Opening Night of ABBA Voyage, 2022

 Opening Night of ABBA Voyage, 2022

photo abba voyage official

Happy Birthday Agnetha !!

 

     

New Photo - Agnetha - Abba Voyage / 2022

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Happy Birthday Agnetha !

ABBA Voyage - Oxford Metrics

Thank you for the music: how will live concerts evolve in the Augmented Age?

Oct 17, 2022

Nick Bolton, CEO, discusses how live concerts could evolve in the

17 October 2022 - Digital transformation is impacting almost every dimension of our world and the live music industry is no exception. The innovative adoption of motion capture technology has enabled the realisation of cutting edge, creative ideas and developments for live performances.

The live concert industry has always been quick to adopt technological change - just look at how virtual performances have evolved from the first experimentations by South Korean boy band H.O.T., to the critically acclaimed ABBA Voyage Experience. It was back in 1998 when H.O.T. became the first to experiment with holographic performances, aiming to appear in multiple locations at once on their world tour. The technology continued to develop so that 2Pac could appear posthumously with his holographic appearance at Coachella 2012, where one video of the performance amassed over 57 million views on YouTubei, his album sales increased 500% and downloads of his song 'Hail Mary' rose 1,500%ii. Not only this, but a 2015 live music video performance by Japanese pop group, Perfume at SXSW, which seamlessly combined live footage of the trio performing with motion captured 3D avatars, was described by Wired as an “ecstatic vision beamed back from a future in which the physical and digital have converged to the point of being utterly indistinguishable”iii - truly the blurring of the physical and virtual worlds.

Concerts are now being performed by avatars of the musicians, to critical acclaim. The best example of this in action is the ABBA Voyage experience.

The momentum was building for augmented projects. The announcement of Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour with a virtual reality experience in 2018, showed key moments over his 50-year career. To create a true to life performance, Elton was motion captured by Vicon customer, House of Moves, ensuring the moves of ‘digital Elton’ stayed trueiv. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour announcement and the ABBA Voyage Experience were both underway before 2020. However, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic accelerated musicians’ readiness, and indeed, the readiness of fans, to embrace this technology on a wider scale, moving the industry into the next era.

As we move into the Augmented Age, where machines and humans partner to achieve what neither can do alone, concerts are now being performed by avatars of the musicians, to critical acclaim. The best example of this in action is the ABBA Voyage experience. The band members, Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny, and Björn, were tracked using motion capture as they performed their set to perfection over the course of five weeks. The motion measurement sensors and software captured every idiosyncrasy, every mannerism, emotion, enabling Vicon customer, Industrial Light & Magicv to merge the physical and the digital and create the band just as they performed in 1979, not as hollow images, but avatars, virtual twins of the artists, complete with the performers’ real essence and emotions.

A study conducted by Middlesex University reported that 95% of fans surveyed said that emotional engagement from the artist during live stream concerts is important to themvi. The commercial and critical success of the ABBA Voyage experience is testament to the fact that this emotional engagement has been achieved, with motion measurement technology at the very core of the operation.

We are already seeing consumers embrace this digital format in the live music industry, as the possibilities enabled by motion measurement begin to crystallise. Now, what leaps out is the potential longevity of these augmented concerts. Virtual concerts allow concertgoers to experience the greatest performances of their favourite bands and musicians, past and present. The performance possibilities are truly exciting, as we have seen with ABBA, bands like the Rolling Stones can be immortalised, even Oasis could be reunited onstage. The sense and analysis capabilities which form the backbone of these projects are there, how they will be applied to transform the future of the live concert industry will be determined by the imaginations and creative genius of the digital artists, technicians, and performers. What once seemed a possibility in the distant future is now being realised before our eyes in the Augmented Age of the present, enabled by developments in motion measurement technology.

i YouTube, Tupac Hologram Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre Perform Coachella Live 2012, 18 April 2012

ii Digital Domain, Virtual Tupac

iii Wired, Hot Damn, This Concert Is Straight Out of the Future, 23 March 2015

iv fxguide, Digital VR Elton, 28 January 2018

v YouTube, ABBA Voyage: The Journey Is About To Begin, 2021

vi King’s College London, Research finds live streamed concerts are here to stay post-pandemic, 14 May 2021

https://oxfordmetrics.com/news/2022-10-17/thank-you-for-the-music-how-will-live-concerts-evolve-in-the-augmented-age

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jun 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aop4_g8o6V8

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U.K. time travel, from Oxford dons to ABBAtars

By Arnie Weissmann |Nov 15, 2023|

Arnie Weissmann

Travel Weekly has reported extensively how AI may impact travel planning and booking. On a trip to the U.K. this month, I looked at how it's affecting tourism experiences, as well.

Seeking a little contrast, I divided time between tradition-bound enclaves and some attractions whose foundation was frontline technology.

To American eyes, the U.K. is particularly rich with tradition, and I could think of fewer places near London that revel in custom more than Cambridge and Oxford. I planned daytrips to each.

In Cambridge, I met up with John Shears. He's an authority in a certain realm of past English endeavors -- polar exploration -- but also recently employed highly advanced technology as expedition leader of the mission that found Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, in the depths of the Weddell Sea last year.

We arranged to meet at Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute, named for the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, at precisely 10:30 a.m. The timing was not coincidental; that's when, each morning, a ship's bell is rung and the staff gathers for tea or coffee. While this custom (minus the ship's bell) was routine in American institutions in the not-too-distant past, it has been more recently cast aside in favor of a quick Starbucks run. The 10:30 gathering of colleagues at the institute seemed a curiously quaint and quintessentially British ritual.

As we wandered through the institute's multistory library containing thousands of volumes related to polar exploration, many old and rare, I didn't see a computer in sight. Was the collection digitized? I asked. It has not been.

