INTERVIEW
Face to face with Bjorn and Benny — by an Abba superfan
What is it like going to watch Abba Voyage in the company of the legendary Bjorn Ulvaeus? Or having a songwriting masterclass with Benny Andersson in his Stockholm studio?
Bjorn Ulvaeus, right, 77, and Benny Andersson, 75, in Stockholm
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
Pete Paphides
Friday December 02 2022, 2.30pm, The Times
‘You don’t believe me? Here. Let me show you.” The voice over the loudspeaker at Abba Voyage, here in the purpose-built Abba Arena in east London, has just told us to take our seats as the performance is about to begin. And here next to me is Bjorn Ulvaeus smirking inscrutably. Stepping outside the Departure Lounge bar, into a swarm of Abba fans, the co-creator of Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, SOS and every hit that will trigger a collective landslide of emotions merges with the melee. And here’s the thing. No one – not the mojito-wielding Agnetha and Frida lookalikes wearing replicas of the pair’s orange and blue satin cat dresses; not even a quartet of stack-heeled Bjorns – will recognise Actual...
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HERE THEY GO AGAIN! (HOW CAN WE RESIST THEM?)
Hanging out with Abba's Bjorn and Benny
Interview by Pete Paphides
FACE TO FACE WITH BJORN AND BENNY
- by an Abba superfan
What is it like going to watch Abba Voyage in the company of the legendary Bjorn Ulvaeus? Or having a songwriting masterclass with Benny Andersson in his Stockholm studio? Pete Paphides finds out
'Y The voice over the loudspeaker at Abba Voyage, here in the purpose-built Abba Arena in east London, has just told us to take our seats as the performance is about to begin. And here next to me is Bjorn Ulvaeus smirking inscrutably. Stepping outside the Departure Lounge bar, into a swarm of Abba fans, the co-creator of Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, SOS and every hit that will trigger a collective landslide of emotions merges with the melee. And here's the thing. No one - not the mojito-wielding Agnetha and Frida lookalikes wearing replicas of the pair's orange and blue satin cat dresses; not even a quartet of stack-heeled Bjorns - will recognise Actual Bjorn, soberly dressed in polo neck and blue Hugo Boss suit just to the left of them. As we peel away from whatever the collective noun is for four Bjorns and take our places for this year's most fêted pop resurrection, he leans over and says, "What did I tell you?"
Whatever 2022 had in store, I had no earthly reason to imagine that (a) going to an Abba concert with, um, one of Abba would be on the menu; and (b) I'd end up losing a bet with him (it was £10, but he graciously declines payment). "Being old is a weird sort of superpower," Bjorn, 77, explains. "You're just another old person. No one really looks at old people. Even here, no one sees me. I mean, they see me but not really."
In 90 minutes, they'll finally see him. But it'll take a spotlight directed at the box from which Bjorn has been watching the show along with an announcement telling us that one of Abba is actually here - for that to happen. What happens before then is, well, it's a lot to take in. Alongside a live band, all of whom had yet to be born in 1982 * when Abba called it a day - a seemingly three-dimensional Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid swoosh around in a cascade of sequins and satin, gazing tenderly at each other as they navigate the rawest sections of break-up post mortems The Winner Takes It All and When All Is Said 2 and Done. And all the time, Bjorn stands beside his more animated partner, Christina Sas, and stares at the spectacle with a quizzical, Spock-like countenance. It's like he's not the real one.
How are you feeling right now, I ask Bjorn, after a particularly harrowing Chiquitita. You seem unmoved, I say.
"Well, what do you expect me to do?" He punches the air and mock-bellows, "Chiquitita, you and I cry? Come on!" That's reasonable. Besides, he has his alter ego to do that. And wasn't that surely the point of all this?
