a Tweet. These aren’t media where we can really connect deeply with other people.

No! It’s impossible. I’m suspicious of all posts. They all have a motive. They aren’t gifts. They’re not about anything but the person who sends them. It’s all about you. And, actually, fuck off!

A lot of stuff seems to be dying. I saw Glastonbury on TV. It was Noel Gallagher, Paul McCartney…

And Diana Ross! Fucking geriatric. Torture, it was torture! Although I had to watch the Pet Shop Boys, because I know them. And you know what? They were fucking great. Like, “OK! Now we’re cooking!”

The risk is, we end up sounding like a grumpy old men.

But I am! And it’s hard to be excited about anything when there’s too much stuff.

Which brings us back to the ABBA show.

It’s exciting because it doesn’t feel like anything else. It’s different. It’s a miracle! Seeing the joy drip off the walls of that arena, it’s unbelievable.

So what’s next?

A holiday. And because I’ve thought of nothing else for three years other than ABBA, I need to take a breath, and be quiet, and think. Like I was saying, I’ve been really spoilt, with this project. What’s next? The thing is, in a way it’s not for me to say. All these opportunities that have come my way, people have given them to me. A lot of them, I haven’t gone searching for them. So what’s next is, wait for the next job to be offered.

That sounds both admirably zen, and also a little terrifying. What if nothing comes along?

Something always has. Alex, I’ve done this for 30 years or more. There are times when I’m really popular, and times when I can’t get arrested. That can go on for years. There have been times when I haven’t worked at all for two years. Because I couldn’t get a job. But that’s the nature of my business. You’re in and out of fashion. You do something that gets lots of attention and you’ll get work for a couple of years, maybe. And then it stops again. You do the best you can. You might do quiet work for a bit. A commercial that’s only shown in China. To earn a living. And you wait for an opportunity.

So now…

For a couple of weeks, I’ve got opportunities.

And you’re going to disappear to Iceland?!

They know where to find me. But, no, the ABBA show is going to roll out all over the world, right? That’ll give me some longevity. And by that point I’ll be dead anyway. So, I’m not fretting.

https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a40665750/baillie-walsh-abba-voyage-interview/

ABBA Voyage’ producers reveal plans to build new arenas, tease changes to groundbreaking show

 ‘ABBA Voyage’ producers reveal plans to build new arenas, tease changes to groundbreaking show - Retro Pop | 

Retro Pop — 

ABBA Voyage | Ludvig Andersson, Baillie Walsh, Svana Gisla

‘ABBA Voyage’ producers reveal plans to build new arenas, tease changes to groundbreaking show

07/07/2022

The producers behind ‘ABBA Voyage’ have opened up about the future of the groundbreaking digital concert, revealing plans to take the show worldwide. 

Having opened in May 2022, performances of the show – which sees the Swedish supergroup recreated as digital avatars – currently take place exclusively at the ABBA Arena in Stratford, east London. 

The venue is purpose built for the show, which offers a 360-degree immersive experience, and speaking in Retro Pop’s August 2022 issue, producer Ludvig Andersson suggests they’re working on creating similar arenas around the world. 

“The biggest dream is to stay in London and we build another one somewhere else,” he says. “Where that would be – I’d like to go places that are maybe not the obvious ones. It would be nice to take it to places that aren’t always visited by the big bands. 

“The dream would be to have one somewhere in South America, one somewhere in Southeast Asia, one in North America. Who knows? But that’s the plan and we’re working on that already.”

‘ABBA Voyage’ currently features 20 songs, including global chart hits and fan favourites, which the group performed on a soundstage wearing motion capture suits to recreate their movements. 

Recalling the sessions, Ludvig confirms additional performances were filmed, meaning the setlist can be changed and adapted as time passes. 

“We did more songs than we knew we were going to use,” he teases. “So there is more material. 

“If this keeps running and people keep wanting to come and see it, we are intending to change a song out or update the show – because that’s also fun to do.”

Meanwhile, fellow producer Svana Gisla is excited by the progression of the technology, which could soon allow the band to interact with the audience in London from their homes in Sweden, virtually, via their avatars. 

“It’s all about render time. How long it takes to render and how big the files are. How heavy the digital stuff is,” she explains. “If that becomes lighter, the render time becomes quicker – then who knows? Benny and Björn could be sitting in their living room, talking to the audience from Stockholm as avatars. 

