Here we go again ... ABBA record first new music for 35 years
ABBA have recorded new music for the first time in 35 years, the band revealed yesterday. The Swedish fourpiece broke the news online, describing the recording process as ‘an extremely joyful experience’, and revealed one of the songs will feature in a TV special to air in December.
MAMMA Mia, here we go again. ABBA have been back in the studio, recording new songs. “It was like time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday,” according to the quartet. Thirty five years short, to be more precise.
They described it as “an extremely joyful experience” and there is something sweet about the idea of old friends and former couples setting aside decades-long estrangements to rekindle musical magic. But it’s hard not to feel at least a tinge of concern. In this era of inevitable reunions, Abba were one of the rare holdouts, reportedly turning down billion-dollar offers to put the show back on the road. Their years of refusal did not seem to be based on mutual antipathy but a very Swedish pragmatism. The ex-members are all
extremely rich, successful and living rewarding lives away from the intrusive spotlight of fame. As Bjorn Ulvaeus said in 2008: “There is simply no motivation to re-group. Money is not a factor and we would like people to remember us as we were. Young, exuberant, full of energy and ambition.”
Based on pictures from rare occasions when the quartet have been spotted together in recent years, I think it’s fair to say none of those adjectives apply today. ABBA 2018 look about as full of energy and ambition as a group of pensioners on a tour of a stately home.
“I’m not that young anymore,” said Agnetha Faltskog in 2013. “I don’t have the energy [for a reunion] and also I don’t want to travel too much.” “You will never see us on stage again,” said Ulvaeus in 2014, which sounded pretty definitive. Yet here they are, announcing that a new song, ‘I Still Have Faith In You’, will be unveiled on a BBC TV special in December. The twist is that it won’t actually be ABBA who we see performing it but their “digital selves”. Together with Spice Girls impresario Simon Fuller, they have been developing the ABBA Avatar project, rumoured to be a world tour featuring 3D holograms of the band.
There is a little bit of a cheat going on. ABBA are not so much reuniting as extending the brand. It is an inescapable trend in modern entertainment: live shows that aren’t actually live. A hologram of Roy Orbison recently toured Britain. The estates of other late, great stars have holographic concerts in the works, including Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston.
But ABBA are living musicians, using technology to create performances they are no longer willing to participate in themselves. ABBA’s audience may be older but the band will continue to be presented as simulacrums of eternal youth.
These kind of sci-fi nostalgic tributes are going to become a new force in a pop culture that refuses to let the past fade away. It will no doubt be thrilling and spectacular. Yet there is a kind of denial of age and maturity, one that fits with contemporary obsessions with technological immortality.
Yet it seems unlikely that the new music created for these young, exuberant and energetic ABBA Avatars will have much in common with the hip-hop-flavoured chopped-up digital Spotify pop of today’s young stars.
At least the new recordings may give us a sense of how a grown-up ABBA have actually developed, in their real lives, and real artistry.
With talent on this scale, I am not sure they really need to hide behind laser-guided feather boas.