Four weeks later I'm in Stockholm, where even in their hitmaking heyday - Abba were always able to walk down the street without attracting attention. And to understand why, we need to familiarise ourselves with the concept of jantelagen (law of Jante), which revolves around the idea that no one-no matter how famous or popular - is better than anyone else. In Sweden, jantelagen acts as an ingrained repellent to celebrity culture. This presents something of a contradiction when you're Abba and your roll of honour stretches to nine British No I singles, more than 300 million worldwide record sales, a globally successful theatrical franchise (Mamma Mia!)
and two Hollywood spin-offs. At Abba the Museum, a short boat trip from the group's waterside HQ and Benny Andersson's neighbouring RMV studio, this tension between the requirements of superstardom and the law of Jante is detectable in some of the exhibits.
In fact, at times, it's almost as if Abba are trolling it. Behold a painstakingly detailed recreation of their late manager Stig Anderson's office. Is there anything exceptional about Stig Anderson's office? Not really - and you rather sense that might be the joke. It looks like it could be anyone's office in the Seventies. Some years after the museum opened, Benny's 40-year-old son and Voyage producer, Ludvig, noticed that clearly visible in the open pages of Stig's notebook was his dad's home phone number, "which, even today, is still his number. It hadn't occurred to anyone to check."
As I approach the studio after a morning at the museum, Benny is alighting from his car, a tiny electric Daddy Pig car. He points to the huge window through which you can see the white Minimoog keyboard on which he first played the baroque arpeggiations that take you into the chorus of SOS, a song that so moved the Who's Pete Townshend that he once interrupted Bjorn in a London restaurant to sing his praises.
Already inside is Bjorn, who greets Benny, 75, with a nod as he comes in. Lunch has been ordered - burger for Benny; salad for Bjorn. There's a stylist on hand for the photos, with suits for both of them. Bjorn mulls over his choices, while Benny elects to wear the clothes he already has on. They don't strike you as especially alike, these two - a difference that runs along extrovert/introvert lines. Later today, Bjorn will head to a reception at the British ambassador's residence in Stockholm, where he will introduce Abba Voyage to key
travel and corporate travel personnel, journalists and influencers from Sweden. By contrast, Benny's plans for the evening involve going home to make spaghetti carbonara for his wife of 40 years, TV presente Mona Norklit, and their grandchildren. His views, if pushed, are left-leaning and feminist
- feminist, he says, inasmuch as, "If you notic a discrepancy of equality between the sexes and you try to do something about it, then that's a feminist." Ahead of the 2009 Swedish election, he campaigned for and donated $125,000 to the Feminist Initiative party. Today, he makes a point of expressing his disappointment with the current season of The Crown, which he feels is "a bit misogynist All of a sudden it's all about Philip and Charles and the princes. It doesn't feel right to me
It's a relief, Benny says, that Bjorn seems to relish being the custodian of Abba's legacy with all the schmoozing that goes with that, because it frees Benny to do the only thing be really wants to do every day - and that's to s at his piano and try to come up with a tune that excites him. And yet, he will proudly
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point out that the pair have never fallen out in the 56 years they've known each other. "He's more like a brother. He can do what he likes and it's up to him, you know? If I say a silly thing somewhere, he doesn't care, and if he does the same, I don't care either. We're totally independent of each other in that way, and having the history we have is a bond that doesn't break."
It's a history whose beginnings are steeped in a peculiarly Nordic kind of bathos. Before Abba were Abba, they were a supergroup of sorts. Bjorn had played campfire folk with the Hootenanny Singers; with the Hep Stars, Benny had been a bona fide pop pin-up. Agnetha Fältskog was already a star in Sweden when she married Bjorn in 1971; a year previously, Norwegian-born jazz vocalist Anni-Frid Lyngstad started dating Benny. But in the new decade, they were eking out a living performing comedy revues in
Swedish restaurants. "I remember one sketch in which Benny and I dressed as schoolboys with propellers on our caps."
When we look back at footage of their 1974 Eurovision performance with Waterloo, it's framed by the knowledge of their subsequent victory and everything that followed. In fact, it's perhaps closer to the truth to say it was an act of desperation, and one they strategised rather like a master criminal might plan a jailbreak or a heist - well aware that this might be their only chance to broadcast their existence to the world beyond Sweden.