Although the library requires permission to enter, the building also houses a small museum visited by 50,000 people annually. Even before going in, one walks past a sculpture created by Scott's widow, Kathleen, then enters beneath a bust of Shackleton into a small hall embedded with architectural details related to exploration in the arctic regions. The museum is polar-nerd heaven.

That night, back in London, my inner tech nerd -- or, I guess, just nerd -- emerged. I had bought a ticket for "ABBA Voyage," a somewhat disorienting journey into an almost purely artificial world. In a purpose-built theater, ABBA Arena, the 1970s Swedish pop group gives a 90-minute concert without any members of the group actually present.

The groups' four members come alive, seemingly human-size and in three dimensions, on densely pixilated LED screens, their movements in sync with enhanced concert footage displayed on giant screens. The entire experience is not unlike a typical arena concert. A creative 360-degree light show augments the songs. The effect is surreal, but real enough that the audience applauds and even stomps its feet for an encore, which it gets. I wasn't sure which was more mystifying, the onstage "ABBAtars" or the audience.

The next day, another friend, a professor at Oxford, walked me through Jesus College, whose centuries-old chambers seemed straight out of a "Harry Potter" book. Among the items displayed in its library is T.E. Lawrence's (Lawrence of Arabia) dissertation on Middle Eastern military architecture, complete with penciled notes in the margins. Although the tour represented submergence in another era, it was a familiar reality, requiring less cognitive adjustment than the interior of ABBA Arena.



Inside the "Beyond Reality" gallery at London's Frameless experience. Photo Credit: Arnie Weissmann

From there, back to London and "Frameless," a permanent art exhibit with no paintings or sculptures. It's a series of galleries, each featuring a different artistic genre. It's among the growing collection of attractions described as "immersive," from Las Vegas' new Sphere to the city's ever-expanding Area 15 complex.

"Frameless" is a technological and design marvel. It has four thematic galleries that together animate 42 paintings. The galleries have no wasted space, with floors, walls and sometimes ceilings becoming the canvas for moving, and occasionally interactive, imagery.

The collected art passes through you rather than the other way around. Images flow, dissolve, throb and explode. In one gallery, after a wall-size masterpiece shatters into shards on the floor, you can kick the debris, scattering flakes of colored light like autumn leaves as you move.

Princess Cruises' president, John Padgett, speaking at the Phocuswright Conference this week, said technology should be employed as a facilitator of personalized, up-to-the-moment experiences at scale. Technology is not the point, he said. Experience is.

I did unsuccessfully inquire whether "Frameless" employed AI, but the platform is beside the point: The technology behind both "ABBA Voyage" and "Frameless" can't be separated from the wow factor. The experience of cutting-edge innovation becomes part of the story that's repeated. I doubt Padgett would be upset if guests returning from a Princess cruise weave the high-tech wonders of the Ocean Medallion into their vacation tales.

Immersive experiences will not overcome interest in tradition and the past, whose remnants, still in use or dormant, often reflect earlier stages of trailblazing technology. Whether examining Shackleton's self-designed boots or seeing the clock turned back on Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid, technology and experience have become inseparable. 

https://www.travelweekly.com/Arnie-Weissmann/UK-time-travel-from-Oxford-dons-to-Abbatars

ABBA 2022

 

ABBA’s successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music

 ABBA's successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music

Jenni Reid 

ABBA’s successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music

ABBA Voyage, which sees digital avatars of the four-piece Swedish band ‘perform’ a 90-minute concert created from motion capture, has proven a hit with critics and fans since launching in May.

Its producers want to take the show around the world and believe it will be replicated in big venues in places like Las Vegas, something industry professionals told CNBC they agreed with.

Questions remain over whether its success could be recreated with another band, and the ethical implications of using it for performances with deceased artists.

LONDON — Before the launch of “ABBA Voyage,” the London concert performed by 3D digital avatars of the iconic Swedish band, member Björn Ulvaeus said they hoped audiences would “feel that they’ve gone through something that they’ve never seen before.”

Following its May 27 debut, much of the reaction from domestic and international critics, fans and industry professionals has been rapturous.

“Other than the team involved, no one really knew how they would integrate an avatar-based performance,” Sarah Cox, director of live event technical consultancy Neutral Human, told CNBC. “That blew me away as someone working on real-time graphics. My jaw hit the floor. You look around and people are really buying into the idea that ABBA are there.”

Demand has been strong — the show’s run has been extended to November 2023 and could well go beyond that.

And the team has confirmed it aims to take the show around the world.

“Our ambition is to do another ABBA Voyage, let’s say in North America, Australasia, we could do another one in Europe. We can duplicate the arena and the show,” producer Svana Gisla told a U.K. government committee session in November.

It also expects other shows to begin following the same model.

“The tech itself isn’t new but the way in which we’ve used it and scale and barriers we’ve broken down are new. I’m sure others will follow and are planning to follow,” Gisla said.

That could “absolutely” be the case somewhere like Las Vegas, where some shows run round the clock with rotating crews, she added.

“We have live musicians, so we keep our band and do seven shows over five days a week. But you could roll round the clock. Vegas will quickly adopt this style of entertainment and do Elvis or the Beatles.”

Money, money, money

Voyage’s venue, dubbed the ABBA Arena, was built specifically for the show on a site in Stratford in east London, with its 3,000 capacity comprising a standing pit, tiered seats along three sides with no restricted view, and higher-priced private “dance booths,″ as well as space for the extensive kit positioned in the roof and what creators White Void say is the largest permanent kinetic lighting installation in the world.

It was also designed for flexibility. It was constructed on a one meter raised platform without breaking ground, and could be disassembled and reconstructed elsewhere — or stay in place and host another show in future.

