The first I heard about ABBA: Voyage was from my mother-in-law a few weeks ago, who arrived to stay in proud possession of two tickets to the show for her and my wife.

“I’m sorry, but what is this exactly?” I asked.

She was incredulous I hadn’t even heard the name: the show had been all over daytime TV for at least a year – rolled out with tremendous hype. Apparently, ABBA: Voyage was a kind of technological karaoke show centered around holographic representations of ABBA. Over a million people had already made the pilgrimage to the specially constructed ABBA Arena in East London. I thought it sounded absurd.

My wife was no ABBA fan (nor was she hologram curious) and was not looking forward to accompanying her mother. Hence why it was so arresting to be shaken awake when they got back, my wife crouching at the side of the bed, goggle-eyed, breathlessly describing herself as changed.

“I cried because the holograms were so weirdly real,” she told me. “It was like being one of the people who saw that movie of the train and ran out of the cinema. I think I just witnessed the future.”

If this was so, then the future would entail the incarnation of the past in the present, as well as the unreal inside the real. Was ABBA: Voyage the inaugural violation, smuggled inside the Trojan Horse of emotive Swedish pop? The show had my attention. I contacted the press office, was completely ignored for a couple of weeks, and eventually stumped up for a £75 ticket.

I had to take several tubes to reach the ABBA Arena for the Monday night “performance.” My last change was at Stratford, where drifting groups of provincial grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, predominantly blonde (some in ’70s fancy dress), could be seen shuffling around in high heels. 

These pilgrims had abandoned their spotless lounges and monolith-sized smart TVs for the night, braving the city’s chaos and disquiet to witness TV 2.0 in the flesh.

Our destination, Pudding Hill Lane, was a Ballardian wasteland, its name like a jazzy bowtie on a corpse. It was in fact so void of raison d’être as to have entirely thrown itself into the arms of this one: “Gimme Gimme Gimme” leaked out of the platform speakers as we filed off the Docklands Light Railway; there was an ABBA: Voyage gift shop embedded in the station’s ground floor; and the large black hexagonal arena — surrounded by miles of blank apartment blocks — loomed up on the other side of the street.

It looked like a high-tech cinema LARPing as a concert venue, and processed the large crowd with painless efficiency, like a chintzy airport offering quick trips to the future (or future-past). My £75 had landed me in the Dancefloor, a large but cramped standing-room-only area encircled by stacked seating.

The show started with the throbbing disco-prog of “The Visitors,” the ABBAtars™ rising slowly out of four portals in the middle of the stage, the tops of their skulls looking at first like the eggs in Aliens. But instead of hatching they kept on emerging. At the full sight of them, the crowd gasped and crunched forward.

In their apparent three-dimensionality and other-worldly colors, the ABBAtars were impressive apparitions. Simple gestures — a quick embrace between the holograms, or the casting off of a sparkling shawl — could draw out a flash of wonder. It had a taste of necromancy, or quasi-necromancy — ABBA after all still walked the earth, even if their youth and marriages were long gone.

Overall, however, I think the spectacle of my wife’s raw amazement had fast-tracked my reaction to this little miracle, the imagination rinsing it of the unexpected, so that it was already reduced (at first sight) to the ultimate fate of all technology: that of hypnotic mediocrity.

The ABBAtars were accompanied by a vigorously competent live band, but were otherwise part of a wall of technology, surrounded by banks of constantly shifting screens and lights. Their presence effectively transformed the stage — or the world —into a screen, and the audience had the transfixed quality common to any screen-viewer. It was much livelier, however: everyone dancing, swaying and singing more and more with every song. 

For “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” long curtains of rectangular screens enclosed the stage, showing the ABBAtars up close. It was fascinating to see their moronic, ingratiating pseudo-expressions magnified. This wasn’t ABBA reincarnated, or cloned, it was something (or someone) else entirely: the visual equivalent to Chat GPT. The defining fascination of our age, I thought, looking up at these despotic scarecrows, was technology’s increasingly adept impersonation (or impersonations) of ourselves, and with it the tantalizing suspicion that this apparent reflection may in fact be a mask.

“Lay All Your Love on Me” hit you in the gut like a Gregorian chant, and had me asking if there might not be a direct if declining line from the Gothic Cathedrals, and the saints in the stained glass, to whatever this was.

A state of near delirium was gripping the audience

A state of near delirium was gripping the audience. ABBA was wedding dancefloor music par excellence, and this felt like a nuclear compression of a million wedding receptions. An old married couple in matching Hawaiian shirts canoodled and waltzed inches in front of me, eyes fixed into one another’s, plunging deep inside a shared past. 

I decided to go for a smoke. There were only four of us in a cordoned enclosure near the exit, standing about in the drizzling rain. A lost seagull passed overhead, looking for the Thames. It looked like an emissary of reality, that unbending backdrop to humanity’s deranged waltz with technology.

“You can tell it’s a hologram, but it is done very well,” said an anglo-Indian guy to his girlfriend.

“I downt even like ABBA but yeah.”

I reentered the Dancefloor from the side in time for “Thank You For the Music” (the beginning of a last triumphant run of mega-hits). The far edge of the stage presented a corrupting angle of the holograms, now one continuous, flickering glitch. I turned my back to them and watched the audience instead (by now beside itself). My attention settled on an apparent ABBA: Voyage superfan at the edge of the first row of seating.

She was around 20 and beautiful, with red hair, pale skin and the concerning signs of an eating disorder. She was wearing an ABBA: Voyage giftshop headband, and seemingly there all by herself, but on her feet, dancing relentlessly with outstretched arms, mouthing every word, eyes piously fixed forward. I was certain she was here for something like the thousandth time, that the show had consumed a huge part of her being. So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me, she mimed in unison with the ABBAtars, pulling her brittle hands to her heart.

Much of the seated audience was by then standing and dancing, or otherwise vigorously swaying in their seats, hands happily aloft. Without a song or dance, what are we? — had Echo assimilated some essential human vanity in the refrain? Had the algorithm concocted this entire spectacle out of the secret inside this lyric?

“Dancing Queen” dropped. All night I had been fascinated to see the response it would get, and it didn’t disappoint. What an eruption, what a suburban bacchanal!  I was grinning ear to ear. A woman in her fifties, ruthlessly dedicated to the maintenance of her femininity — perfect hair, figure, facelift — ground her hips low, and extended two manicured forefingers at a passing granny, who ground her hips back at her in ecstatic solidarity. What reserves of emotion were being burnt up in these nightly shows? How many wedding dance floors would suffer from the exhaustion of these celebratory feminine reserves?

… so did ABBA: Voyage use these songs to mask whatever diabolical lust lay behind technology’s ostensibly reflective surface

The effect of ABBA on the female soul seemed almost more remarkable, by then, than the dystopic technology leveraging it. Swedish women may have captured the carnal imagination of the world’s men, but (through these songs) two Swedish men had apparently done something analogous to the world’s women.

ABBA, in fact, resembled ABBA: Voyage. Just as the former was a covert communion between a lustful pair of Swedish dudes and tens of millions of women —  a communion masked by their singing wives — so did ABBA: Voyage use these songs to mask whatever diabolical lust lay behind technology’s ostensibly reflective surface, a surface that kept beckoning us deeper, deeper into mysterious woods.