Other artists innovated, but Abba were expert assimilators, looking to see what was big that year and then improving on it. Together with the engineer Michael Tretow, the objective Abba set themselves with Waterloo was to muscle in on the territory of glam-rock brickies Slade and the Sweet: "We wanted to pack Waterloo with the same energy as
something like Ballroom Blitz. It's all energy. energy, energy." By way of illustration, he roars the guitar part like a revving motorbike. As for Eurovision itself, Bjorn's recollections
are bittersweet. He remembers getting the bus from the hotel to the venue in Brighton and having to stand because his trousers were so tight. "When I watched back the footage, I realised I was now a pop star and I would have to lose weight." With visible pride, he adds, "And I managed to do so without using those pills that some of the other musicians were taking."
By so carefully masterminding their ascent, Abba inevitably incurred the wrath of jantelagen. Swedish broadcasters and newspapers snapped into line with the left-wing progg movement, which defined itself against capitalism and commercialism. The progg wars climaxed on the first anniversary of Abba's Eurotriumph. While one television channel aired the 1975 event live in Stockholm, the other main channel hosted an "alternative festival". One song, performed by members of the Swedish National Theatre went: "Here come Abba in clothes made of plastic as dead as tinned herring, they also don't care about anything except to make quick cash."
Abba's riposte, it has to be said, was pretty cool. For their next, self-titled album, they posed for the sleeve in the back of a Rolls- Royce, sipping champagne as onlookers peered through the windows. For all that, the perception of Abba as pop theoreticians working to a formula is a lingering bone of contention. "If that's the case, then what's the formula that connects SOS, Mamma Mia, Fernando and Dancing Queen? There isn't one. We didn't see ourselves as a 'factory'. But sure, we loved pop- and we took it seriously. Perhaps that's what offended some people' I tell Bjorn that when I was seven, the
reason for my fascination with them outside of their imperious run of hits was down to two co-existing dynamics within the group. You had the melancholy, maternal gaze of Agnetha contrasted against Frida, platonic ideal of the childminder who always lets you stay up past your bedtime. But for this fan, Benny and Bjorn carried a certain mystique. They ruled pop in the same way as fellow Swede Bjorn Borg ruled tennis - with icy insouciance. Interviewed on Noel Edmonds' Swap Shop, they seemed less like pop stars and more like visiting salesmen from a plastic mouldings company seeking to secure an order for 6,000 office chairs. And yet how were these sober, sensible, placid men responsible for creating Dancing Queen, a song that scales such vertiginous heights of euphoria to ache so exquisitely? "I just remember working really hard on it," says Benny. "But actually, that's only half the answer. Really, so much of the magic of
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what you hear is in the girls' harmonies. A soprano singing with a mezzo-soprano. If you were looking for technically perfect harmonies, you wouldn't go for that combination." If it were perfect, I suggest, it would sound
less than human. But Dancing Queen sounds like two halves of a heart trying not to break. Benny makes a noise that I take to mean agreement, but as he's removing a tobacco pouch from his mouth at the same time, I can't be entirely sure.
Bjorn's recollections of Dancing Queen are more detailed. The same day, they had also finished work on Fernando. Bjorn drove to his sister's house, where they played it over and over again. Even now remembering that evening, he seems lost in the rapture of that moment. "Both songs, absolutely... Oh, you wouldn't believe it. They sounded so good."
"I used to see pictures when I heard Benny's melodies," adds Bjorn. "I still do, in fact. When I first heard the music for Knowing Me, Knowing You, I just saw a house being emptied. Boxes piled against the walls. The furniture being removed. Someone walking around those rooms, remembering the past."
Over the years, people's determination to believe that the song was about his divorce from Agnetha suggests that it feels too true not to be about something that really happened. And yet, says Bjorn, "That year, we had our second child. We were happy together, and I'd never gone through anything like a divorce. But I had read novels; I'd watched movies."
I mention the famous story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. Observing Hoffman in method mode, Olivier suggested, "My dear boy, why don't you try acting?" Bjorn erupts with laughter. "Exactly! That's spot on! 'Why don't you try fiction, my friend?"