But emulating Voyage’s model — which sees digital replicas of the four band members perform classic hits and newer numbers for 90 minutes, while also interacting with each other and speaking to the audience between songs — will be no easy task.

The show was in the works for five years and had a £141 million ($174.9 million) budget funded by global investors. It needs to get around 3 million people through its doors to break even, according to Gisla, and the average ticket price is £75.

After choosing their set list and making other creative decisions, the ABBA members did five weeks of performance in motion capture suits. Hundreds of visual effects artists then worked on the show for two years, led by the London branch of Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects company founded by George Lucas.

A decade ago, a Coachella performance featuring an apparent hologram of Tupac Shakur impressed audiences and hinted at alternative reality’s potential in live shows, with the artist’s likeness digitally recreated without using archive footage.

While not meeting the technical definition of a hologram, which uses laser beams to construct an object with depth, the visual effects team projected a 2D image onto an angled piece of glass, which was itself projected onto a Mylar screen, creating a 3D effect. Shakur then “performed” two songs with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, 16 years after his death.

The Voyage team is tight-lipped about exactly how their show works, but previously confirmed it is not a laser-based hologram either. It involves 65-million pixel screens which give the impression of the band performing life-size on stage in 3D in real time, with traditional-style concert screens showing close-ups and different views on either side.

Its servers are being pushed to the “absolute extreme” to render the images without lag, Gisla said, such that they are shaking through some transitions. She also acknowledged that the 10-meter high side screens are “very unforgiving” on detail and there are improvements that could be made.

But, she added, with real-time render speeds becoming quicker, “Benny and Bjorn could be sitting in a chair at home connected to their avatar, updating them to talk about last night’s football result to the audience. That will come.”

Next steps

Consultant Sarah Cox said the kind of processing and motion capture technology used by Voyage is still prohibitively expensive for most productions, but believes it is a “brand-new format that will be replicated time and time again,” particularly somewhere like Las Vegas.

“An immersive venue could host multiple shows. And then the cost comes down, because you have the technology stack, the venue, and all the money goes into creating the avatar and virtual experience and tweaking the programing.”

Many will remain skeptical of digital avatar-based gigs, particularly if they are wary of the general trend toward metaverse-based virtual experiences.

Bjorn Ulvaeus himself previously told CNBC he has concerns about the misuse of the technology to create nefarious “deep fakes” which will be “indistinguishable from the real thing going forward.”

There is also the question of finding suitable artists for shows. ABBA is a rare proposition as a band with a large catalogue of hits, a multi-generational worldwide fanbase, and a full set of members who are on-board with the show — but who have not toured together for 40 years.

“Posthumously you can put artists back on stage, ethically you may or may not have a view on that,” said Gisla. “Having ABBA partake in this is I can say this is an ABBA concert. ABBA made the decisions, chose what to wear, chose their set list, ABBA made this show.”

For an artist like Elvis with an extensive visual and audio archive you could create an accurate replica, but without the input that makes this show feel so tangible, she said.

For Cox, live shows that provide a “shared experience” like ABBA Voyage hold a greater appeal than headset-based virtual experiences, though there will certainly be more of those available in future.

And both AR and VR are spreading in the worlds of gaming, events, sports, theater and beyond.

Digital avatar experiments have included musician Travis Scott premiering a song within the wildly popular game Fortnite in 2020, with his avatar looming over players who were still moving around within the world of the game. It got a reported 45.8 million viewers across five shows. Lil Nas X performed the same year in the game Roblox.

A 15 year-old plays Fortnite and Travis Scott Present: Astronomical on April 23, 2020, in Los Angeles, United States.

Frazer Harrison | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Jo Twist, chief executive of trade body UK Interactive Entertainment, said she was noticing growing opportunities in the intersections between games, music and entertainment experiences.

“While these kind of experiences have mostly been the preserve of the biggest artists so far, we believe that growth in both the number of people who play, and online game worlds that enable user generated content, could open games up to all kinds of performers, allowing them to successfully tap into its enormous player base to raise their profile.” she said.

Giulia De Paoli, founder and general manager of show design and AR studio Ombra, has worked on projects bringing “extended reality” — spanning AR and VR — to live sports.

“AR has permitted us to create a full show for broadcast events that would be impossible with traditional projection and LED setups, like creating huge 10-meter flying numbers and flames around the arena,” she said.

“We see this developing into a full experience for people to watch live and, as the word says, augmenting the reality around us, gamifying, interacting and seeing impossible things happen.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/29/abba-voyage-avatar-show-in-london-offers-glimpse-of-future-for-live-music.html

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photo 25 may 2022

ABBA Voyage: Are holograms the future of music?

 ABBA Voyage: Are holograms the future of music?

Tom Bromley

Back in 1974, music critic Jon Landau saw a show at the Harvard Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and famously declared: ‘I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’

Last night, I also had a glimpse at a musical future. Its name, surprisingly, was ABBA.

The ABBA Voyage show opened earlier this year at a purpose-built concert venue in East London.

The band aren’t actually there, but instead replaced by four avatars – ‘ABBAtars’ – backed up by a live band.

When the tickets originally went on sale, I was sceptical. Why pay money to see a collection of holograms?

But everyone I know who has been all went in with similar scepticism and came out converted. Having been to watch, I now understand why.

Rising up to the stage to the beginning of The Visitors, the four avatars look like ABBA, sound like ABBA, and for all intents and purposes are ABBA before your disbelieving eyes.

Rather than some flickering Princess Leia hologram from Star Wars, the ABBA avatars look properly real. It’s a genuine pinch-me moment.

The Stars Wars reference is a relevant one, because the avatars are the creation of Industrial Light and Magic, ILM, the special effects company that Star Wars director George Lucas set up in 1975.

