We took a chance, and could have lost a pile of... money, money, money! ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus reveals how the £140m gamble the band took to create their breathtaking avatar concert almost backfired spectacularly
ABBA have sold more than 150m records since they won the 1974 Eurovision
They made a stunning comeback last year with their number one album Voyage
Band will never sing together again, but perform as digital 3D avatars in London
By COLE MORETON FOR WEEKEND MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED: 22:31 GMT, 11 November 2022 | UPDATED: 22:31 GMT, 11 November 2022
'This is it,' says Bjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA with a sigh, admitting there'll never be any more new music from the greatest pop band of all time.
'We did an album – and we never thought we would achieve that – but that's it. We're not going to do anything more.'
ABBA have sold more than 150 million records since they won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with Waterloo, and they made a stunning comeback last year with the album Voyage, which went to No 1 nearly three decades after they last topped the charts.
But while Bjorn is adamant that he, Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog will never sing together in a studio or live on stage again, they came up with an extraordinary, groundbreaking way to put on a show to accompany the album: digital 3D avatars of themselves – known as 'Abbatars' – performing in a purpose-built arena in the former Olympic Park in London.
'We took such a risk doing this,' says Bjorn with a half-smile. 'It could have been that people felt they were watching a video. That would have been terrible.'
He's not wrong. The ABBA Voyage concept took five years and £140 million to develop, so Bjorn was well aware they were gambling with a fortune. But more than that, their reputation as one of the best-loved bands in the world was also at stake.
'I felt it all in a very personal way,' he admits. 'I would have been so sad if it hadn't worked.
'I felt we were taking the risk that people would say, 'We had an image of them in our hearts, why did they have to ruin it?'
They made a stunning comeback last year with their No 1 album Voyage. While the band will never sing together again they came up the groundbreaking way to put on a show to accompany the album: digital 3D avatars of themselves
Demand for tickets to the opening night in May was huge, with resale sites flogging them for four times the face value at £475, but there were also dangerous early signs of a backlash, with comments on social media like, 'Why are the tickets so expensive? They're not even there!'
The four members of ABBA appeared in public together for the first time in 36 years at the premiere, which attracted the likes of Kylie Minogue and the king and queen of Sweden, but Bjorn confesses to having been very nervous beforehand.
'Would it work? Would the audience connect with what they were seeing? They did – and it was such a relief.'
There were gasps and tears of joy as the stars appeared to rise up into on stage, lifelike and convincing.
'This is not a museumpiece re-creation of ABBA in 1979,' says Ludvig Andersson, Benny's son and one of the technical brains behind the show. 'The moves, costumes and music are as if the younger ABBA were performing now, in the present day.'
People get very emotional when they see the show, there's something so moving about those four figures
They had to build their own 3,000-capacity arena to pull off this overwhelming spectacle. They're not holograms but images projected on a super-high resolution screen and surrounded by a live band, wraparound screens and state-of-the-art synchronised lighting so your senses really do believe it's the real ABBA, here and now.
'Some people get very emotional when they see it, because there's something so moving in those four figures coming up and looking as though they're there,' says Bjorn, 77, with pride. 'I get pulled into that emotion, even I think, 'I'm there!' when clearly I'm not.'
What was it like to see himself for the first time? 'Weird. But if I look at myself as a historical figure from the 70s and I tell his story, it's not so weird.
'So that's how I see my avatar now.' What would he say to his 70s self if he could? 'Don't worry so much. Try to see what's important and don't worry about the less important stuff.'
Do people still stop him in the street? 'You'd be surprised,' says Bjorn, who seems shyer than you might imagine.
'Even Paul McCartney can walk around the streets as people don't expect him to be there, so they just see an old man. It's the same thing with me,' he says. 'I'm an ordinary guy.
'In certain environments there's a certain respect, for which I'm humbled and grateful.'
The night before we meet he was at the O2 Arena to check up on the singalong dining experience Mamma Mia! The Party.
'People have such fun, it's amazing. They only realised near the end that I was sitting there,' he says, smiling at the love they showed him.
'It's a young audience. Two-thirds of them weren't born when we wrote those songs.'
Bjorn himself had two children, Linda and Peter, during his nine-year first marriage to Agnetha, and is now a grandfather. The pain of their divorce in 1980 was documented in several ABBA songs and there were rumours of acrimony between them in the years after the band split in 1982.
