Having the time of your life

"Whatever sorcery this is, it works – and then some." - NME

Wow. There are few words that can adequately sum up the spectacle that is ABBA Voyage...

Housed in its own (flat-pack; easily transportable to another location) purpose-built 3000-capacity arena at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, East London, it has sold out to full capacity practically every night since opening in May 2022. And for very good reason.

Despite the band officially splitting up forty years beforehand, the popularity of ABBA continued unabated in the intervening decades - boosted by their songs being featured in films such as Muriel's Wedding, the continued strong sales for their Greatest Hits album, and (of course) the popularity of the Mamma Mia behemoth. I've said many times, love 'em or loathe 'em, everyone knows the words to all of their hits! And hits galore there were on Friday night, when John-John, Madam Arcati and I went along to see the show.

The air crackled with excitement around the arena (tiered seating and "dancefloor" standing-room alike), as (after one of several animated sequences that serve to break up the evening's "live" segments) the unmistakably dramatic opening bars of The Visitors boomed from the 291 speakers - and rising through the floor came the "Fab Four" themselves!

At this point, my heart almost stopped - there they were indeed, hair swishing, costumes sparkling, youthful and at the peak of their powers. Suspension of disbelief is an oft-used cliché, but in this case it truly fits. Everything is believable; the band's interactions, the dancing, the smiles, the hugs, the flirting, their sheer charm (even the hairs on Benny's arms) are all there to see, clear as day. Yet these are merely the product of an amazing trompe-l'œil, courtesy of the brilliance of CGI specialists Industrial Light and Magic (the brains behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe) - the result of a painstaking process of motion capture photography using 120 cameras and hours of dedication from Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Frida (each of them now in their 70s) - to convince us all that we had been transported back to 1979, watching them perform on stage.

"I was left with no idea what was real and what was not. This bears overstating: I literally could not believe my eyes." - The Standard

And what a performance! They crammed in hit after hit - "performing" SOS, Chiquitita, Fernando, Mamma Mia, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) "live", accompanied by their excellent real-life backing band (who had their own chance to shine, with an energetic rendition of Does Your Mother Know?). Knowing Me, Knowing You and Lay All Your Love on Me were projected, video-style, on the 65ft-tall screens that stretched as a panorama all around the walls (and on opaque giant discs suspended over the audience), and Eagle and Voulez Vous served as backing music for the continuing animated segments - hilariously explained away by "Bjorn" as "breaks for costume changes". [Each member of the band had a turn at addressing the audience, segments that just added to the hyper-realism of the experience.]

Adding to the theatrics, of course, was the extravagant and brilliant light-show - from hundreds of pin-spotlights dancing across the audience, to the spinning mirrors reflecting laser-beams, to the neon-lit stage and the climactic multi-coloured dancing rope-lights over our heads and across the entire room.

"...the most enduring pleasure of the whole endeavour is exactly how uncheesy Voyage is; how it is not a Madame Tussauds with go-faster stripes." - The Guardian

It wouldn't be an "ABBA concert" if they didn't take time to slow things down a little, and they cleverly segued the classic When All Is Said And Done into the two hits from their "reunion" album from last year (also called Voyage), Don't Shut Me Down and I Still Have Faith in You - which was in itself a bit of a mindfuck, for here was the "1979 ABBA" singing songs from decades later - before having a bit of a laugh and a joke about their 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winning appearance [at which, notoriously, the UK jury gave them nul points], with a projection of that very performance of Waterloo on opaque screens above the stage.

The audience, including us, was unanimously on its feet by this stage (of course) and, with a rousing sing-along on Thank You For The Music, it was inevitable that the finale would be that eternal crowd-pleaser Dancing Queen!

Of course, with the audience in a state of near hysteria, and the deafening applause, there had to be an encore - The Winner Takes It All. Then, as the youthful ABBA departed the stage came the biggest surprise of all - as the Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Anni-Frid of today took to the stage to thank the audience and take a bow!! Or did they..? [Nope. They, too, were CGI "ABBA-tars".]

It was one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, indeed...

ABBA Voyage - Official First Look Trailer

ABBAVoyage.com

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