The eyes don’t look alive, which spoils the impression. It’s mostly the eyes, no, always the eyes, when digital people are supposed to appear lifelike, but something isn’t quite right with the face. One then speaks of the “uncanny valley” effect. If humanoid creatures don’t appear quite photorealistic, we often feel alienated. Perhaps because we notice the art figures’ deviations from ourselves particularly clearly when they are minimal. Frida sings “Fernando”, she looks like Frida, but she is not Frida. Your eyes lack the shine. The “Uncanny Valley” problem is not exclusive to Abba, all of Hollywood has been grappling with it for almost 20 years, since Robert Zemeckis’ “Polar Express” from 2004. The George Lucas company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) commissioned by Abba has at least, it can be said after the premiere of the “Voyage” show in London (May 26), made a step forward. This event shows the possibilities of such representations – and their limitations.
From a distance, the digital avatars aka “Abbatare” are not recognizable as 3D characters, apart from the facial expressions that can be judged on screens. They look real. Of course that’s good. They are projections, but appear three-dimensional and move with a dance-like suppleness that Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn lacked even on their best days. The real Frida wasn’t exactly famous for her pirouettes.
Under the eyes of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, who might not have seen Abba during their active concert era until 1980, the Swedes are now celebrating their live comeback. Royal visit, because Abba are considered the country’s most important export good. Also in the audience are hipsters like Jarvis Cocker, Abba fangirl Kylie Minogue, actress Keira Knightley, and film director Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne Supremacy”), an auteur of handheld cameras and jumpcuts who may be able to pull off a visual trick or two Abba team would like to copy.
Benny Andersson has also sneaked into the audience, in one of the upper blocks with a panoramic view. He mouths the word “Wow” when he hears Frida on “Fernando,” thumbs up the crowd cheering on “SOS,” and when everyone jumps out of their seats on “Voulez Vous,” he jumps up too and fires his own avatar. That reads stranger than it is. Even after countless rehearsals, the show still seems to grab him. I looked at his hands because I was sitting behind him: Andersson moved his fingers during the beautiful piano outro of “Chiquitita”.
Abba’s first world hit was called “Waterloo”, and the line “I feel like I win when I lose” is certainly not a credo for the four musicians, because they are not losers, they are the second most important pop band of all Times after the Beatles. But this show, which has been booked for London until at least May 2023, reveals some weaknesses that cannot be dismissed even by the euphoric premiere audience.
Andersson announced beforehand that a set list of 20 songs cannot make everyone happy. The omission of “Super Trouper” is sad, the omission of “Take a Chance on Me”, their most complicated and at the same time most trusting song, unforgivable. Instead of the West Coast piece “The Name of the Game” they play the worse West Coast piece “Eagle”, but not with Canyon film in the background, but transplanted into a fantasy world (more on that in a moment). Abba also bring the swaying “Hole in my Soul”, which is not on everyone’s wish lists for nothing. “When All Is Said And Done” from the 1981 album “The Visitors” is important for the band biography, a document of the divorce, an internal highlight, they want to work on it, but like “The Visitors” it’s more fulfilling a kind of fan service: Abba completed their last tour in 1979, and pieces like this were never heard live. Well, as a fan you have to see it as a sport and think of the Beatles: If the Fab Four still existed and they played a concert with 20 songs, a number of important things would be missing.
What makes a good performance, one performed by indefatigable Abba musicians, indefatigable because they came from the computer? For one thing, they don’t make any mistakes in singing or with the instruments, after all they are never exhausted. On the other hand, that they play through 100 minutes. Here “Voyage” affords considerable dramaturgical inconsistencies. As early as the fourth song, “Knowing Me, Knowing You”, the abbatars disappear and can be seen on the screens as a video clip instead. That’s exactly what it shouldn’t be like. It’s nice to see digital characters in music videos on TV, but digital characters transported from a real stage to a digital music video studio just don’t make sense. The pattern repeats itself. Halfway through the set there is a stretch of songs, “Eagle” and “Lay All Your Love On Me”, in which Abba “disappears” again, i.e. is no longer projected onto the stage. Instead, an animated film is played, which at least I didn’t understand. In it, a boy runs through an Avatar – The Last Airbender jungle world in search of a coin that seems to have been taken from the “Playmobil” treasure island. He ends up in a cave where he sees four stone heads of the four Abba musicians in a frightening setting like the Temple of the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark. A short film that no one on the Abba team has ever said a word about before, recorded to “Eagle”, a song about a non-mystical flying animal.