So is the reunion evidence that some kind of love endured? 'Absolutely. Benny and I worked on many projects together. Frida lives in Switzerland and New York but when she used to come to Stockholm we'd meet.
'Agnetha? Birthdays, Christmas. We'd meet and so we stayed friends. Our divorce was amicable, if a divorce can ever be amicable.
Two people who decide at the same time, 'Yeah, we should go our separate ways, you're right.' The fact we could work together again after so long was testimony to that.'
Bjorn married music journalist Lena Kallersjo in 1981 and they also have grandchildren together, but separated in February after 41 years. He made his first public appearance with a new partner, record company product manager Christina Sas who's 28 years his junior, just a few months later.
'We met after my wife and I decided to go our separate ways. Very quickly after that. It was unexpected but great, and I'm very happy.'
Bjorn, who's worth £260 million, has a house in Stockholm and another on an island outside the city, but no others. Is that because Sweden is the place that loves ABBA most? 'No, England loves us more than Sweden loves us, more than Germany and Australia and Canada and other places.
'So it's not that, but Stockholm is a very nice city to live in,' he says.
'It's not as big as London. It's not as crowded. There is not such a huge divide between poor and rich. And I was born there. It keeps my feet on the ground.'
Strange as it seems now, there was a time when ABBA were seen as totally uncool. 'I'd anticipated the dark 80s,' he says.
'When we took our pause from ABBA, I thought that was the end. I thought people would play the songs every now and then on the radio and would find reason to refer to us if they told something from the 70s, but we'd be irrelevant and forgotten. That's what happened.'
Then the band Blancmange had a hit with The Day Before You Came in 1984 and people remembered what great songwriters he and Benny were. ABBA also emerged as unlikely gay icons.
'It was very much the gay community who brought us out of the dark 80s. For some reason they found ABBA to be symbols.
'Maybe it was that we're Swedish and the outfits, but most of all it was that the music seems to be very joyous, very uplifting and made for celebration. A song like Knowing Me, Knowing You is desperately sad, but the ladies' voices make it a happy sad.'
Then there was Mamma Mia!, the stage show set on a Greek holiday island and based on their songs that opened in the West End in 1999 and is still going to this day. The movie starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan was a massive hit in 2008 and Cher stole the screen in the follow-up in 2018.
'Mamma Mia! was an experiment like ABBA Voyage,' says Bjorn. 'It paid off.
'The movie more than anything else has brought in a new generation. Mums play it and let their children watch, and the children get used to it and dance and so it goes on.'
Will there ever be a third Mamma Mia! movie? 'If you ask me, no. There are not enough songs left. We don't want to rehash Dancing Queen again. No!'
He's certainly the man to ask: nothing involving ABBA happens without Bjorn's approval. 'If someone comes up with a brilliant idea that's never happened before, I'm completely open-minded,' he says.
The idea for ABBA Voyage was born when former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller approached ABBA about putting on a show combining live music with holograms.
'We discovered the technology was not enough for us,' says Bjorn. 'It was old-fashioned, a circus trick. So nothing came of that.'
So instead they turned to Industrial Light & Magic, the geniuses behind Star Wars special effects. 'They are the most forward-looking in that field in the world.'
The four members of ABBA spent five weeks in a studio in Stockholm performing the moves, gestures and comments for the concert, their every motion captured in 3D by specialist cameras.
'Of course we had not performed together like that for 40 years. It was very emotional, but not as emotional as when we went back into the studio to sing.'
That was at Benny's place in Stockholm in 2019. 'That day was so strange and wonderful. We were standing there looking at each other and we were like, 'What the f***?'
'But it all came rushing back. It was like time didn't exist.' Was there a part of him that wondered if Frida and Agnetha could still sing?
'Yes, and I'm sure with them as well there was the thought, 'Can we do this?' But when the moment came, they put on their headphones, stood there face to face and started to sing. And it was ABBA. Maybe a tone lower, but still ABBA.'
With crowds flocking to the show, how long do they intend to keep it going? 'I hope it will become one of the attractions in London for many years,' he says.
'We chose London because there's such a wonderful infrastructure for this kind of thing, the best in the world: talent, technology, everything. And I love working here as well.'
ABBA Voyage is booking until May 2023 at the ABBA Arena, London. Best availability from January 2023, see abbavoyage.com
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