The four members of ABBA were filmed by 120 motion capture cameras, then painstakingly digitised by a team of 1000 animators, recreating their seventies selves.

Its cinematic magic in the flesh and is both jaw-dropping and spooky at the same time.

At one point I found myself thinking of the sci-fi show Westworld, the android-filled theme park which goes horribly dystopian, and briefly wondered if Bjorn again Benny was going to lay waste to the audience.

Is this the future of music? Take a look at any of our local venues and the demand for tribute acts remains high.

Over the next few months our region plays host to facsimiles of Fleetwood Mac, The Kinks and The Beatles, among many others.

But why pay to see someone doing a wonky impersonation of Elvis, when technology could recreate the 1968 Vegas version, sweaty hip swivels and all?

Right now, I suspect, the money would be prohibitive: the ABBA Voyage show reportedly cost £140 million to put together.

With my back-of-an-envelope maths from the ticket prices, I reckon they’re making around £2 million a week, going into profit sometime next year.

Currently, then, you’d need big pockets to put such a show together, but as technology improves, the costs will come down.

At which point, the future of rock and roll will be Bruce Springsteen all over again, just in ageless avatar form.

illustrastive photo

https://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/leisure/23156441.abba-voyage-holograms-future-music/

Record Collector Magazine Issue 539 Christmas 2022

 

 Issue number: 539

Christmas 2022

Abba, Exclusive Benny Andersson interview Plus Their 40 Best Songs!

"WE LEARNED FROM

THE BEATLES"

And now to meet the man behind those 40 (plus one) amazing songs... Along with Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA's chief melodist, Benny Andersson, comprises what is finally - after years of being dismissed as pop lightweights – regarded as one of the great songwriting partnerships, up there with Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, Holland-Dozier-Holland and Wilson-Love. And with the Voyage album, their first for 39 years, and the ABBA Voyage concert spectacular featuring virtual avatars going on 'til well into 2023, ABBA are poised at last to be hailed as true immortals. But what was it like to make their first ABBA music since 1982? How have they managed to pick up after so lon-----g? "It was like it had been three weeks, not 40 years," Andersson tells Pete Paphides in this rare interview.

|Through the lens of a MacBook camera, the high eaves and variously shaped windows of Benny Andersson's RMV Studio studio in Stockholm, Sweden reveal what may have once been a church. The light that streams through the windows this afternoon reveals a grand piano and at least one studio console. Just out of shot (for now) is the trusty Synclavier which has withstood four decades of daily music-making from the only member of ABBA who witnessed the group's imperial years from a seated position.

After ABBA ceased trading at the end of 1982, a total of 39 years elapsed before their spectacular resurrection with the Voyage album and the eponymous shows in East London's specially created ABBA Arena, which presented a digitally recreated version of the group's younger selves alongside a hand-picked 10-piece live band. During that time, Benny and Björn Ulvaeus collaborated on two musicals - cold war drama Chess and Swedish literary epic Kristina Från Duvemåla – and saw the ABBA songbook slowly but surely come to be regarded as comparable to the very greatest pop music produced in the 20th Century.

For the guy who wrote those melodies, though, a line of continuity runs through the manic years of megastardom depicted in 1977's ABBA The Movie in somewhat nightmarish terms, right through to the present day. Every morning, this is where he comes every day, panning for melodic gold.

"Sometimes you come away with nothing,”

he says. "But if you don't try, then you're definitely not going to come up with anything.” Unlike the other three initials who make up ABBA, it's Benny who most closely corresponds to the description of a jobbing musician. He tours regularly with his Nordic folk ensemble Benny Anderssons Orkester, for whom he more commonly defaults to accordion. Back in 2010, at ABBA's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, he talked about his early years listening to music on the single radio channel that was available to him: "We didn't have any blues like you would call it blues in Sweden, we had some kind of blues because above [59 degrees latitude]... from eastern Russia, through Finland into Scandinavia, there's this 'melancholy belt', sometimes mistaken for the vodka belt [laughter]... It's definitely in the Swedish folk music, you can hear it in the Russian folk songs, you can hear it in the music from Jean Sibelius or Edvard Grieg from Norway, you could see it in the eyes of Greta Garbo, and you can hear it in the voice of Jussi Björling. And actually, you can hear it in the sound of Frida and Agnetha on some of our songs, too." While he happily acknowledges ABBA's early hunger for international success, also detectable is a certain pride taken in the fact that, when their songs ascended the charts all around the world, they did so on their own terms. Almost all their biggest disco hits, he beams, were written in a minor key.

Let's start with Voyage, because even though the album appeared at the end of last year, the album almost certainly wouldn't exist were it not for the ABBA Voyage shows and the ABBA Arena for which you built those shows. So much of this hugely secretive series of undertakings happened in plain sight. Didn't the auditions and rehearsals take place in Kentish Town in North London? 

Yes. Jamie Righton [formerly of The Klaxons] helped us to reach the musicians. We said to him that we want people who like to be onstage: we didn't particularly want people who were used to sitting in a pit. It was important to have people who liked to perform. So, he found these guys. Victoria [Hesketh aka Little Boots] was one of them and we liked her. The funny thing is, there are seven women and three guys in the band, and that's not a feminist thing; that was just because they were the best musicians.

It's amazing that this was all happening on the outskirts of Camden, and no one knew. I cycle through Kentish Town most days, and the idea that you guys were there, just rehearsing, is mind-blowing. How did no one know? 

Normally, we don't tell people where we are!

At that point, had you recorded any of the new songs? 