“That’s the future. They could go, ‘Hello London, isn’t it a shame that West Ham lost this afternoon?’ And they could literally be sitting wherever they are in the world and talking. One day, that’s how quick the render’s are going to be.”

Read the full interview in the August 2022 edition of Retro Pop, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store or use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist.

https://retropopmagazine.com/abba-voyage-producers-director-behind-the-scenes-exclusive-interview

Behind the ‘madness’ of ABBA Voyage - The Producers

 Behind the 'madness' of ABBA Voyage | IQ Magazine

James Hanley — Tiempo de lectura: 7 minutos

Behind the ‘madness’ of ABBA Voyage

Producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson and director Baillie Walsh reveal the secrets of the futuristic smash-hit production

By James Hanley on 04 Jul 2022

The team behind the smash-hit ABBA Voyage virtual concert residency have revealed the secrets of the revolutionary production in a new interview with IQ.

The project, which blends the virtual and physical worlds, reportedly had a budget of $175 million and brings the Swedish group – Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus (co-founder of lead investor Pophouse), Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad – back to the stage (in avatar form) for the first time in 40 years, backed by a 10-piece live band.

Held at the demountable 3,000-cap ‘ABBA Arena’ – a purpose-built venue devised by entertainment architect Stufish, under the direction of producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson and director Baillie Walsh – the show debuted at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in May to rave reviews.

Walsh had previously collaborated with Gisla on projects including the Springsteen & I and Oasis’ Lord Don’t Slow Me Down documentaries.

“I knew I could really push boundaries”

“She suggested I go on a call with Benny and Björn, but the idea wasn’t fully formed at that point,” he explains. “It was more of a cinematic idea, but there was a roadmap so that was something to work from. I just had to sit down and work out, essentially, what would I want to see? What’s going to get 3,000 people a night into that arena?

“There was no brief in a sense, but we had the avatars and the sense of these younger versions of ABBA – 1979 was our reference point – and ABBA were very trusting with me. We communicated well and liked each other, and that is essentially how I got the job. They put together a great team before I came on board like [visual effects company] ILM, for starters. So I knew I could really push boundaries.

“As the arena was being built, we’d visit and look up at that screen and go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s the size of a tower block!’ That was daunting, but exciting – it’s not often you get opportunities like this.”

Hundreds of thousands of tickets have already been sold for the production, which is currently booking until late May 2023. Ludvig Andersson (son of Benny) tells IQ the show was six years in the making.

“An idea came to the Stockholm office of ABBA that it might be possible to create digital versions of themselves, and that’s basically how it started,” he says. “Then followed three years of research and development: a lot of conversations around tables in different cities, with different people about what can and cannot be done. Slowly, slowly through that process, we ended up with the idea that became what it is today.”

“The whole project is complete madness and always has been”

The intervention of the pandemic in 2020 set things back by at least six months, however, remembers Gisla.

“It almost pushed us down,” she admits. “We needed to convince a lot of people that this mad idea – that became insanity overnight when Covid struck – was going to be okay, so that took a while.”

“The height of the pandemic coincided with Svarna and me trying to get people to give us money which, in their defence, they ended up doing,” notes Andersson. “But, of course, it was a challenge to convince people not only of the qualities of a show that didn’t exist yet, but also of a project that was based on getting 3,000 people to come into a space during a time when no one was allowed to come into any space of any kind.”

The world’s largest demountable temporary venue, ABBA Arena is designed to fit 1,650 seats and space for a standing audience of 1,350. Outside the auditorium is a sheltered, extended concourse area used to serve visitors. Tickets are priced from £21 to £175, with a variety of different ticket types available for the concerts, including general admission (standing), auditorium seating and dance booths – of which there are eight, each named after people from the ABBA universe.

“This whole concept is complete madness and always has been,” grins Gisla. “There’s an audacity to the scale that is ridiculous. When Ludvig, Baillie and I did the fundraising, we were describing to investors what it was going to be, but we had nothing to show them. It was incredibly difficult and, had it not been ABBA, it would have been impossible.”

“This is an ABBA concert… They’re as involved in this as they would be in any other concert they’ve ever done”

The four members of ABBA spent five weeks being filmed by 160 cameras for motion capture as they performed the 22 songs that make up the show’s 95-minute runtime.