During their imperial years, Benny and Bjorn's obsessive pursuit of the next hit seemed to supersede all other considerations, perhaps even their marriages. "We were set to 'receive' the whole time," recalls Bjorn, and he's not exaggerating. Thank You for the Music came to Benny in the middle of a dinner party at Stig Anderson's house. "There was a little piano under the stairs," remembers Benny, "and it all came out. Possibly the quickest one I've ever written." A keen runner, Bjorn got the intro to Take a Chance on Me from the "t-k-ch" sound his feet made as they pounded the pavements of Stockholm.
Nightclubs suddenly became laboratories for future releases. As they made deeper incursions into disco with Voulez Vous and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight), they took test pressings of key songs to Alexandra discotheque in Stockholm and monitored the reaction on the dancefloor to see if their È attempts to beat the Bee Gees and Donna Summer at their own game had worked. In
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'THE GHOSTS ARE NOT JUST WHAT YOU SEE ON STAGE. THEY'RE ALL THE STORIES AND MEMORIES'
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2005, the power of Gimme! Gimme Gimme! would once again be utilised when it formed the basis of Madonna's Hung Up. Benny remembers Madonna's assistant personally bringing her song on a USB stick, seeking permission to sample the Abba track: "We played it and said, 'Yeah, bloody great! Half of the copyright and you're good.' Then they came back with a counteroffer. They said, 'Who's going to pay Stuart [Price, co-writer and producer]? I said, 'That's up to you now.""
Meanwhile, anyone with a radio and a basic grasp of English couldn't fail to notice the themes that were starting to consume Bjorn. A tendency that started with Mamma Mia and SOS - songs narrated by women being sent into a tailspin by the vicissitudes of men - was now finding its fullest expression in a string of later Abba gems, such as Angel Eyes, Lay All Your Love on Me and One of Us. I suggest to Bjorn that when it's your wife singing these songs, the line between empathy
and sadism feels like a fine one. Especially when, in the case of The Winner Takes It All, your real-life marriage is now falling apart.
A smiling Bjorn rolls the question around his mouth like a vintage barolo. "Lots of empathy, I think. Men are, you know, the eternal torment for women in many cases. When I write stuff like that, I am a woman. I don't think of myself as a man in those situations. Er, which is strange." He pauses, just to check that's really how it is. "Yes, I am a woman when I write it. It sounds strange, but that's how it works."
Forty-two years on, he still emits a shiver when he recalls the day he presented the others with the words to The Winner Takes It All. Raw from his separation from Agnetha, he didn't need to lean on his imagination quite so much this time. Famously, he emboldened himself to write it with the aid of red wine. "I came in the next morning with sheets of paper where I'd neatly handwritten the lyric. Then we went into the control room. Agnetha started to half-sing the words over the backing track and, oh, it was such a moment! All of us were so moved. We were standing around and just went through it the first time, and I'll never forget that. There were moist eyes all round. Because we felt, oh wow, this is something out of the ordinary"
for seven years, they were untouchable. By the end of 1932, it was over. They never announced it but, although I was only 13, watching Benny Bjorn. Agnetha and with her now iconic post divorce punk hairdo - Frida, reluctantly bunching up on Noel Edmonds sofa for one final promotional interview on The Late Late Breakfast Show, even I figured it out. Speaking "hypothetically" about the moment it would be time to disband, Bjorn pondered, "When we were recording an album we would feel it's not fun any more." Benny shot back, "We should have done that a long time ago." And although subsequently hailed as a masterpiece of Scandi pop noir, the sombre six-minute single they were there to promote, The Day Before You Came, effectively acted as their suicide note. "Maybe, with hindsight, we took that too far," reflects Bjorn now.
In separate conversations with Bjorn and Benny, I've noticed a note of... well, if not irritation, then let's call it sadness creep in when they talk about their late manager Stig Anderson. Benny feels that the image Stig attempted to perpetuate for himself - as the canny dealmaker behind Abba's rise - had a negative impact on the group. Bjorn mentions the fire sale-like speed with which Stig licensed out the group's catalogue in the wake of their split. For a while it seemed that all Abba were good for was petrol-station shelf space alongside all the other badly designed budget- priced CD compilations of forgotten Seventies bands; a punchline to a never-ending gag about the decade that style apparently forgot.
