two months pass...
Ok so I was firmly in the sceptic camp, my son had been and loved it but I often think he's a bit uncritical of music and events and we have divergent tastes and (like my daughter) I had concerns about the direction it took live music in.
So I resolved myself I wasn't in love enough with the idea to go to London for it but when we ended up there for something at the BFI then it felt like something worth doing.
I wasn't sure I done the right thing, as the next door popup bar was wall-to-wall beveragino/live laugh love and an expensive prosecco bar being the centre of the inside concourse surrounded by people in generic '1970s' fancy dress (although the ticket was explicit about which elements of that were offensive and not tolerated) made it clear what the target audience was.
The concourse is wood panelled and looks vaguely like a stereotype version of a sauna but works quite well in making it feel less like a generic stadium and more like an intimate show. For floor standing (the "dancing zone") there's a tunnel with a handily placed bar in it then through to the hall. Which is much, much smaller than expected. Looking round it actually feels... intimate? There's an animation of some woods on a big screen and occasionally you can spot someone or something running about which seems more frequent as the house lights go down.
Spoiler tags for the show content as anyone who is curious and/or able to go - and I don't know whether there's a plan to move it anywhere - might want to stay unspoiled.
Starting with The Visitors is a bold move that throws the audience, many of whom seem not to know the song at all. The Abbatars rise from through the floor in silhouette during the autotune/quartertone intro section but with "now I hear them moving" the stage lights come on and we're away. I'm a child again and I'm watching Abba on stage and my emotions get the better of me and I'm a blubbering mess.
Hole In Your Soul is an unexpected blast, with SOS finally bringing the crowd into familiar territory and properly engaging them.
KMKY follows and is the first song not performed by the Abbatars. Superficially this seems to be so the film can replicate parts of the video but the reason is far more prosaic - the longer they are on stage the less convincing they are, or rather you begin to see them as flat from time to time, and your eyes clearly need a break. But in this case it's well worth doing as there's one scene where Benny and Frida are so in love (more than they ever managed in the video at the time) which makes their breakup a few seconds later utterly heartbreaking and prompts emotions #2 from me.
Then, I'm afraid, the bar called. Chiquitita and Fernando are songs I've never liked (even if the crashing sun behind the latter improves things when I pretend it's Lars Von Trier's Melancholia) but I'm clearly an outlier because these are the best received songs of the whole night, which does make me wonder if I've accidentally booked the Brotherhood of Man fanclub night by mistake. Mama Mia rescues things somewhat though it's preceded by the first part of clunky audience interaction as Frida introduces it. These feel a bit staged - they get one each - but actually if there's one thing BBC4 has shown is that they always did uncomfortable intros on 70s TV shows so it's probably very authentic.
Three songs, quite flash so time again to lose the Abbatars. Bjorn comes on and introduces the band (who are utterly anonymous and not lit or even on stage for the rest of the show, raising questions about whether all the rest of the show is on tape) and does the verse of Does Your Mother Know before leaving the rest of the song to actual living people. Sorry, but if I wanted to see three women belt out an Abba cover in front of a competent but unspectacular band then I'd go down the Legion on a Friday night and it wouldn't cost me all this money.
Eagle up next, and backed by the first of two animated sequences that tell of a young child's quest for some kind of hidden temple which culminates in the band being revealed as giant Zardoz heads in the second part backing Voulez-Vous at the next gap. The former perhaps isn't a surprising choice for this treatment when we think back to Abba The Movie and the role it plays there, but the latter is a real surprise for me as I would have thought it was one of the big hits.
Lay All Your Love On Me starts the next part of the set with giant Frida and Agnetha stalking hanging video screens and concludes with genuinely the most astonishing thing I've ever seen on a stage. I'm struggling to describe it but the screens show the band top down which pulls away as the song ends then as Summer Night City starts it changes to Abbatars in an instant and it's like you've been thrown 90 degrees onto your back. Gimme Gimme Gimme brings down glitter balls and brings the party bangers section to a close.
After Voulez-Vous it gets a bit odd. When All Is Said And Done is an introspective choice which, on the face of it, feels like it's just to show off the effects (and to be fair the way they step forward and back, in and out of the shadows being just visible in the dark is brilliantly done) but to follow them up with Don't Shut Me Down/I Still Have Faith In You smacks of reminding the audience there was a new album came out this year that they didn't even listen to and they should now buy.
Waterloo is handled very, very weirdly. You'd have thought it would have been an obvious candidate for Abbatars in Eurovision gear but instead we get a supercut of British TV performances of the song, none of which are things you haven't seen multiple times already.
The Abbatars come back for the umpty-tum of Thank You For The Music before a storming version of Dancing Queen closes the show.
An encore of The Winner Takes It All is a triumph, and "and tell me does she kiss, like I used to kiss you" absolutely finishes me and I'm in floods of tears again.
All that's left is for the 'today' aged Abbatars to come on and thank people for turning up and sharing their vision. As they walk out across the wings it doesn't look so good but in centre stage I'd bet cold hard cash those were real people.
So it's not a perfect show but I'm absolutely delighted with my decision to go and if you have any desire to see it then you definitely should. Some practicalities:
- The resale option on the Ticketmaster site itself means you can definitely get tickets for the show you want to see so make your other plans first
- I didn't track the costs but the resale pricing does vary so it may be worth putting in some legwork to see when the optimum time is to buy
- The matinee show is much cheaper and so definitely a cost effective way of seeing it
- The evening show is still very early, you'll be done by 9
- There's basically nothing there except the arena so don't expect to make a night of it
- ]-* There may well be a set change at some point as they sell Take A Chance On Me t-shirts but it doesn't get played. So I might end up going again if it does. [/h]
- Make no mistake, the technology is amazing. But you have to keep your eyes on the Abbatars, if you look at the screens to the side it looks like a video game and takes you out of the moment.
- They're all good but Benny's is far and away the most convincing Abbatar. Bjorn probably the worst.
The use of technology raises all kinds of issues for an audience though. Do you applaud them? Is there any interaction in a real sense or are you just in essence watching a film? This confusion is manifest before the encore when nobody seems to know whether to shout for more or not - putting the artifice of encores to one side, who are you trying to persuade to come back on? - so that part of stagecraft is completely broken. I'm sure it's something that'll develop if and when other people do the same thing but it's an emerging audience reaction.
What does the technology mean for live music? Well for all my worries beforehand I think surprisingly little. This is clearly a very expensive endeavour which needs a lengthy residency to pay for it so only open to enormodome or heritage acts. My first thought of a candidate band is Fleetwood Mac, spending some of that sweet Yacht Rock Boom cash on having the diaphanous Stevie Nicks from the Rhiannon video on stage. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow indeed.
It does feel at times like you're trapped on the set of the ill-advised Suggs karaoke show Night Fever and I'm not actually sure who the target audience is apart from "people with money" but I am a person and I have money so I guess I fall into that demographic.
tl;dr - I had great fun and so will you.
two months pass...
two months pass...
four weeks pass...