“They have been very hands on, incredibly so,” suggests Gisla. “It wouldn’t be possible without a considerable input from them because this is an ABBA concert. We’re not franchising anything, this is their concert, so they’re as involved in this as they would be in any other concert they’ve ever done. We’re really proud of it and ABBA are too.”

“ABBA came up with the setlist; I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to suggest to them what songs they should be playing,” laughs Walsh. “ABBA always wanted a live band, but when we had the live size avatars it made perfect sense because it added to the idea of, ‘Where does reality end and digital begin? And so I could really play with that. That is another big idea in the show – where you just don’t know where the digital world ends and reality begins.”

Other key team members include co-executive producer Johan Renck, choreographer Wayne McGregor and AV tech specialist Solotech UK, led by director of special projects Ian “Woody” Woodall.

“There is no reason why it couldn’t run and run and tour”

The ABBA Arena structure is able to be relocated to another site at the end of its London tenure.

“There’s no reason why it couldn’t run and run and tour,” finishes Gisla. “We’ve done lots of things in our lives, but these last few years have been the single most enjoyable years of our careers.”

While ABBA Voyage debuted to universal acclaim, Walsh says his initial response to the positive reception was one of “enormous relief”.

“It’s obviously been a long process,” he says. “It’s been in my head for a long, long time and it wasn’t until a couple of months before we opened that I actually got to see what was in my head, so that was a big moment. And then to see it with an audience, which brings that extra element to show, was a wonderful thing. I couldn’t have wished for a better response. It was emotional.

“What I wanted to achieve was, can you be emotional about an avatar? Can you fall in love with an avatar? And I think we have achieved that. What I see every night is such a vast range of emotion: there’s pure joy, but there are a lot of tears, as well as that confusion about, ‘What am I seeing? What’s real and what isn’t?’ So for me, creatively, it’s been really successful.

“It’s rare as a filmmaker that you get this opportunity to see a response to your work in this way because usually, it’s in a darkened cinema where there is no applause and no direct response. Seeing this visceral response to something that I’ve made is a complete joy.”

“We wanted people to feel something. If they had gone away just thinking, ‘Wow, that was cool technology,’ we would have failed completely”

Gisla echoes those thoughts, describing being able to witness the reaction first-hand as a “privilege”.

“It’s wonderful,” she says. “It’s almost unbelievable how well it’s been received and continues to be received. It’s a special experience for us to be inside that auditorium with 3,000 people and watch people having such fun.

“This has never been about technology. This has never been about creating a spectacle. This has always been about creating the best possible ABBA concert we could. And every single decision, every step of the way, has been considered with only that in mind.”

“All we ever wanted was for people to feel something,” nods Andersson. “If they had gone away just thinking, ‘Wow, that was cool technology,’ then we would have failed completely.

“It’s really hard to take in that all this work that all these people put in actually seems like it worked, and that is something special. I still can’t really fathom that we got this far and that it went so well. We often say that our job has been to get out of the way and let this magical mystery train keep chugging, and that is testament to the extraordinary people involved, who have gone above and beyond to make these ideas reality.

“We’ve been trying for six years to describe what this show is and even now, when it exists, it’s impossible. You just have to come and see it.”

https://www.iq-mag.net/2022/07/behind-the-madness-of-abba-voyage

Svana Gisla, and Baillie Walsh talk about ABBA Voyage Show

 Svana Gisla, and Baillie Walsh talk about ABBA Voyage Show

Televisionation - Jun 28th, 2022

https://youtu.be/EmUPWr3Vn_4

Baillie Walsh Director ABBA Voyage interview.

 Baillie Walsh Director ABBA Voyage interview.

Thanks James King.

ref: abba the new songs 1 atns1

https://www.facebook.com/abbathenewsongs/posts/pfbid0n29bQmDa2w4c7xXixRUg7K5uNNpYocaj5R5ZE39HprEgMiNWeZN6CHQzB7HcQCAgl

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ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp

 ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp

Katie Rosseinsky
Thu, June 23, 2022

ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp

Katie Rosseinsky 

From Oasis to Kylie Minogue, Massive Attack to New Order, director Baillie Walsh has spent his career working with some of the biggest names in music. His latest project is a little different, not least because his musical collaborators are composed of millions of pixels, recreating the four stars of ABBA in their pomp. “They don’t complain – they’re not saying, ‘Oh, we can only do one performance tonight,’” Walsh laughs of the digital performers.