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Only when Benny and Bjorn took control of their legacy in 1992 and sanctioned the release of Abba Gold did the rumblings of a resurrection start to occur. Perhaps because it would go on to become the second biggest-selling album of all time in the UK (only Queen's Greatest Hits surpasses it), it's tempting to think that Abba Gold was always going to be a runaway success. In fact, it was market-researched into existence. Asked if they'd consider buying it, focus group participants said they might, but only if there were no photos of Abba on the sleeve - hence its plain black artwork featuring little more than the Abba logo. Not quite the equivalent of a brown paper bag, but not far off either.
If they were sensitive to derision, you could hardly blame them. In the same year, Kurt Cobain of the all-conquering Nirvana proclaimed himself a fan, inviting Australian tribute act Bjorn Again to open for his band. The real Bjorn tentatively voiced his approval, but took mild umbrage at their insistence on addressing their audiences with comical Swedish accents. Other developments in 1992, however, gave them greater reason to believe that their story was far from over. Erasure topped the British charts with an EP of Abba covers; and soon afterwards, in Australia, where Abba had experienced adulation on a par with Beatlemania, two films that featured the group's music, Muriel's Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, would go on to become cult classics. Perhaps best of all, when U2 brought their Zooropa tour to Sweden, the first people they contacted were Benny and Bjorn. "We were invited backstage and Bono said they were playing Dancing Queen - did we want to join them? Sure, I said, and they produced a keyboard that was the size of a melodica - it only had about 12 keys. Impossible to play, but I did anyway. And Bjorn played acoustic guitar. That was, what? Thirty years ago? Jesus Christ."
"That was when the offers to reform started," recalls Bjorn. "But I just felt in my gut -I think we all did - that this wasn't the way to go." I point out that, without this reticence, the phenomenon of the jukebox musical might not exist. After all, wasn't Mamma Mia! created as a means of keeping these songs in spaces where people can celebrate them? "Well, by that time, we'd been working in musical theatre doing Chess and working on (their Swedish musical saga] Kristina fran Duvemal for ten years. So when [Mamma Mia! playwright] Catherine Johnson presented us with the story, it was..."
Here we go again?
"Very good," he grimaces.
As Bjorn submits himself to the stylist ahead of the photos, Benny suggests we head over to 2 the music room where he spends most of his
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OH GOD. I'M ABBA-SPLAINING ABBA TO ONE OF ABBA. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES
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days. On his piano, a framed photo of Agnetha and Frida means that whenever he plays, they are constantly in his field of vision. With his band Benny Andersson's Orkester, he's the only member of Abba who still records and performs with any regularity. Is he ever tempted to turn up to one of the Voyage shows and relieve the keyboard player of their duties for one evening? "Yeah, I could, but it would be confusing, wouldn't it? Two
Bennys on two keyboards, heh heh." Or perhaps one of the various performances of Mamma Mia! taking place at theatres around the world? In the orchestra pit where no one can see him? "Oh yeah, so what would be the point? I have my band, and the only reason I have a band... It's always nice to come here, but it's a bit lonely. So I decided that playing together with other musicians is such a joyful thing and if I have the opportunities to do it, then... Because otherwise, it's just sitting here trying to find the next tune. Sometimes it can take days."
Benny picks up on something I said earlier today, when I asked him about the songwriting process with Bjorn - whether he leaves space for Bjorn to create a melody line for the lyric. "I know that some writers build a song from the bottom up, but I've never done that. I build down from the melody. If you don't have a melody, you don't have anything."
By way of illustration, he plays the first few notes of Mozart's Piano Concerto No 21 in C major. "How would you get to that from a backing track?" A mini songwriting masterclass ensues. He sits at the piano and plays a sparse but intensely pretty ballad that he plans to submit to Bjorn, who still supplies lyrics for a couple of songs on each Orkester album.
