ABBA
Why it’s finally over now
ABBA have arrived in the future.
© Baillie Walsh / Universal
ABBA talked to the “Guardian” about their comeback, the Avatar Tour – and why it was finally that with the band.
ABBA are back – and gone straight away. Their new album “Voyage” will be released on November 5th, the first joint longplayer by Benny Andersson (74), Anni-Frid Lyngstad (75), Agnetha Fältskog (71), Björn Ulvaeus (76) in 40 years.
The band reports to the Guardianthat they would not have expected to appear together again in public. Ulvaeus explains that they were practically dead in the early 1980s. “It wasn’t cool to like ABBA.” Andersson adds: “We didn’t expect ABBA to continue, I can assure you.”
No interviews with Agnetha and Annie-Fried
The women in the group were certainly a sticking point for this: Agnetha Fältskog and Annie-Fried Lyngstad: “They didn’t need a lot of persuasive power, but we had to assure them both that they don’t have to speak to you,” said Andersson to the interviewer who is here stands for the whole press.
Andersson describes the work together in the studio as “perfect”: “It was exactly the same as always. We came into the studio, into the control room, I had copied the lyrics, we played the backing track, the girls sang along and asked questions, and then they took the sheets to the studio and started singing. “
But that was not the end of the job. From May 2022 they will be regularly on stage in London – as avatars or “Abbatars”, as it is called in their case. To do this, they stood on stage for five weeks in the Ealing Studios in London and instead of performed the songs in front of an audience “in front of 75 guys with computers and hundreds of cameras,” explains Ulvaeus.
“Everyone should have their own avatar”
According to Ulvaeus, she doesn’t mind that her Abbatars have also been made younger, i.e. look like the members in the seventies and not like the members today. “You have to remember that we are constantly confronted with our younger selves on television, in pictures and such. Everyone asks us that it must have been very strange, but for me I don’t think so.” ABBA have been used to seeing themselves young for a long time, so to speak: “It’s completely natural. Everyone should have their own avatar.”
Allegedly, there are already vague thoughts about building the theater, which had to be specially built for the technology, in other cities. That depends on how the new show is received by the audience even after the first rush.
“That was it”
With ABBA, however, that will be it. At the end of the interview, Andersson recalls 1982, when the band last appeared together on a TV show for three decades. And says, “I have [damals] himself never said that ABBA would never happen again. But I can tell you now: That was it. “