As director of ABBA Voyage, his task was to dream up a virtual concert experience that recreates the magic of watching the Swedish pop group in their 1970s imperial phase. At its heart are the four all-singing, all-dancing ABBAtars – painstakingly recreated digital renderings of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha FÓ“ltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, created by the special effects whizzes at Industrial Light and Magic.

When they appear on screen at the purpose-built arena in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to the opening strains of The Visitors, twirling their embellished capes, the effect is staggering – and strangely euphoric. “The challenging part was restraint,” Walsh says. “I wanted the tech to be the secondary part. I love a light show, but I didn’t want it to be this tech wonderland because I think you lose emotion that way.”

A big question for the director and his team was: “Is it possible we can have emotions for these avatars?” Judging by the sheer volume of tears – from surreptitious eye-wiping to unabashed waterworks – in the arena each night, it seems the answer is yes. As Minogue, who was at the show’s opening night, puts it, “This technical feat manages to emote… it offers an embrace and welcomes us to this otherworldly but ultimately human experience.”

A lifelong ABBA fan, Walsh says the group’s music is “in my DNA” and living in the West End, it’s ubiquitous – “Every day outside my window, the tuk-tuks are playing Dancing Queen.” He was approached by show producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson – Benny’s son – three years ago, having worked with the former on music videos for Massive Attack, as well as on Oasis documentary Lord Don’t Slow Me Down and the film Springsteen and I. Then came a Zoom call with Andersson and Ulvaeus. “I was in Iceland on holiday, they were in their cabins in Sweden – the whole thing was very surreal.”

The band spent five weeks filming in Stockholm’s Filmhuset to capture their movements and expressions; then came another filming session using performance doubles to amp up the routines, overseen by choreographer Wayne McGregor. A few songs were added and dropped along the way, but the set list was “very much theirs – I can’t tell ABBA what songs they should play!” Walsh says. “It was obviously strange because Benny and Bjorn had shaved their beards because we needed them to do so for motion capture.

“They’re in weird motion capture suits, [wearing] shoes with bubbles on them, but they got over it very quickly and were very un-self-conscious – then you’re just watching ABBA, and those mo-cap suits become invisible… When the four of them came together and they performed that first song, it [was] breathtaking.”

Hi-tech motion capture suits are hardly the strangest outfits that ABBA have worn. In their heyday, they were famed for outlandish stage gear – “they came from that period where anything went,” says Walsh – which could be classified as theatrical costumes, tax deductible under Swedish law. The 2022 ABBAtars wear retro-modern ensembles by costume designer B Ȧkerlund, who worked with the likes of Dolce and Gabbana and Manish Arora. “[They] made the clothes physically and we filmed them to see how they moved,” Walsh says. “Then ILM built them digitally – they had to weave every thread.”

Getting the ABBAtars’ faces right was even more arduous. “You start with the skeleton, and then you put skin on them; it’s such a gradual process,” the director explains. “You think, ‘We’ve got it’, but once it’s in motion, it’s gone.” It was, he adds, “scary at times, because it just didn’t look like them… You’d find Benny[’s likeness] for a song, then the next one, he’d be gone again.” The light show – which comprises 500 moving lights, mapped to 30,000 points in the arena – had to line up with the ABBAtars too, as “every lighting change you make changes the faces”. No wonder the project required a mind-boggling 1 billion hours of computer time in total.

There are plenty of clever touches throughout that help suspend the audience’s disbelief. The virtual stage on screen perfectly lines up with the physical stadium and the lighting rig, giving a seamlessly three dimensional feel; the band fade and recede as they move ‘backstage’. “That screen can never just be a screen,” Walsh says. “When you go and see a live band, you see people moving around in the dark - it just felt like that was going to add an awful lot to the believability.”

It’s not all high realism – some of Voyage’s most thrilling moments wink at the artificial set up, including a breathtaking sequence when an overhead shot featuring oversized ABBAtars flips over to reveal the ‘band’ standing back in formation, human-sized again. “It’s almost like you’re playing a game of what’s real and what’s not,” Walsh says. “We’re not denying that they’re digital avatars, we’re embracing that. And I think the audience appreciates that.”