"That's how they all start," he explains, before firing up a computer screen on which are displayed all the individual parts that make up Don't Shut Me Down, one of the first
new songs they wrote for the Voyage project - a lyric that Bjorn will later tell me he wrote about an Abbatar knocking at the door of the fans and asking them to accept her as she is now, in this shape and form. On Benny's screen are 48 individual tracks, perhaps more, each one helping to bear the melodic weight of a song that seems to contain more hooks than an angler's satchel. Momentarily, he isolates the string parts and the emphasis
of the song is transformed into overlapping sighs of pure longing. Then he moves across to the piano and plays the melody from which everything else sprang. Perhaps sensing that I can't find the words to describe what I'm feeling, he helpfully points out, "It keeps shifting key in a way that you don't notice. So
your emotions are constantly fluctuating." But then, I suggest, isn't that often the way with Abba songs? Simple on the surface and yet you never quite know where you are? Does Take a Chance on Me even have a chorus? "Sure it does," says Benny, singing the "If you change your mind..." bit.
That's surely the verse? "No, that's the chorus. The verse is the, 'We could go dancing...' bit."
But that feels like more of a middle eight, no? "Hmm... maybe. But then, what about the actual middle eight?"
Oh God. I'm Abba-splaining Abba to one of Abba. This is why you should never meet your heroes.
The next morning, with three hours remaining before my flight home, I receive a call from Abba's manager, Gorel Hanser. And the reason? Cracker bread. I had mentioned to Benny that when I last came here in 2002, I noticed some giant discs of cracker bread on the kitchen table. It turns out that back in 2013, the local cracker-bread bakery, Skedvi Brod, faced the threat of being bought out by a larger conglomerate. Benny - unable to bear his cherished cracker bread disappearing
made a reported six-figure donation that allowed them to continue independently. "They had even smashed up the old ovens," he exclaims, aghast even now. If Bjorn sees being old as his superpower, it seems that Benny's superpower is the ability to save his favourite artisan baked goods from extinction.
When I arrive back at the studio, Bjorn is picking up Benny's latest batch of melodies and to everyone's shock - news of this year's American Grammy nominations has landed, with Abba named in four categories. Incredibly, these are the group's first Grammy nominations - they didn't even figure in this year's Swedish Grammys. Asked if they plan to go to the ceremony, both agree that they "might" if they find out they're "definitely gonna get one".
It's been a year now since the release of Voyage an album the existence of which
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had remained a secret until the September evening Benny and Bjorn flew to London to unveil the exact form that Abba's return had taken. There had been talk of two new songs and some sort of virtual show. But when it came, the announcement wildly surpassed those expectations. Not only had they somehow recorded an entire new album, but they'd built a dedicated venue next to the Olympic Park in east London where the show would happen. The Abba Arena was hardly hidden - its hexagonal steel and timber structure had clearly been visible to anyone who boarded the DLR train from Stratford for their daily commute.
How do you keep a secret like that? You do it in a place where no one pays any attention to you. Early in 2021, ILM - the visual effects company founded by George Lucas-built an entire studio in Stockholm where every day for four weeks, the four members of Abba would dress in special motion-capture suits and perform the songs that would comprise the setlist at the Voyage shows. Gazing on were approximately 150 visual effects experts for whom Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Frida would have to move, sing and, most importantly, emote their best-loved hits several times over, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
"We agonised over the tiniest of details," recalls show producer Svana Gisla, who had previously worked alongside Chernobyl director Johan Renck and David Bowie in the singer's final months on the videos for his Blackstar album. "Which version of Abba are you going to see when you turn up? In the end we went for 1979 Abba, but a version of 1979 that works in 2022. Bjorn's hair isn't exactly like it was before. We called it the Kings of Leon hair. But then Benny said, Oh, that's ridiculous. Why does he have to have, like, a cool hairdo? Why can't we just look like we did?""
To keep up the energy levels of a group whose collective age was 296, the producers arranged special Waterloo or Fernando days where staff - "Everyone from the animators to the dinner ladies" - would attend in song- appropriate fancy dress. A huge amount of activity. And still, somehow, no one noticed. That remained the case even when a trickle
of new songs turned into an album. On any given day anyone could have peered inside the large windows of Benny's studio and seen Benny and Bjorn running Agnetha and Frida through their vocals and witnessed the beginnings of the reunion Abba insisted could never happen. But no one did. The law of Jante forbids that sort of behaviour. The first two songs written by the pair when they first committed to the shows were I Still Have Faith In You and Don't Shut Me Down. When Benny handed Bjorn the
music for I Still Have Faith In You, Bjorn knew exactly what the song would be about. "Of course, it's about the four of us," he explains, "but it's about other things as well. It's about unions in general... As a matter of fact, I thought about Brexit and about Europe. Crass as it may be, it's a beautiful thought, the European Union."