After that comes another screen video, this time with the Abba Tron figures in neon colors, which the Swedes have been using to advertise since last September’s “Voyage” album. Now imagine what it would be like to see “Eagle” and “Lay All Your Love On Me” as the performances of the abbatare, rather than the Little Indiana Jones show shown on the screens. And that’s exactly what makes a good concert: Tireless musicians who you can watch non-stop at work. The adventure sequence with the little boys is reminiscent of the “Inception” borrowing from “Don’t Shut Me Down,” in which Agnetha sings, “I’m like a dream within a dream that’s been decoded.” As soon as you have saved the digital musicians as realistic, there is a moderately animated adventure short with a boy that nobody can assign. Should it be a dream of the avatars? Do you have to know the boy and the mythology in which he moves? Should this be decoded?
The ten-piece backing band, at least, is made of flesh and blood. Björn Ulvaeus was never a good singer, he knows that, which is why he hands over the lead vocals to the three female choir singers on “Does Your Mother Know”. The content with which the four Abba heads equip their four individualized stage speeches is remarkable. Each of them had 40 years to think about it. Björn makes the playboy, talks about how he received offers from girls that don’t belong to each other. Benny, musical head of the band and driving force in the “Voyage” project, philosophizes about the importance of extending life into the digital self: “To be or not to be, that no longer matters.” Agnetha does not reveal herself, remains in the lifeworlds of the songs, uses her announcement before “Don’t Shut Me Down” as a noncommittal hint that she, too, has often been let down by the person who loves her. Frida tells the most important thing – the highlight of the show has less to do with music than with the spoken word: she was born in 1945 and tells how hard it was for her and her grandmother to build a new life after the Second World War; her mother died when she was two, and she only met her father, a Wehrmacht soldier (who is not mentioned at the concert), decades later. The most defining thing in the life of this Abba musician wasn’t fame, it was her first few years. So they are digital images, abbatars, governors who articulate the creeds of their human creators. They say what Frida, Agnetha, Björn and Benny might not say in interviews today.
However, the distribution of computer beings (Abba) and real musicians on stage seems very territorial. Abba stand alone in the very wide middle, the ten-strong troupe was squeezed to the left of the stage edge. The model for “Voyage” are the Abba concerts of 1979, but the accompanying musicians were very close to the quartet, all of them merged. In the year 2022, this kind of amorphous mixture cannot (yet) be technically represented with certainty, simply because the avatars are holograms that are projected onto a screen. No real person is allowed to do gymnastics in front of them.
Everything that works is presented, everything that doesn’t work is left out. That’s why the stage design is awkwardly constructed. A three-tiered stage leads up to the abbatars. However, three-tier stages are there to ascend and descend on them. Level one, two, three. The projections can’t do that, they stay behind, on level three. But one is used to musicians coming to the front from time to time, right up to the front row of the audience. The Abbatars, who only act horizontally, cannot do that. No problem. Technology. But that makes “Voyage” a static concert, unlike Benny and Björn, who praised the dynamics in interviews. It would have been interesting to focus exclusively on the facial expressions of one of the avatars when watching the concert, to determine whether, for example, Björn showed a variable facial expression for a period of 100 minutes, whether effort could be seen; perhaps only the spectators from the front rows can judge that.
There will be many feuilleton debates about whether concerts of this kind are “the future” if the stars eventually get tired of it because they are getting older. Hologram shows have only been done by dead musicians, Tupac, Whitney and Ronnie (James Dio). Apart from Genesis, Abba are the only 1970s mega-band that could still perform with the original line-up. But they don’t want it, they don’t want to see themselves on stage when they’re old. The “Voyage” show offers the technically best possible in digital representation of people making music. Abba did not disappoint us in this. But real people still see, always look better.
Maybe Kiss did everything right after all. Paul Stanley once said that once he and Gene Simmons are dead, musicians other than Kiss could step in and keep the brand alive—with the right makeup on the right features, no one would notice the difference. The kiss make-up makes the people underneath ageless. Their voices would come as a playback, as now with Abba.
Would it be better to replace people right away instead of feeding their biometrics into a computer so that it ejects a younger, more perfect, digital self? A creepy idea.
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