In "Don't Shut Me Down", one of the songs on the latest Abba album, released in 2021 after a break of forty years, a woman suddenly stands on the mat with her former lover and tells him how she has changed since the relationship fell apart.

Using terms from computer language, she tries to persuade him to start over: "And now you see another me, I've been reloaded.

I'm fired up, don't shut me down.

I'm like a dream within a dream that's been decoded.” Just as this woman presents herself to her ex as someone different from who she once was, the Swedish pop band now steps before her with a new old freshness thanks to digital technology audience to pick up where she left off half a lifetime ago.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

  • Follow I follow

Except that time has only been turned back for their computer-generated alter egos.

In contrast, the majority of the three thousand people who made the pilgrimage to the futuristic Abba Arena in east London for Abba Voyage, to relive their youth with the virtual impersonations of Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Fri Lyngstad, Benny Andersson and Bjoern Ulvaeus, become wrinkled, gray and greasy.

The 1970s fashion pieces that many dug out of their closets don't quite fit anymore.

And with the bell-bottoms and sequined mini dresses from the costume mail order, the lifebelts reveal that wishful thinking has sometimes triumphed over reality.

But that doesn't spoil the mood.

In the hexagonal board stack construction by Stufish, an entertainment architecture firm that has become famous for its spectacular stage designs for bands such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Queen, on a bus parking lot on the Olympic site, the aim is to overcome the boundaries of reality and engage in illusion.

To achieve that, more than a thousand technicians under the tutelage of Star Wars producer George Lucas' effects magic company reportedly clocked in a billion hours of programming.

Every day for five weeks, the Abba members, who are now all in their seventies, slipped into full body suits covered in sensors so that every gesture and every facial expression could be recorded with 160 cameras from every conceivable angle.

This data was then merged with records of the movements of younger doppelgangers to create believably rejuvenated "abbatars," as the digital incarnations are called.

In the darkened arena, she now brings the largest projection system in the world with a mega-resolution of 65 million pixels onto a screen that fills the entire width of the room: wrinkle-free and without sweat beads, as can be seen above all on the enormous enlargements to the left and right of the stage.

But otherwise amazingly lifelike.

The spectacle is presented seven times a week in the temporary arena.

Other locations are already being discussed.