Taking a chance with legacy
ABBA secretly reunites to make new album, create high-tech stage show
For the first time since the Reagan administration, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus are discussing a new album by their band, ABBA — an album one of the biggest international pop acts in history somehow made in secret, with all four of its original members congregating nearly four decades after giving their last public performance.
“We took a break in the spring of 1982, and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it,” the group said in a statement in September. The response was thunderous.
“ABBA is another vessel, isn’t it?” Ulvaeus marveled. “We did this thing, and we are on the front page of every paper in the world.”
In a country known for producing towering figures in pop music (Avicii, Max Martin, Robyn, Roxette), ABBA still looms the largest, and even has its own museum. Between 1973 and 1981, the quartet — which includes singers Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — released eight studio albums filled with meticulously crafted melodies, harmonies and strings that have generated 20 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, sold tens of millions of albums around the world and built a passionate fan base.
But its paradigm-shifting impact can’t be measured only in numbers: The group was known for taking risks with technology and the use of its songs. Starting in the mid-1970s, it was among the first acts to make elaborate promotional mini-films — called music videos now — most of them directed by Lasse Hallstrom.
Its 1981 album “The Visitors” is generally acknowledged as the first commercial release on compact disc. The 1999 jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” paired the group’s hits with an unrelated plot, sparking a slew of imitators and two film adaptations.
Now ABBA is risking perhaps its most valuable asset — its legacy — by not only releasing a fresh addition to its catalog, but creating a stage show that features none of its members in the flesh. Starting in a custombuilt London venue next May, the group will perform as highly sophisticated avatars (or in this case, Abbatars) designed to replicate their 1979 look — the era of feathered hair and flamboyant stage wear.
Andersson, 74, and Ulvaeus, 76, said they were genuinely surprised, and possibly a little relieved, by the excitement that greeted the new album’s announcement. (“Voyage,” which shares its name with the live show, is out Friday.)
“We had no idea it would be so well-received,” Ulvaeus said. “You just take a chance, you risk a thumping.” It was hard to tell if he was echoing the title of a famous ABBA song on purpose; these guys have a way with dry
humor.
Still, they might have had an inkling a reunion would spur interest. Since it went offline in 1982, ABBA has continued to thrive. Conversations about pop have shifted over the decades, helping the group overcome the “cheesy Europop” tag that often stuck to it during its 1970s prime. ABBA is now widely respected as a purveyor of sophisticated pop craftsmanship, and its enduring popularity transcends generations and borders.
Because there was no pressure to reunite, the pair say there was no grand plan for an
album: It just kind of happened when four friends realized they still enjoyed making music together. It all started about five years ago, when Simon Fuller, the producer behind the “Idol” franchise and the Spice Girls, pitched a show starring 3D reproductions of the group’s members “singing” the original vocal tracks backed by a live band. The project also had appealing practical benefits for people unwilling to submit to the grind of big concerts.
“What interested us was the idea that we could send them out while we can be at home cooking or walking the dog,”
Andersson said.
The pair traveled to Las Vegas to check out the hologram used in the Cirque du Soleil show “Michael Jackson ONE,” and their main takeaway was that they would have to do roughly a million times better. The visual-effects company Industrial Light & Magic, of “Star Wars” fame, assured them it could happen. (Fuller is no longer involved in the project.)
Naturally, “the girls,” as seemingly everybody in the band’s close circles good-naturedly calls Faltskog, 71, and Lyngstad, 75, had to be onboard, especially since the process would involve weeks of motion capture. “They said ‘OK, if that’s it,’ ” Andersson said. “‘We don’t want to go on the road. We don’t want to do TV interviews and meet journalists.’ ”
Andersson and Ulvaeus decided that the Abbatars should have some fresh material because that’s what would have happened before a tour back in the day. In 2017, Faltskog and Lyngstad traveled to RMV studio, 100 yards from Andersson’s base on the Swedish island Skeppsholmen. There, they put down their vocals on the ballad “I Still Have Faith in You” and the string-laden disco of “Don’t Shut Me Down.”
The original plan was to do just those two tracks, but they kept going. “We said, ‘Shouldn’t we write a few other songs, just for fun?’ ” Andersson said. “And the girls said, ‘Yeah, that will be fun.’ So they came in, and we had five songs. And we said, ‘Shouldn’t we do a few others? We can release an album.’ ”
Faltskog and Lyngstad’s harmonies on the “Voyage” album bear the unmistakable ABBA stamp, even if the register is a bit lower than it used to be. Age alone does not account for the difference: “We used to sort of force them to go as high as they could on most of the songs because it gives energy,” Andersson said.
“We urged rather than forced,” Ulvaeus interjected.
A lot has changed in pop in the past 40 years, but “Voyage” makes no attempt to sound like anything other than ABBA.
“You listen to new records, it’s always so slick,” Andersson said. “There’s nothing moving aside of the exact rhythm. I don’t do that — I do it by free hand.”
Four decades ago, this long, improbable journey was unimaginable for four Swedes. “You have to understand how impossible it seemed right before ABBA to have hit records in England and the U.S.,” Ulvaeus said of the pop landscape before the internet globalized it. “It was absolutely not in the cards.”
Yet not only did ABBA break down barriers for musicians around the world, it did it with the matter-of-fact pragmatism of artisans — which is what its members remain at heart. “The thing is, it has always been like day-to-day work, even then,” Andersson said. “We would write the songs, hope that something good will come out, go to the studio, record those songs. And then we wrote some more. Exactly the same as now: It’s not about anything else than trying to come up with something good and see what happens.”