Yeah, the first two, Don't Shut Me Down and I Still Have Faith In You. We played it to

(100 Record Collector) page1

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The Voyage begins: Benny Andersson backstage in 1975: "It's great to have more than one singer, like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Eagles"

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them, so they knew what was coming up. Those two were not in the setlist that we gave them: we had a set-list, but we had excluded those two because they weren't out yet. But we played the two songs for them, so they knew what was coming.

When you recorded those songs, did you have a good idea in your head of what ABBA Voyage was going to look like; what the shows were going to be like?

No, not at that time, because we obviously had ideas and how everyone working on this were looking at it, especially Ludvig [Andersson, Benny's son] and Svana [Gisla, who, with Ludvig and Benny, co-produced the Voyage shows], and also Johan Renck [director, best known for his work on Chernobyl- as well as being one-time rapper, Stakka Bo] was involved in the beginning. We recorded I Still Have Faith In You three years ago. And he filmed a video, with stand-ins for us.

So, you have these two songs, they're incredible. Who was the first person to say, "Why don't we keep going"? 

Maybe me! It could be me! Then we spent another year after that, trying to come up with music, sending it to Björn, or he could come here to my office where I'm sitting now. I'd play it to him and then he'd write the lyrics. And then we maybe did  three or four songs, and when we had those, we were saying, "Well, maybe Universal Music would be happy if we made a whole album" - they needed to have something to sell when this was going to happen. That was good thinking, in a way.

Did Agnetha and Frida know you were continuing to write a whole album?

Yes, it was step-by-step: first the two songs and then another three or four, then the rest. So, they came here in three... not sessions, but during three periods. Maybe they spent a total of 10 days in the studio.

It was almost business as usual.

It was. That was the funniest thing of all. Once they came in and recorded the first two songs, they came into the studio, and it hit me that I hadn't really asked them if they could still sing! I thought they could, but we hadn't really talked about it. But they were getting into the studio, we were playing through the songs, and they had the lyrics - of course, I sent them before. They started to sing, and it was all like we were [last here] three weeks ago, although it was 40 years ago. Quite a nice thing. I think we felt the same, all four of us.

There are a couple of songs on Voyage that reference other ABBA songs. The most striking is the reference to SOS at the end of Keep An Eye On Dan. 

Yeah, that's on purpose.

You were clearly having fun.

We were. That was the only way to get through with this. We said from the beginning, "OK, we're going to do an album, we're not pop musicians anymore." I mean, we're 75 and older than that, even. There's no point in trying to emulate or keep on track with what's going on musically today, because we don't understand it. I could only do what I think: "This is a good tune, these are good harmonies, this is good, we'll keep that." It has to come from inside and not from what's going on around. In the 70s, it was different, because then we were trying to keep on track with what was going on. "Oh, there's a snare drum sound on Rod Stewart's latest single," things like that.

I wanted to ask you about that, because looking back at ABBA's years as a productive studio entity, I can see that you were taking notes on what was working for other successful artists - especially in the beginning - because in the early years, when you didn't know if you were going to have a successful pop career internationally, it was important that the music was commercially successful as well as artistically successful, right?

Well, yeah, I guess. Because once we were out there, once we had been in Brighton, winning the Eurovision Song Contest with a pop song, then we just said, "Well, now we need to start working; now we can work, because people know that we exist, all over Europe." But it's more a matter that you sit there, and you say, "Is this good or is it bad? Do we like this? Is this good?" If we both say yes, we keep it. If only I say yes, I'll play it to Björn again and again until he gives up. But normally Björn and I would be happy with the result. First when we wrote the songs and then once we were in the studio, and then it was me and Björn and [engineer] Michael [B. Tretow], all three of us... [we all had to be] happy with the final result. We didn't give up until we all were. It wasn't enough that I liked it, or Björn liked it, or Michael... That's the way it worked. Very Swedish.

If I listen to those pre-Arrival ABBA records, it's a bit like you're trying different styles and almost waiting to see what there's a public appetite for. So, a song like Another Town, Another Train, is very different to My Mama Said. It's almost like you're spreading your bets, just to see what catches fire.

That's something we learned from The Beatles. They were always with their style in a way, much more so than we were, but what they did was, you heard a song with them, then the next

single was nothing close to the previous one, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. At that time, you needed to have some diversity, no? So, you have Fernando, then you don't want another Fernando, you want a song like Dancing Queen or My Mama Said, or whatever on that album, to give it some listening value. And another great thing, I have to say, that goes for many of the bands that I like, is that you have more than one singer; it helps you. You have John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] or you have Fleetwood Mac, you have the Eagles: it's great to have two singers, because that makes a difference between the tracks as well.

You're huge fans of Phil Spector and also Brian Wilson. 

Oh, yes, especially Brian Wilson.

Did you recognise something of yourself in Wilson's obsessive attention to detail?

Yes, I do, but I can't compare with him. They [The Beach Boys] were in a different situation, they had three or four tracks to use, and when we finished, we had 32 tracks in the studios, which made it a little easier to do overdubs, to add things. I don't know how he did that, it's incredible. But it's more the heart of the songs. It's the way he treated them.

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"I THINK MAMMA MIA WAS WHEN WE REALISED, ‘THIS IS SPECIAL, NOW WE FIND OUT WHAT WE CAN ACHIEVE””

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What was the first song of yours that had "the ABBA sound"?

I think Mamma Mia was when we realised, "Well, this is special, now we find out exactly what can we achieve with a song if you work enough on it," you know? You're in the studio, and you see, "Oh, there's a marimba there, let's see if we can use it" - that's sort of special, there's not much marimba [in other pop songs]. But then also it was really arranged, you know? It wasn't just strumming along. Everyone was playing exactly the notes that were needed.

Around the same time, Money, Money, Money was also released. That's such a strange song. I remember as a child feeling frightened.

