Wanted, dead or alive: avatars promise acts eternal stardom

MUSIC fans will never have to worry about missing their favourite bands performing in their prime, experts have said as more high-profile acts follow in Abba’s footsteps and preserve themselves as virtual avatars.

Svana Gisla, producer of the hit Abba Voyage production that rendered the Swedish group as computer-generated images for live shows, says more acts will be aiming to capture their golden years through digital technology.

She told MPS on the digital, culture, media and sport committee that many people in the music industry “have started to explore it”, adding: “There will be a lot of musicians that will be thinking about this.”

The Abba Voyage show used 800 special effects experts to capture the appearance and movement of the band’s members from their heyday in 1979, and then three-dimensional avatars of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Annifrid Lyngstad were projected on stage at live concerts.

Ms Gisla told MPS that this kind of show costs millions of pounds to produce, meaning being captured by computers would be available only to world-famous acts who can afford it.

However, she added that other bands could be digitally preserved in future as costs came down, allowing stars to go “on tour” without leaving the UK.

The potential of the technology would not be restricted to music, Ms Gisla said, explaining: “I think this opens the door for a multitude of variations of what we’ve done. You don’t need to end necessarily with music. You could do films, you could look at musicals, you could look at theatres, you could look at plays – any creative event.”

Ms Gisla said that the Abba Voyage show was done with the full backing of the band, and raised concerns about putting on a similar digital show without the consent of the stars being used to fill venues, particularly dead musicians.

She added: “Posthumously, you can absolutely put artists back on stage, but ethically, people may or may not have a view on this.”

Shows have already been staged using more rudimentary holograms of Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley and the rapper Tupac Shakur.