The intricacy of the tech meant that every light cue and remark from the ABBAtars had to be sketched out years before, but if the show ever rolls out to other venues – the stadium was designed to “in a way be flat pack, so you can take it down and move it” – Walsh would love to record extra tracks to slot into the set, with The Day Before You Came top of the wish list.

The technology, he believes, will “get better and better, and much cheaper”, so other groups are likely to follow in ABBA’s (digital) footsteps. Andersson and Ulvaeus suggested in an interview last month that the virtual concert treatment could pull off the seemingly impossible and reunite Walsh’s former collaborators, Oasis. “I don’t think Oasis would be up for it,” he counters. “They love to tour – I mean, they don’t together, but Liam and Noel do. And Noel made a comment ages ago, you know, he loves to be a bit negative” (he described the concept as “meaningless” in an interview with The Sun).

The fact that all four members of ABBA were able to take part in Voyage removes the ethical murkiness of previous virtual performance, he says. “We were able to reinvent them visually – if this had been a posthumous show, you can’t do that, but because they were involved in the whole thing, we were able to bring them into 2022… When you do Whitney Houston [as a hologram] and Whitney’s not around, it doesn’t feel right.” All the speeches and remarks delivered by the ABBAtars “were written by ABBA. It’s them, they’re present… How are you going to do that with John Lennon and George Harrison? Are you going to hoke it together?”

When Voyage was in its early stages, Walsh the show with work on Being James Bond, a documentary exploring Daniel Craig’s stint as the world’s most famous spy through previously unseen footage and candid conversations between Craig and Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson.

Walsh has been great friends with Craig since before his days as 007. Craig also starred in his 2008 film Flashbacks of a Fool between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and praised Walsh’s “astonishing creativity and […] laser-like eye for detail, two things that often don’t sit well together”.

“I’d spent a lot of time on the Bond sets, so I’d been around for all of it,” Walsh says. “I’d seen Dan become Bond. But when I went back to find visuals, looking at all the B-roll, I was really taken aback by what Dan had gone through. I just wanted to make a portrait of the man I know and was incredibly proud of.”

Looking back, the furore around Craig’s casting – which dwelt on his hair colour and questioned whether wearing a life jacket for a photo op on the Thames had destroyed his action hero credentials – seems bizarre. “It was insane,” Walsh says. “It was really, really tough for him… the UK press loves to build you up and slap you down, or slap you down then build you up… All those papers were just vicious with him.”

Casino Royale put paid to those criticisms, and Craig went on to become the longest serving Bond of all time. “15 years is a long time to be in an iconic role, and I think it’s very difficult to give up,” Walsh says. “If you become one of the biggest stars in the world playing this role, walking away from that is quite a hard thing to do.” Pierce Brosnan, of course, famously followed up his turn as Bond with a role in Mamma Mia! “There we go,” Walsh says, “why don’t we bring Dan into ABBA? Those two worlds collide again…”

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/abba-voyage-director-brought-swedish-060000172.html

ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces

 ►Baillie Walsh, director of ABBA Voyage

Date: Jun18th, 2022

ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces Jonathan Bell — Tiempo de lectura: 12 minutos ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces Baillie Walsh, the director behind ABBA Voyage, one of the most advanced entertainment spectacles ever, tells Wallpaper* how the magic happens, ABBAtars and all Who would have thought that one of the most advanced entertainment spectacles on the planet would have originated with four septuagenarian Swedes? ‘I love a challenge,’ says Baillie Walsh, the director responsible for bringing ABBA’s new spectacular Voyage show to the stage (or screen, depending on your hankering for accuracy). Walsh has been immersed in the music industry for most of his career, directing videos for Massive Attack, Kylie, New Order, Spiritualized and Oasis, among others, in addition to campaigns for brands like Cartier, YSL, Thierry Mugler, Sony, and Versace. Two years ago, he got a call from ABBA’s producers, Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson, eager to progress the idea of a new kind of music experience based on the band’s evergreen music. Despite the quartet disbanding in 1982, their music has never really left the public consciousness, eventually bubbling triumphantly to the surface once more with the globally successful Mamma Mia! stage show and films. The initial call was swiftly followed by a Zoom meeting with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus themselves; Walsh got the job on the spot. ‘At that point, the idea wasn’t fully formed,’ Walsh recalls. ‘They knew they wanted to do something, but not how or what.’ The idea of a digital experience had already been in the works for a couple of years, timed to coincide with the first new ABBA music since 1981 album ‘The Visitors’. The pandemic shuffled the whole project back by a couple of years, during which time the hunger for communal live experiences only grew and grew. Walsh says the very first question he asked himself was ‘What would I want to see? And I wanted to see something that I’d never seen before – an immersive concert experience that was believable.’ The result is ABBA Voyage, a 95-minute spectacular that takes the audience through ABBA’s career (albeit not in chronological order), using strikingly animated CGI ‘ABBAtars’ of the four members, seamlessly blended with a live band and light show. Early on in the process, the producers engaged Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the world’s foremost CGI specialists. ‘They knew they needed great tech people,’ says Walsh, ‘even though there still wasn’t a fully finished idea. What I wanted to know was: can you create ABBA as they were, back in the day?’ Simply showing videos or lights and animations wasn’t going to be enough, certainly not to sustain a long run. As the show gradually came together, it became clear that it would have to be a seamless blend of old and new, live and pre-recorded, analogue and digital. The four members of ABBA drew up a setlist, effectively creating the ‘screenplay’. ‘It moved around a bit – we added and dropped a few songs,’ Walsh admits, ‘but finally I had a structure to work with.’ There then followed two motion capture shoots, including five weeks with Benny, Björn, Ana-Frid and Agnetha in Sweden, running through the performances again and again, rehearsing moves and interactions, not just during the songs themselves, but in the moments in between. It was then time for four doubles to do the routines once more and inject a bit more of the spirit and verve that the original quartet could no longer stretch to. The award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor guided this process every literal step of the way. ‘Wayne took their performances and then extended them,’ Walsh explains, ‘he put [their movements] into young bodies, basically.’ ILM took this huge tranche data and modelled the four ABBAtars, drawing on the rich costumes of the era and the very latest simulation engines for hair, skin, and fabric. ‘Every thread was modelled,’ Walsh marvels, with the signature sequins and rhinestones shining brighter than ever before (it was once alleged that ABBA’s stage wear owed its outlandish styling to Swedish tax laws, which stipulated that entertainer’s costumes were only deductible expenses if they couldn’t be used as everyday clothing). This is where the first layer of blending came in. The core of the show is a digital performance by ABBA, rendered at life size on a colossal LED screen. Made by display specialist ROE Visual, a global company with origins in China, it has a resolution of 19,536 x 3,344 pixels, or 65.3 million 2mm square pixels in total; when running at a smooth 50fps it means that 3.2 billion pixels are being processed every single second. For reference, an Apple Pro Display XDR has a resolution of 6,016 x 3,384 pixels, a total of 20.3 million pixels. ROE’s original innovation was to create a modular display system, Magic Cube, that was designed to be demounted for easy touring, and it has also moved into the new generation of ‘virtual production’ studios that are gaining traction in Hollywood and beyond. Today’s ultra-high resolutions mean that digital backdrops can be used for live action, creating lighting and reflections that are consistent and believable. ABBA Voyage presented a different challenge; the lighting also had to be manifested in the real world, experienced by 3,000 people, not just on the screen. To achieve this, the virtual stage behind the CGI characters is modelled to be an extension of the real arena, with CGI lights and rigging stretching off into the ‘distance’, aligning perfectly with the real lighting rig out front. If you’re seated centre stage the illusion is seamless; there is no hint as to where the screen ends, and the arena begins. Walsh is effusive about the design of the new temporary arena, designed by London-based entertainment specialist Stufish (opens in new tab), the company founded by the late stadium supremo Mark Fisher, an architect who directed his training towards spectacular performances by the likes of U2, The Rollings Stones, and Lady Gaga. ‘The experience really starts when you arrive outside Stufish’s arena – it’s already exciting,’ says Walsh. ‘You have to go through these tunnels of light and that’s very different to a “normal” venue. The arena design came first – I was involved only in the stage and screen.’ Walsh is somewhat underplaying his intense involvement with the project over that span of more than two years. ‘To make this real and living and breathing, we all knew it was about how the light worked,’ he says. ‘For example, in “Lay all your love on me”, there are lasers in the room, but not on the screen. However, the moving laser lights have been modelled by ILM to reflect on the digital costumes.’ Co-ordinating this immensely complex blend required a billion hours of computing time. Behind the scenes are a tech team of 17, ensuring that the screens and lighting systems dovetail perfectly. ‘You don’t know where the digital world ends and the real world begins – it’s about blending the two,’ says Walsh. ‘All that work was decided two years ago.’ Not every song is given this naturalistic treatment; some are done using the big screens alone, with vast 10m-high projections of the band, or specially commissioned animated films. For the ballads, in particular, the intercutting and layering of shots is very reminiscent of ABBA’s pioneering video style back in the 1970s. The overall effect is pretty remarkable. The ABBAtars themselves are seamless when viewed at distant human scale, but there’s still the light veil of CGI waxiness to the faces. For the first couple of minutes, you’re required to hike down the steep slopes of the Uncanny Valley, but it's by no means an arduous trek. By the second track, you stop wondering how it’s done and just enjoy yourself. ‘I’m interested in emotion – the idea that you could create an avatar you had an emotional response to was really important,’ Walsh says. ‘Most importantly, after the first five minutes of the show, the technology has to be the least important thing.’ Although the camera pans and zooms for the large-scale close-ups are mostly naturalistic, albeit nigh-on impossible to achieve without an army of extremely agile camera operators, there’s only one moment in the entire show when this ‘fourth wall’ is comprehensively broken. The screen flips from a bird’s-eye view of the four performers before swooping down to eye level, like Google Street View on steroids. Other visual tricks have been deployed to maximise the realism. Walsh planned it so the ‘stage’ never goes completely dark. Between songs, and in some routines, the characters can be seen moving about in the half light of ‘backstage’, their sequins still sparkling. ‘These were important moments to keep up the belief that it was a stage, not a screen,’ he says. ‘It was a very conscious decision not to let the tech take over.’ The band, lighting crew, and tech team from ILN finally got access to the new arena in February 2022 to start rehearsals. ‘You can always tell a lot by how a crew responds,’ says Walsh. ‘We had the worlds – the music team and the film team – and when these cynical old guys got excited, then I knew we had something.’ ABBA Voyage opened in May 2022 to almost universally approving reviews and near-hysterical audience feedback. It’s a fantastic show, well worth a visit, if only to experience the true state of the art. Walsh is still involved, tinkering and tweaking. ‘I’m seeing how smoothly the show runs – it’s an enormous mechanical beast,’ he says. ‘I get quite anxious about all that data.’ He hints that setlist changes are not just possible, but planned, and the ABBA canon of nearly 100 songs means it could run and run. He admits that perhaps more than any other band, ABBA lend themselves to this new approach. The history doesn't feel forced. It's not too perfect. Very occasionally the visuals dip into obvious CGI, but Walsh and his team keep the (virtual) camera moving, using the full width of the massive stage to distract and delight. ‘What was really interesting was working directly with ABBA and reinventing them – there is nostalgia there, obviously, but you’re also bringing them up to date,’ says Walsh. ‘It’s ABBA, but it’s also 2022 ABBA.’ Having the original members working so closely on the project was also crucial. Others have noted that this sort of approach could be repurposed to bring back all four Beatles, Elvis, Bowie, Prince, any number of deceased performers. ‘It would be much more difficult to do this posthumously,’ Walsh says, and it’s true that the many occasions when stars have been digitally ‘resurrected’ feel rather less authentic and organic given the performer’s obvious lack of involvement. Whitney Houston in Vegas, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, and Roy Orbison have all been given this virtual treatment, with varying degrees of success, although these recreations relied on projection, not LED screens, to generate the image. Has an eternally young ABBA created a new kind of music experience? The Rolling Stones are currently on their 60th-anniversary tour, but there’s a very different image and ambience. ABBA Voyage works because the band can play with being frozen in time, what were once deliciously archaic costumes and hairstyles are now already well into their second or third time around the fashion block. ABBA embody memory and nostalgia, with the only scandals being ones of the heart. It’s the antithesis of the slowly maturing fine wine of the Stones’ heady brew, with its potent cocktail of drugs and debauchery, survived and transcended. Sure, Voyage might ring just a tiny bit hollow in comparison – the adrenaline buzz has a far steeper taper than a ‘conventional’ concert. Pop music has always been about combining emotion with the state of the art, be it in sound, vision, or fashion. Voyage is a delirious fusion of them all, a consistently delicious tonic for an uncertain age.