Ha, yeah?

Can you understand why?

Maybe it's because the bass is playing the melody line [sings]. It's almost like [the movie] Jaws! It's a funny song, that one. It's more like a ragtime tune for the piano.

The sentiments of Money, Money, Money were relevant to a lot of economic migrants who had left their native countries in the hope of getting a job that would allow them to return home someday. They're enduring years of hardship, delaying the gratification that their savings will one day allow them to enjoy. Is that Björn trying to put words to the feeling of the melody that you've given him?

Photo: Baillie Walsh

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Money, Money was one of the first lyrics he wrote for ABBA. Stig Anderson [manager] was writing the words to our first songs, and that changed with Fernando and Money, Money, Money. Stig wrote a Swedish version of that for Frida's [Anni-Frid Lyngstad's] solo album that I produced [in Stig's early lyric, the narrator is consoling the titular protagonist of Fernando, who has lost his lover]. Björn totally changed that. Over time, he realised there was no need for him to try to write lyrics before we knew what the backing track music was saying to him. So, we did the backing track, did some sweetening, did some overdubs to make it come close to what it would be like at the end, and then he would take it and see if it spoke to him or not.

The intro of Knowing Me, Knowing You is fascinating, because it grabs you immediately with very few notes: this very high keyboard and then the guitar in a much lower register – the sound of conflict. What do you remember about that?

I remember coming up with the verse, we had the chorus, and I think the verse is so special, kind of brilliant, because there are no notes, it's just [sings the minimal top-line of the verses]... it's very good.

And then you have that minor-to-major transition on the chorus, when Frida sings, "Knowing you," which is very dramatic. 

Yes, it goes from minor to major.

Let's talk about your band back in the day. You had this amazing rhythm section, and the rhythm section on songs like The Name Of The Game and Lovers (Live A Little Longer); they were almost like your own Muscle Shoals. You must have known, around the time of Voulez-Vous, that the band was on fire... 

Yeah. Especially Rutger Gunnarsson, the bass player. I've been around and walking into the pit for Mamma Mia, the musical, several times, in New York or London or whatever, I go down to the pit to say hi to the band, and everyone is talking about Rutger Gunnarsson. They find him the finest bass player in the world. He's dead now, unfortunately. They were all - Lasse Wellander and Ola Brunkert, the drummer - a solid band.

That bassline on The Name Of The Game is something else, isn't it?

Yeah, it's good. But the bass playing on Voulez-Vous or Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! all those songs, it's just incredible, because that comes straight from him. A normal bass player will play like [sings] and he will play [sings more notes, arranged differently] and you won't hear it. I don't know how he did that.

I would say that song for song, as a beginning-to-end experience, Voulez-Vous just about edges it over the other albums. Oh, you think? 

That's interesting.

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page 104 Record Collector

I wonder if in the same way that Brian Wilson would hear Rubber Soul and be inspired to write Pet Sounds, something similar happened with Saturday Night Fever and Voulez-Vous? 

Possibly, yeah.

Because the first sessions for the album saw you take a break from your base in Stockholm, Polar Studios, and use Criteria Studios in Florida, where the Bee Gees recorded most of their disco-era music. 

We did, because Björn and I were trying to have a week of songwriting in the Bahamas. And we said, "If we're down here, why don't we call [engineer] Michael Tretow and ask him to fly down and we go into the studio in Florida and record?" - which was a bad idea. It was a good band, someone brought some musicians together and there was nothing wrong with them, they were good, but it wasn't our band, you know? It was difficult to

communicate. Normally, we would come in, I'd play the piano, Björn would play the guitar, we would sing them the song with rubbish lyrics and I would write down the harmonies on a sheet of paper so they knew what they were doing; maybe start a bassline so they knew there would be a bass note, and then we just went from there. But meeting new guys and trying to explain to them or make them understand what we were after, that wasn't so easy. But I tell you one thing: [the song] Voulez-Vous we recorded down there, the original backing track. Well, we came home, and it's totally redone, so we got in Rutger and our guys to do what you hear is our band. But the original was done in Florida.

Is there a version somewhere with theAmerican musicians on it? 

I think they're credited still, because they were in it from the beginning. I don't know. It should be somewhere on a roll of tape.

In a parallel universe where Robert Stigwood had asked you to write the theme tune to Saturday Night Fever, Voulez-Vous would be that song.

But not as good as Stayin' Alive! Stayin' Alive is great. We were inspired by the Bee Gees, because suddenly they became another band. They were good, they did Massachusetts and all those songs in the 60s, then all of a sudden, they were back with a totally different approach. It had to do with...

[Producer] Arif Mardin? Yeah. I suppose he had something to do with that. And it was very inspiring.

I think Ahmet Ertegun, who was in charge of Atlantic, hooked them up with the musicians that could give them the confidence to reinvent themselves.

Yeah. Those were the days, when people in record companies had some musical instinct, not just handling money.

The impression I got when the Voyage show happened is that it was just something you wanted to do anyway. Finally, technology had caught up with the only way in which you were willing to "come back" - and that was to create a sort of time-travel experience. That way, you didn't have to compromise. 

Yeah, you're right. It gave us the chance to pretend to be pop guys again.

I was happy to see that Summer Night City made it onto the setlist for the ABBA Voyage shows. Does that mean that you like it a bit more these days? I had the impression that, for a long time, you weren't so happy with it. 

No, I wasn't so happy with the recording, because we had problems. We took away our long beginning. And it's very compressed. But I think it's a good tune. I have to say, in Voyage, that's the best moment, going from, in the disco section, Lay All Your Love On Me to Summer Night City. The whole stage becomes a totally different thing, and it's an amazingly beautiful design.

