Staff Writer Cruz Glynka visits the ABBA Arena to review the digital avatars, the live band and the show’s emotional arc that is ABBA Voyage.
You’ve probably seen the adverts by now, plastered across bus stops, tube escalators and billboards: four glowing silhouettes and the promise of “a concert like no other.” After months of walking past them, we decided it was finally time to see what all the fuss was about.
The ABBA Arena in Stratford, next to Pudding Mill Lane station, was constructed specifically to house ABBA and the elaborate visual technology behind them, looking like a cross between a spaceship and a very expensive tent.
If you want to actually dance, and you will want to, the standing area near the stage is where you want to be. Move into the crowd, and you’ll find yourself shoulder to shoulder with strangers who are, within minutes, singing at full volume and waving their arms like old friends. Sit further back instead, and you get a better vantage point on the lighting work, which sweeps and revolves around the entire auditorium.
The ABBA was created using motion capture, with the real Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid performing the movements and vocals that were then translated into digital avatars depicting the band as they looked in 1979. It’s a strange kind of time travel: nobody on stage is lying about being flesh and blood, but the illusion is precise enough that you catch yourself waving at Agnetha as she can see you.
The show opens not with a burst of colour but a hush: a dim, snow-dusted Scandinavian forest fills the screens, a sun sinking behind the trees, a deer picking its way through the frost before a lone figure appears, walking toward whatever comes next. It’s a strange, almost cinematic way to begin what is, at heart, a pop concert, and it makes the eventual eruption into the hits land even harder. There’s a moment, not long after, where you stop trying to figure out whether what you’re looking at is real.
The four avatars are standing right in front of you, reaching toward the crowd, gesturing their thanks, and a ten-piece live band is filling the arena with sound. Your brain gives up trying to categorise it as a concert, a hologram show, or a cinema, and just lets you enjoy it. Crucially, the avatars aren’t doing all the work; it’s the combination of pre-rendered visuals reacting in real time to musicians actually in the room that stops the show from feeling like watching a very expensive music video.
The show is structured less like a normal gig and more like a night out with a deliberate emotional arc. Expect plenty of big hits, with the audience blurting out the words the moment ‘Dancing Queen’ lands, an entire arena on its feet in seconds, swaying in near-unison. ‘Mamma Mia’ gets much the same treatment. Later, in the encore, ‘The Winner Takes It All’ is stretched out and reworked into something closer to defiance than heartbreak. Anyone who grew up on ABBA’s greatest hits compilations will recognise almost everything; anyone who didn’t will still recognise most of it, because that’s the peculiar power of this back catalogue.
If there’s one gripe, it’s that you can’t capture any of it. Staff patrol the crowd throughout, discouraging phones out during the show, and there’s no sneaking a video past them. There’s something to be said for being fully present rather than watching a gig through a four-inch screen, and the absence of the usual sea of raised phones is, in its own way, a relief. Still, it’s a shame there’s no way to keep a record of a moment like that for yourself, even as you understand exactly why they’re protecting the surprise for everyone yet to come.
ABBA Voyage shouldn’t work as well as it does. On paper, watching digital recreations of four Swedish septuagenarians as their 1970s selves sounds like it could be gimmicky, or worse, a bit sad. In practice, it’s disarmingly joyful. Part of what makes it work is ABBA’s rare intergenerational pull: this is one of the few live experiences you’re likely to see three generations of the same family venturing down to together, grandparents, parents and students all singing along to the same songs for entirely different reasons.
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