The Fabricated Four
Live music events, at least in their traditional form, are covered by an unspoken contract between the fan and the artist. In the flesh, we get to see our heroes up close. They, in turn, are meant to sweat for their art. We go home elated (“you had to be there!”) at having shared - albeit briefly - the same physical space with the people who make the music that matters most to us. But, asks Gregory Jackson, what about ABBA Voyage, the career-spanning computer-generated celebration of the Swedish super troupers that has reportedly cost around $175m to stage? Is it a live gig? Is it a tribute band? Does it bring ABBA fans closer to Benny, Frida, Agnetha and Björn?
It's a grey Saturday afternoon in February 2025 and 3,000 people in silver jumpsuits and sequined headbands are filing into a curious black rhomboid in East London. Part-warehouse, part-spaceship in appearance, the promo materials refer to the ABBA Arena as a "space church", and while there is no doubting that this is a quasi-religious ceremony to some in the audience/congregation, it most closely resembles an outsize semiconductor soldered into a rather desolate circuit board.
At its outer edges, the ABBA Arena shares many features with standard purpose-built music venues. There are plenty of bars, the usual under provision of women's lavatories, a merch stand, ramps for wheelchair users and helpful security staff. And, once the show starts, it becomes clear that the ABBA Voyage experience ticks several of the requisite boxes for a good gig. State of the art sound? Check. Unimpaired sightlines for all? Check. Space for fans to get up close and personal with the performers? Check.
But who is performing? And what are we watching?
Between winning the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’ in 1974 and disbanding in 1982, ABBA churned out a string of well-crafted pop hits that spanned the transition from glam rock to disco, effortlessly blending elements of both genres. Several of those tracks are played during ABBA Voyage. ‘Voulez-Vous’, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘Fernando’, ‘The Winner Takes it All’, to name but a few. Omissions aside (‘Money, Money, Money’ being particularly glaring, given the eye-gouging prices of tickets for the show), the band know what their fans have come to hear and they don't disappoint. It's a phenomenal back catalogue. Standout moments came during songs like ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ and ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ when the audio and the visuals of the performance seemed to feed off each other.
That said, when the show begins and the silhouettes of the fabricated four rise from the stage, we are looking not at the sweaty reality of spandex costumes under stage lighting, but a quartet of computer-generated ABBA replicants (the self-styled ‘ABBAtars’), strutting their stuff across a 65-million pixel LED screen. It is the screen that tricks the audience into seeing depth and substance in a choreographed performance by digital ghosts. Even the word performance feels wrong here (although we should not overlook the excellent ‘real’ live backing band, who play their hearts out throughout the show).
Yes, this is an ABBA show, but it's an ABBA show that never actually happened. It's not a recording of a live concert. It's happening here and now. It's an ABBA show that the real ABBA haven't been performing nearly every day since May 2022 (when ABBA Voyage opened). It's a carefully constructed mix of trompe l'oeil projections and motion mapping, augmented by Al-generated cutaways to give the illusion of camera close-ups. Impressive? Certainly. Authentic? Definitely not.
Someone with a philosophical bent, Walter Benjamin, say, might well wonder where the authentic artwork is here. In his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin wrote, "the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced."
In that sense, to get at the authentic ABBA, should we not be paying to watch ABBA as they are in 2025, in all their septuagenarian glory, with all their emotional battle scars painfully on display as they take to the stage once again? And if we're not watching the real ABBA, and we're not watching a tribute band, then what are we watching?
ABBA VOYAGE
Yes, this is an ABBA show, but it's an ABBA show that never actually happened.
Of course, the alternative to ABBA Voyage was never really an option. And who could really blame the band? All those costume changes? All that travelling between venues? All those interviews with the media? No thank you. Instead, think of this more as legacy planning. Frozen in time as attractive thirtysomethings, never required to do another day's work, with digital understudies ably straddling the back catalogue, from ‘Chiquitita’ through to ‘Mamma Mia’. A band of Dorian Grays with unfettered access to the ABBA jukebox.
The real answer to what we are watching lies in the technology used to create the show. The cutaway screens on the sides of the stage provide close-ups of the ABBAtars during the songs. Or rather, the screens pretend to show close-ups. What's actually being displayed is Al-generated images of the band. Not people, but Al-spawned avatars. Representations of what has been agreed is the idea, or ideal, of ABBA.
This is Plato's theory of forms at work. Rather than being a concrete incarnation of ABBA (which would have to be a specific ABBA concert at a specific venue at a specific point in time), ABBA Voyage admits us to the realm of forms. The form of Benny, Frida, Agnetha and Björn, as agreed upon by 3,000 adoring fans (and many hundreds of millions more worldwide), unconstrained by venue or time, yet somehow...somehow... on stage. Right here, right now (at the ABBA Arena, 1 Pudding Mill Lane), reified by Al...and worshipped by the sweaty masses on the dancefloor.
And if this all sounds like some spooky AI voodoo, well, it does need to be seen to be believed. If you were at the same gig I saw, you'll know exactly what I mean. But you really had to be there.