T'was rather a long (some might say unnecessarily long) day in old London town today, even though we caught the 11:48 to Euston and didn't get into the capital until nearly 1pm. We had an appointment at WF in Avery Row to keep and then we headed off to the Sound Cafe. Unfortunately they had changed the menu and put the prices up, so that was a shame... but anyway, it killed an hour and a half before we headed off to Stratford and (allegedly) the biggest shopping mall in Europe!
It honestly didn't seem that big really, but they did have some cool shops and I got to try on the new TAG Heuer sunglasses, which were interesting. We thought about buying some buns from M&S and then thought about trying to find somewhere to sit down and have a drink, but in the end we settled on Zizzis where we had a couple of Cokes and some fries (which were surprisingly nice actually).
Then it was off to the DLR, our next stop 'Pudding Mill Lane' station which is directly opposite the ABBA Arena. Needless to say there were some 'interesting' looking people heading towards the arena, though the crowd was generally older than anticipated with lots of people in their 60s and 70s in attendance. They told us to get there an hour before the show started at 7:45pm. God knows why, I guess they want you to buy drinks, food and merchandise... which we didn't. Thankfully the time passed relatively quickly and before we knew it it was 7:30pm and we were asked to go to our seats.
I don't really know what I expected when the show started, but somehow I expected the holograms to be a little larger. I mean, they are supposed to be life-size (albeit they seemed rather taller and thinner than reality) so I guess they were probably about the right size, but because they looked a long way back on the stage they appeared smaller than perhaps they were intended.
The first three songs I did not know. They could be new songs from the recent album I guess, the first one sounded quite good, almost a bit like The Gathering. After that it was largely hits with a few curveballs thrown in for good measure. The ABBAtars (see what they did there) weren't on stage all the time, some songs were performed without them appearing on stage but with videos, which was okay. There was also a couple of songs which were accompanied by animation of some character (who looked a bit like Pob) roaming around a forest - it looked very game like and he was clearly doing some sort of quest, finding an amulet and presenting it to the Abba Gods.... or something. Not quite sure.
The avatars themselves were impressive, although they aren't as yet good enough to convince you that you are seeing 'real people' on stage. Oddly the very close-up footage featured on the video screens (of which there is a lot) looks better than the wider shots - in which Agnetha was giving me serious Princess Fiona vibes. I think Benny and Frida seemed to be rendered better than Bjorn and Agnetha overall.
There was a brilliant transition from video to ABBAtars at one point - when the band were presented wearing these 'TRON' like costumes (think it was during 'Summernight City') and the production cleverly used the video screens which extended out from the sides of the stage and around the sides of the venue.
After the first couple of songs, we suddenly realised there was actually a band on stage performing along with the backing tracks. This must have been a bit annoying for the people standing on the left side of the dancefloor as they would have been impeding their view of the ABBAtars, Still we were encouraged to applaud them as they performed one of the songs unaided - which is kind of pointless, since the whole thing about this was seeing the closest thing we could to ABBA themselves, not a tribute act.
There is definitely a bit of 'Uncanny Valley' going on at times, since the ABBAtars are just good enough to be a bit creepy looking and I couldn't help but think it was a bit of a cop-out using video from the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest to fill out five minutes of the show, but I guess that is important for the history of the band. Poor Agnetha looked an absolute lemon though, I bet she loves being reminded of her terrible blue trousers, hilarious silver boots and the ridiculous bonnet thing on her head.
It was about this time that people started getting out of their seats to dance, even Rose. Unfortunately the old boy in the seat in front of us ended up falling flat on his arse, and in the process somehow managed to splash his pint all over us. You couldn't make it up...
Anyway, that was about it really. Dancing Queen ended the show... well everyone thought it was the end, but then they did a sort of encore of 'Winner Takes it All' before the real ABBA came out on stage to wave and thank us for coming, except of course it wasn't the real ABBA it was more holograms - but these looked much more realistic as they were made using live footage rather than renders.
Predictably the tube station was rammed but we managed to get on the second train out of there but missed the 10:09 back to Northampton. Instead we got the 10:39 which was packed to the gunnels and we also had to sit opposite the two most boring women in the world who were wanking on and on about the comings and goings of the street they live in, and sharing photos of people they know who are 'transitioning' or who are in 'polyamorous relationships' (oh do fuck off), all in the most irritating voices imaginable.
As I said, it was a very long day.
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