As an avowed anglophile who spent his immediate post-Abba years in Henley-on- Thames, Bjorn has been watching recent political developments over here with some concern. Does it look a bit like we've spent the past few years having a collective nervous breakdown?
"Well, we read about prime ministers coming and going," says Bjorn, "but how Brexit feels for the British is very hard for us to judge from here." Benny is rather more frank. "I think
it looks like you're in trouble, that's what
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I think it looks like." Demonstrating that his knowledge of the Napoleonic wars doesn't just stop at Waterloo, Benny adds, "But you've dealt with that before. You won at Trafalgar; you'll be fine!"
By all accounts, recording the album was a breeze. "The girls started to sing and it was like we were [last here] three weeks ago, not 40 years ago," says Benny. The sleepless nights came with the very real possibility that the resulting spectacle at the Abba Arena - total bill: £140 million - might turn out to be an act of vast hubris.
"That was the worst scenario," agrees Bjorn. "The guys from ILM kept reassuring us that it's going to be OK..."
"But, you know what?" says Benny. "They don't know either. No one ever really knows. Back in the day, you'd put out a new song and you'd think, will it be accepted for what we think it is - a bloody great recording? And people around you think they know, people in the business, but really, they don't have a clue what the public will think. Similarly, how were people going to respond to the Abbatars? No one knows shit until it happens."
They know now, of course. What nobody could adequately describe beforehand was brought closer by the astonished reviews that followed the Voyage premiere on May 26. "If only it were acceptable to begin reviews with the brain exploding emoji," began the London Evening Standard review - while The Times
proclaimed the spectacle was "out of this world". NME, though not a journal usually known for its championing of Abba, gasped, "Their movements, their shadows, their clothes, the way the sequins shimmer in the light... How can this not be real?"
Joining us in the kitchen of Abba's HQ, Ludvig says that if we want to understand why the experience of the Voyage show feels so overwhelming at times, we have to "park the binary of real and not real. When you see them singing Knowing Me, Knowing You, the way they look at each other, the body language, the emoting... If you'd been in that studio in Stockholm, that's what you would have seen. What's different is the... augmentation - the sense that you've stepped out of linear time. And we had no way of knowing if people were really going to react that way when the show opened."
Voyage director Baillie Walsh tells a story about Jalena, a friend who took her elderly mother "who is fairly far down the line with Alzheimer's" to see the show. "The mum now barely speaks and spends most of her time in her own world to the extent that Jalena didn't even know if she should take her. When the show started, her face lit up and she started dancing. Her mum hadn't been so animated for years. Just for an evening she felt as though she had her old mum back."
And the more I think about this story. I remember an exchange we had when I first interviewed Benny and Bjorn 20 years ago. Back in 2001, the four had been offered $1 billion to reform for a tour. Bjorn's response? "I could imagine the looks on the faces in the audience as they realised we had grown old." I didn't quite get it then, but I do now. It turns out that his understanding of what people want to see when they go to an Abba show in the 21st century was perhaps more evolved than anyone else. If you're one of the 738,000 fans who have so far made the journey here, you'll know how it feels to see spirits of pop past shimmering in red and blue sequins, gazing out beatifically from the disco Vatican they've built for themselves. And, in its own way, this also explains why Bjorn can enjoy such anonymity at what is essentially a cathedral of Abba.
"If you build the right machine," says Bjorn, "and you build it well, then you may be able to release the ghosts. And those ghosts are not just what you see on stage. They're all the stories and memories that come with them."
And the music, I say. "Yes, and the music. That was pretty good too."
Abba Voyage is now booking until November 2023, only at the Abba Arena in London. For information and ticket availability, visit abbavoyage.com
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