"WE MET JOHN CLEESE, AND SAID, 'WE'RE WRITING A MUSICAL, WOULD YOU WRITE THE BOOK?' HE SAID 'NO'!" 

Can I ask you about Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) and what Madonna did with it to create Hung Up? You must like it because you allowed her to do it.

Yeah. She didn't come [to Sweden], she sent her right-hand woman. She had to come because we said, "We're not going to say yes until we hear it." Then she said, "Well, I'll let you hear it, but I don't want to send it over via the internet, so I'll send someone with a CD." We listened to it in my room here, and I thought it was bloody great. So, we said, "OK," and split the copyright.

Madonna did an interview on the Song Exploder podcast recently where she talked about the process of writing it. She said she was nervous about the prospect of getting your permission: she loved it so much but couldn't bear the idea that you might not let her use it.

I can understand that, because it's such a vital ingredient in that song. If you swap that for something else, then it becomes something totally different. I think it was a clever thing to do.

You never wrote a Christmas song until ABBA Voyage: Happy New Year was the nearest you got. Happy New Year is a very beautiful song. It feels very Swedish.

Yeah, well, we are Swedish!

The sentiment is very fatalistic, with the suggestion that, in 10 years' time, the entire human race might have destroyed itself. 

It was written in Barbados. Björn and I went out for a week, to the same house that Paul and Linda McCartney hired a year before. I heard about this wonderful place, and I thought, "We must go there." We met John Cleese, by the way, in Barbados. We said, "We're thinking about writing a musical about New Year's Eve. Would you be interested in writing the book for that?" and he said, "No"! We didn't get any further with that idea. But we liked the song.

Let's talk about the title track of The Visitors. It's one of your most extraordinary songs - and, at the time, a brave departure from a recognisably 'ABBA' sound. In the ABBA Voyage shows, it's the first song. That's quite a statement.

That was Ludvig's idea. We had a list of maybe 30 songs, and we tried to think how would this be if we actually did it live, if we had that to play? So, we eliminated a couple of songs, and we added another one, and we had a setlist. And Ludvig was really [lobbying] for opening with The Visitors, and then Hole In Your Soul. And we said, "[Hole In Your Soul] is the song we used to end with, and now I think you should put it in the beginning." Listen to it. It's a good opening.

Most groups would have started with a huge hit. But by starting with The Visitors, it establishes a relationship. We meet you on your territory, quite a confident thing to do. 

Yeah, well, we knew that we had songs coming up.

Around that time, groups like The Human League were very vocal in their love of ABBA. Do you know their song Don't You Want Me? 

Yeah, yeah.

You know the intro is inspired by Eagle, right? 

No. I have never listened to it that way.

They admitted they got the idea from listening to Eagle. It is almost the same... 

Yeah, I'm going to listen to it.

How about Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello? The piano motif is inspired by

Dancing Queen... 

I didn't know that. I do know Elvis is very fond of SOS.

Oliver's Army was going to be a B-side when [keyboardist] Steve Nieve heard Dancing Queen and had the idea of doing a similar- sounding piano part throughout. At that point, they realised they now had an A-side.

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Cool, I like that. It's nice when what we do is inspiring other people. Like Brian Wilson inspired us, or Paul McCartney.

I hear Pete Townshend came up to you in a restaurant to tell you how much he loved your music... 

I like his music, too. We also have the Synclavier [synth] in common [walks across his studio to show us his Synclavier]. Pete Townshend and I both got them maybe 40 years ago. He also has a GX-1: the big Yamaha synthesiser that I use. He's also interested in the folk music side, so we have communicated a little.

The Day Before You Came is a song you're clearly fond of. You featured it on your 2017 solo album, Piano. I guess a lot of these songs must have started out that way. I interviewed Billy Joel in 2007 and he said all his songs start out as solo classical piano pieces, then he decides what sort of a pop song to make out of them. Have some of your songs started out like that?

Nowadays, everything [starts out that way]. Even in the earlier days. Some songs are sort of 'pianistic'. Not so much a song like Waterloo, not even Dancing Queen. But a lot of the other stuff is, you know, like My Love,

My Life or the songs I have on my piano album. Some of [ABBA's songs] are more pianistic and I didn't record them... But you're right, if it sounds OK when you sit alone at the piano, it's probably worth keeping.

What's an example of a song we know that would have started as a solo piano piece? 

SOS? They all started on the little old piano in Stockholm, where Björn and I used to sit, day after day.

Did you watch [Beatles documentary] Get Back? 

Oh, yes, the best documentary ever made. It's fantastic. Like a fly on the wall, you know? Wonderful. I've seen it twice.

It's the story of all bands, isn't it? 

In a way, I guess. 

What did you recognise about yourselves in it?

 I recognised a part of myself in Paul: he never gave up, constantly wanting to move things forward. Sometimes, nothing happens, but he keeps on feeding the band with stuff. I like that. I'm not saying I'm the same, but I recognise the method.

Just to see the song Get Back appear out of thin air was incredible, wasn't it? 

Yeah, wonderful. You never see these things. I've never seen that.

A lot of the responses to the ABBA Voyage shows were very emotional. Was that expected?

No. We did not know at all. That's the thing with all of this: you never know until afterwards. You write the song, how will it be after it's recorded, and once it's recorded, once it's out there? Will it be accepted for what we think it is, a bloody great recording? Or will people ignore it? No one ever knows. People think they know... people in the business. And it's the same with this. How about coming onstage as 'ABBAtars'? Of course we don't know [how it'll be received]: they don't know shit! No one knows until it happens.

Your son Ludvig talks about the ABBAtars. In the programme, he said they have an "emotional voodoo power". 

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know what he means? 

