Sweden’s king and queen attend premier of new ABBA digital concert in London

Four decades after the Swedish pop supergroup last performed live, audiences can once again see ABBA onstage in an innovative digital concert where past and future collide.

The show opens to the public in London on Friday, the day after a red-carpet premiere attended by superfans, celebrities and Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia.

The four members of ABBA appeared in public together for the first time in years.

They were in the audience, though. Onstage at the specially built 3,000-seat ABBA Arena next to east London’s Olympic Park were a 10-piece live backing band and a digital ABBA, created using motion capture and other technology by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects firm founded by Star Wars director George Lucas.

Digital ABBA-tars

The voices and movements are the real Agnetha Faltskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, choreographed by Britain’s Wayne McGregor, but the performers onstage are digital avatars, inevitably dubbed “ABBA-tars.”

In unsettlingly realistic detail, they depict the band members as they looked in their 1970s heyday — beards on the men, flowing locks on the women, velour pantsuits all around.

The result is both high tech and high camp, a glittery supernova of stupefying technology, 1970s nostalgia and pop music genius.

For many in the audience, it was almost like being taken back in time to watch ABBA perform classics including “Mamma Mia,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “SOS” and “Dancing Queen.”

The peppy 90-minute set also includes tracks from “Voyage,” the reunion album the band released last year.

Watch your (younger) self

The four band members — two married couples during ABBA’s heyday, though now long divorced — got a rapturous ovation when they took a bow at the end of Thursday’s show, 50 years after they formed ABBA, and 40 years after they stopped performing live.

Watching one’s younger self perform must be a strange sensation, but the band members, now in their 70s, said they were delighted by the show.

“I never knew I had such amazing moves,” Ulvaeus said.

Lyngstad agreed: “I thought I was quite good, but I’m even better.”

Producers bill the show as “revolutionary.” However, time will tell. Like the first audiences to watch a talking motion picture a century ago, attendees may leave wondering whether they are watching a gimmick, or the future.

The Times of London reviewer Will Hodgkinson judged the show “essentially an ABBA singalong with added sound and light show,” though he called the effect “captivating.”

Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis called the concert “jaw-dropping” and said “it’s so successful that it’s hard not to imagine other artists following suit.”

Gimmick or genius, “ABBA Voyage” is booking in London until May 2023, with a world tour planned after that.