The Night ABBA's Avatars Made 3,000 People Cry

They built a whole building for this. The ABBA Arena sits on the edge of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, a demountable structure holding around 3,000 people, and the fact that it is temporary tells you how strange the bet was. Nobody puts up a hexagonal venue for a show that might not land. The reported cost sits near 140 million pounds, a figure the Guardian and others cited in the run-up to opening. For a concert. For a band whose members are in their seventies and were, that night, standing somewhere else entirely.

What struck me walking in was how ordinary the approach felt. You queue. You buy a drink. You find your seat on a floor built for dancing, no chairs in the pit. Then the room does something most arenas never manage. It shrinks. The screen, a wall of close to 65 million pixels, does not sit at the back like a stadium jumbotron. It becomes the far end of the space, and the design pulls your eye into it so completely that the depth reads as real. I have curated shows in warehouses and old churches and once a decommissioned pool, and getting a room to feel intimate at that scale is the hardest thing we do. They did it with light and geometry before a single note played.

The band that opened ABBA released their first new album in 40 years, Voyage, in November 2021. The concert took the name and ran with it. And the emotional setup was already loaded before you arrived, because you knew, everyone in that room knew, that you were about to watch something that could not physically happen.

The company behind the illusion is Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects house George Lucas started. Reporting around the launch put more than 1,000 people on the project across several years. The band spent five weeks in motion capture suits, performing the full show while a rig of around 160 cameras recorded every muscle, every glance, every tilt of the head. Younger performers of matching build stood in for body reference. Then the team aged the faces back to roughly 1979 and mapped the real ABBA onto them.

Here is the part people get wrong. These are not holograms in the sci-fi sense, no light floating in mid-air. It is a very large, very high resolution screen, plus clever staging, plus a live 10-piece band standing in front of it in the flesh. That last detail is the whole trick, in my read. The human musicians are the anchor. Your brain accepts the digital figures partly because there are real people breathing and sweating a few metres downstage, and the two register as one event. BBC coverage at the time captured the confusion in the crowd, people genuinely unsure whether they were looking at a person or a rendering, and that uncertainty is not a bug. It is the show.

What I keep coming back to is the restraint. They could have made the avatars fly, morph, do things bodies cannot. They mostly did not. The figures walk, sway, banter between songs in a way that feels slightly rehearsed and therefore more real. The team clearly understood that the goal was not spectacle. It was believability, which is a much colder and harder target.

I want to be honest about the moment it got me, because I went in ready to be clinical. It was Chiquitita, maybe the fourth or fifth number. The woman beside me, easily seventy, had her hand over her mouth and tears running down without any drama to them, the quiet kind. She was not watching a screen. She was somewhere in 1979 with whoever she first heard that song beside. And I realised the avatars were almost beside the point. The room had become a machine for returning people to their own memory, which is, when you strip everything back, the only thing atmosphere ever really does.

My friend Deniz went the following month and texted me afterward, and honestly her reaction was funnier and more useful than any review I read. She said she spent the first ten minutes trying to catch the seams, hunting for the pixels, being smug about it, and then she looked up during Dancing Queen and realised she'd been singing for two songs and had absolutely no idea when she'd started. I'm not sure the effect works on everyone. I've met a couple of people who found the whole thing eerie and could not switch off the part of their brain flagging the wrongness. But most of the room, most of the time, simply let go.

This is the same lesson the best immersive work of the last few years kept teaching us. When Superblue opened in Miami and turned a shared meal into something closer to a reckoning, the tech was never the point either. You can read my earlier notes on how that Miami dinner redefined immersive experience and the throughline is identical. And when Refik Anadol let a machine dream on the wall at MoMA, the achievement was emotional, not computational. I wrote about how that year the room itself became the message, and ABBA Voyage belongs in that same conversation, even though one is a museum and one is a pop concert. For more on this, see Refik Anadol's Unsupervised Made MoMA a Living Room in 2022.

The commercial logic is the uncomfortable part. Live music came back hard in 2022, with the concert business posting record numbers as touring resumed, a rebound documented across industry reporting from Pollstar. But a real tour ages the people on stage, burns them out, and eventually ends. A residency of avatars does not. It can run nightly, indefinitely, in a building designed only for it. That is a model, and models get copied.

So here is my editorial position, and I hold it with some worry. ABBA Voyage is a triumph and a warning in the same object. It proves that a curated room, real musicians, and a believable digital presence can produce genuine feeling. It also opens a door I am not sure we should walk all the way through. The value of this show rests entirely on the fact that ABBA are real, that they lived, made the music, and consented to their own likeness. The moment the model gets applied to artists who never agreed, or who never existed at all, the magic curdles into something else. The honesty of the illusion is doing quiet ethical work.

A few things I think producers should take from it, and a few they should leave:

• Anchor the synthetic in the human. The live band is why the avatars land. Strip the real people out and you have a very expensive television.
• Build the room around the emotion, not the technology. The screen serves the memory, not the reverse.
• Do not chase the impossible. The restraint, the choice to have avatars simply stand and sing, is what sells it.

The thing that does not always work, and this is worth saying plainly, is transferring the effect to material that carries no memory. ABBA had 40 years of loaded songs to draw on. A new act with no history in your body cannot borrow that shortcut, and I suspect a lot of imitators will learn this the expensive way.

Sources

• The Guardian - ABBA Voyage review
• BBC News - ABBA Voyage
• Industrial Light and Magic
• Pollstar