Is Abba Getting Back Together Again
LONDON (AFP) — About four decades after disbanding and vowing never to get dorsum together, Swedish superstars ABBA on Thursday appear a musical improvement with a new album and a London show featuring their performances captured by digital avatars.
ABBA notched upwardly over 400 1000000 album sales over fifty years despite parting ways in 1982 and resolutely resisting all offers to work together over again — until now.
"We accept made a new anthology with ABBA!" the band's Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson announced via a video presentation in London, delivering the news fans have waited decades for.
The pop maestros had a cord of hits in the 1970s and early 1980s after winning Eurovision in 1974 with "Waterloo."
On Thursday, Ulvaeus and Andersson put an end to the suspense, following hints that something was in the pipeline.
Later on the video proclamation, both men appeared in person, dressed in black, for a presentation of the forthcoming album.
(FILES) In this file photograph taken on October 2, 2012, Madame Tussauds waxwork models of Swedish pop group Abba are displayed at a roller disco in the Renaissance Room in London. (Photo by Adrian DENNIS / AFP)
"The anthology is in the tin can now, information technology's done," said Andersson, describing the group'south return to the studio, against the spectacular backdrop of the view from the top of London'southward ArcelorMittal Orbit tower.
"It's been forty years, or 39, it was like no time had passed. Information technology was quite amazing," he said. "We've washed equally practiced equally we could at our age."
The pair looked relaxed and described their reunion as very friendly.
"No imagination could dream up that: to release a new album subsequently 40 years and yet be the all-time of friends," said Ulvaeus.
"It'south the most fun matter yous can do: to write songs," he added.
'Biggest reunion'
The album will come out on November 5, the musicians said, with the testify expected in May 2022.
The now septuagenarian stars of pop classics such every bit "Dancing Queen," "The Winner Takes It All" and "Risk on Me," last recorded new music together in the 1980s.
British radio presenter Zoe Ball, hosting the interview, said: "This is huge: yep ABBA are dorsum together officially."
She hailed this every bit "one of the biggest reunions ever."
The presentation came subsequently the grouping — Anni-Frid Lyngstad, 75, Agnetha Faltskog, 71, Ulvaeus, 76, and Andersson, 74 — announced on Twitter last week: "Thanks for waiting, the journey is virtually to brainstorm."
The Swedish pop icons had announced they were returning to the studio in 2018, maxim: "We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces once again and get into the recording studio."
Ii new songs — "I Still Have Organized religion in Y'all" and "Don't Shut Me Downwardly" — were played in London Th, featuring the band's characteristic sound.
Acknowledging their age, the musicians said they were not trying to imitate contemporary stars.
"We're not competing with (Canadian rapper) Drake and all those other guys," said Andersson.
'We looked ridiculous'
The musicians also described the process of being transformed into digital avatars using hologram engineering for a new show gear up to launch in London adjacent year.
They described how they were photographed in leotards to create the avatars for the bear witness chosen "ABBA Voyage" which volition play at a theatre being built close to the presentation venue in east London'southward Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
"Nosotros looked ridiculous," said Andersson.
He said the show volition feature the group equally "digital characters" in 1979 when they were "in their prime." They will look "perfectly real," he said.
The show is "technically immensely complicated, the screen, the sound, all the lights," he added.
It will feature 22 songs, mostly the group'due south archetype hits, and last 90 minutes, the musicians said, with tickets going on auction later this month.
The group broke up in 1982 by which time both of the quartet's married couples were divorced.
They long steered articulate of a reunion despite their music'southward enduring popularity, fueled by a hit compilation album in 1992, the "Mamma Mia" musical and later spin-off films starring Meryl Streep, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan.
"There is only no motivation to regroup. Money is non a factor and we would like people to remember us equally we were," Ulvaeus said in a 2008 interview.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, each member of Abba is worth betwixt $200-300 million. In 2000, they turned down a $i billion offering to perform a 100-show world tour.
"They're very independently wealthy then I don't call back it's considering of the money," Swedish Abba adept and writer of several books on the group Carl Magnus Palm said of their comeback in a annotate to AFP.
"I think they're genuinely excited by the possibilities of this."
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