No! I don't, but maybe he's right. I have an interesting take on this, because I've seen a number of performances with an audience, and

(CIn transition: the band in their motion capture suits preparing to be turned into digital entities aka ABBAtars))

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before we had an audience at all, no one knew how they would react. Would they think that they were watching a film and that they weren't needed? Because normally, when you see an artist, you're there for them, you're there to show your enthusiasm for their music, or their artistry or their voices or whatever they're doing up there. In this case, we didn't know, but I think the audience recognises the fact that, OK, so we're not there, but we've made this for them, which is absolutely true. They don't have to lift us up, because we're not there; all they can do is absorb what we are trying to do for them. And I think that makes them... I don't know, relax.

You said you watched a few times: where Did the response to any particular songs surprise you? were you watching from? Were you among the crowd? 

Yeah, yeah, I was sitting just a couple of rows below the sound desk.

 So, you were watching people as much as you were watching the band?

Yeah, yeah.

That must have been amazing.

 It was. It was with only a third-full house, for invited people. Just to see that they were getting it, that and they were accepting what was going on, was such a tremendous relief, because then [we realised] it will work.

Did the response to any particular songs surprise you?

Don't Shut Me Down, because that's a new song, it hasn't had time to travel around for years. But they took to it, so that was good.

It sounds like a classic ABBA song, like it's always been there.

Yeah. I like it for its progress through the keys. You start in one key, you end up in a totally different one: I like that.

You held some songs back, didn't you? Isn't the set going to be changed at some point? 

Could be done. It would take some work for ILM [Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company with whom ABBA collaborated for the Voyage shows]. It's a million pounds a minute or something to make avatars of us. They have everything that we did two years ago here in Stockholm, when we were recording everything, doing the filming. We did a couple of other tunes as well [for the Voyage show], so they don't need us for that: they can just start working with the information they have. But we

shall see. We'll let this run for a while, so people have a chance to get their money back, the people who invested.

 This issue of Record Collector is going to feature a list of the 40 best ABBA songs. What do you think should be No 1?

I Still Have Faith In You.

Is that your favourite right now or do you feel that that's your all-time peak?

 It's because it represents who we are now, you know? It's not very commercial, it's not catchy, but it's quite intricate, a great lyric and a good recording. I'll put it there. And then maybe Knowing Me, Knowing You, Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, SOS, The Day Before You Came...

The thing with the Voyage album that people found moving is it felt like it was something you were doing for each other.

 It's absolutely true.

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"WE DO IT BECAUSE WE WANT TO DO IT, AND THE LADIES CAN STILL SING AND WE CAN STILL WRITE MUSIC"

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It felt like a private moment that we were being allowed to listen in on. That made it very different to any other reunion I can think being allowed to listen in on. 

Yeah. As I said earlier, we couldn't try to emulate what's going on nowadays, being modern, we could only do what we can do, and there's nothing to prove here. People probably will say, "Well, I think they were better in the 70s." So fine, maybe we were, but it doesn't matter, because this is what we do now, and we do it because we can and we want to do it, and the ladies can still sing, and we can still write music. This is what it becomes when you're 75 years old.

Tell us something about ABBA that no one knows.

Oh, boy. There's nothing to know! Nobody knows anything about us! They know what we've been doing, they know the records, they know the pictures, they know what we say in interviews, but they don't know anything about how [our personal] life is, which is quite conscious. They don't know I walk the dog in the morning and late at night, I go shopping for food, I cook every day, stuff like that. I live a normal life: I have always done.  I think that goes for nearly all of us. 

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Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson ABBA - Voyage 2022

Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson ABBA Voyage 2022

London

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Fecha de creación: 24 de mayo de 2022 Fecha de subida: 26 de mayo de 2022

ABBA Voyage

 

ABBA Shot Seven Hours a Day for Month to Get 'Voyage' Show Right

Martin KieltyMartin KieltyPublished: May 16, 2022 — Tiempo de lectura: 2 minutos

ABBA Shot Seven Hours a Day for Month to Get ‘Voyage’ Show Right

Evening Standard, Getty Images

ABBA spent seven hours a day for more than a month working on performance routines for their upcoming Voyage digital performance spectacular.

The four members wore motion-capture suits in front of 200 cameras with around 40 people behind the scenes, Benny Andersson told Rolling Stone. More than 1,000 staff workers from the movie-effects giant ILM were involved in putting the show together, while the custom-built ABBA Arena in London was redesigned three times to accommodate the 20 lighting rigs hung from the roof. The resulting “experience” will see the “ABBA-tars” of Andersson and his bandmates perform alongside real-life musicians with a 196-show run starting on May 27.

“It was really a pleasure for all of us,” Andersson said. “It’s been a lot of uphill. Brexit, the pandemic. It’s been a lot of stuff that hasn’t worked well, but we’ve been resilient.” Explaining that the original members’ movements were later emulated by younger performers to present ABBA in their heyday, he noted that "we are sort of merged together with our body doubles. Don’t ask me how it works because I can’t explain that! If you’re 75, you don’t jump around like you did when you were 34, so this is why this happened.”

He said of the results: “I see myself standing onstage, talking to you. It’s absolutely believable. It’s not unbelievable. It’s believable!” Touching on the fact that interest from new generations of ABBA fans made it possible to stage such a production, he reflected: “That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? It’s 40 years ago, and the corpse is still moving. I don’t know. Maybe it’s good enough. Maybe that’s the only answer.”

Andersson’s son Ludvig, a Voyage producer, was one of the team members who decided the usual kind of hologram projections weren’t good enough for what was envisaged for this production. “We hear often, ‘This is the dawn of a new era in live entertainment,’” Ludvig said. “I think that’s an incorrect statement. I don’t think it is. This is unique.”

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/abba-voyage-show/