From Oasis to Kylie Minogue, Massive Attack to New Order, director Baillie Walsh has spent his career working with some of the biggest names in music. His latest project is a little different, not least because his musical collaborators are composed of millions of pixels, recreating the four stars of ABBA in their pomp. “They don’t complain – they’re not saying, ‘Oh, we can only do one performance tonight,’” Walsh laughs of the digital performers.
As director of ABBA Voyage, his task was to dream up a virtual concert experience that recreates the magic of watching the Swedish pop group in their 1970s imperial phase. At its heart are the four all-singing, all-dancing ABBAtars – painstakingly recreated digital renderings of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha FÓltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, created by the special effects whizzes at Industrial Light and Magic.
When they appear on screen at the purpose-built arena in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to the opening strains of The Visitors, twirling their embellished capes, the effect is staggering – and strangely euphoric. “The challenging part was restraint,” Walsh says. “I wanted the tech to be the secondary part. I love a light show, but I didn’t want it to be this tech wonderland because I think you lose emotion that way.”
A big question for the director and his team was: “Is it possible we can have emotions for these avatars?” Judging by the sheer volume of tears – from surreptitious eye-wiping to unabashed waterworks – in the arena each night, it seems the answer is yes. As Minogue, who was at the show’s opening night, puts it, “This technical feat manages to emote… it offers an embrace and welcomes us to this otherworldly but ultimately human experience.”
A lifelong ABBA fan, Walsh says the group’s music is “in my DNA” and living in the West End, it’s ubiquitous – “Every day outside my window, the tuk-tuks are playing Dancing Queen.” He was approached by show producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson – Benny’s son – three years ago, having worked with the former on music videos for Massive Attack, as well as on Oasis documentary Lord Don’t Slow Me Down and the film Springsteen and I. Then came a Zoom call with Andersson and Ulvaeus. “I was in Iceland on holiday, they were in their cabins in Sweden – the whole thing was very surreal.”
The band spent five weeks filming in Stockholm’s Filmhuset to capture their movements and expressions; then came another filming session using performance doubles to amp up the routines, overseen by choreographer Wayne McGregor. A few songs were added and dropped along the way, but the set list was “very much theirs – I can’t tell ABBA what songs they should play!” Walsh says. “It was obviously strange because Benny and Bjorn had shaved their beards because we needed them to do so for motion capture.
“They’re in weird motion capture suits, [wearing] shoes with bubbles on them, but they got over it very quickly and were very un-self-conscious – then you’re just watching ABBA, and those mo-cap suits become invisible… When the four of them came together and they performed that first song, it [was] breathtaking.”
Hi-tech motion capture suits are hardly the strangest outfits that ABBA have worn. In their heyday, they were famed for outlandish stage gear – “they came from that period where anything went,” says Walsh – which could be classified as theatrical costumes, tax deductible under Swedish law. The 2022 ABBAtars wear retro-modern ensembles by costume designer B Ȧkerlund, who worked with the likes of Dolce and Gabbana and Manish Arora. “[They] made the clothes physically and we filmed them to see how they moved,” Walsh says. “Then ILM built them digitally – they had to weave every thread.”
Getting the ABBAtars’ faces right was even more arduous. “You start with the skeleton, and then you put skin on them; it’s such a gradual process,” the director explains. “You think, ‘We’ve got it’, but once it’s in motion, it’s gone.” It was, he adds, “scary at times, because it just didn’t look like them… You’d find Benny[’s likeness] for a song, then the next one, he’d be gone again.” The light show – which comprises 500 moving lights, mapped to 30,000 points in the arena – had to line up with the ABBAtars too, as “every lighting change you make changes the faces”. No wonder the project required a mind-boggling 1 billion hours of computer time in total.
There are plenty of clever touches throughout that help suspend the audience’s disbelief. The virtual stage on screen perfectly lines up with the physical stadium and the lighting rig, giving a seamlessly three dimensional feel; the band fade and recede as they move ‘backstage’. “That screen can never just be a screen,” Walsh says. “When you go and see a live band, you see people moving around in the dark - it just felt like that was going to add an awful lot to the believability.”
It’s not all high realism – some of Voyage’s most thrilling moments wink at the artificial set up, including a breathtaking sequence when an overhead shot featuring oversized ABBAtars flips over to reveal the ‘band’ standing back in formation, human-sized again. “It’s almost like you’re playing a game of what’s real and what’s not,” Walsh says. “We’re not denying that they’re digital avatars, we’re embracing that. And I think the audience appreciates that.”
The intricacy of the tech meant that every light cue and remark from the ABBAtars had to be sketched out years before, but if the show ever rolls out to other venues – the stadium was designed to “in a way be flat pack, so you can take it down and move it” – Walsh would love to record extra tracks to slot into the set, with The Day Before You Came top of the wish list.
The technology, he believes, will “get better and better, and much cheaper”, so other groups are likely to follow in ABBA’s (digital) footsteps. Andersson and Ulvaeus suggested in an interview last month that the virtual concert treatment could pull off the seemingly impossible and reunite Walsh’s former collaborators, Oasis. “I don’t think Oasis would be up for it,” he counters. “They love to tour – I mean, they don’t together, but Liam and Noel do. And Noel made a comment ages ago, you know, he loves to be a bit negative” (he described the concept as “meaningless” in an interview with The Sun).
The fact that all four members of ABBA were able to take part in Voyage removes the ethical murkiness of previous virtual performance, he says. “We were able to reinvent them visually – if this had been a posthumous show, you can’t do that, but because they were involved in the whole thing, we were able to bring them into 2022… When you do Whitney Houston [as a hologram] and Whitney’s not around, it doesn’t feel right.” All the speeches and remarks delivered by the ABBAtars “were written by ABBA. It’s them, they’re present… How are you going to do that with John Lennon and George Harrison? Are you going to hoke it together?”
When Voyage was in its early stages, Walsh the show with work on Being James Bond, a documentary exploring Daniel Craig’s stint as the world’s most famous spy through previously unseen footage and candid conversations between Craig and Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson.
Walsh has been great friends with Craig since before his days as 007. Craig also starred in his 2008 film Flashbacks of a Fool between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and praised Walsh’s “astonishing creativity and […] laser-like eye for detail, two things that often don’t sit well together”.
“I’d spent a lot of time on the Bond sets, so I’d been around for all of it,” Walsh says. “I’d seen Dan become Bond. But when I went back to find visuals, looking at all the B-roll, I was really taken aback by what Dan had gone through. I just wanted to make a portrait of the man I know and was incredibly proud of.”
Looking back, the furore around Craig’s casting – which dwelt on his hair colour and questioned whether wearing a life jacket for a photo op on the Thames had destroyed his action hero credentials – seems bizarre. “It was insane,” Walsh says. “It was really, really tough for him… the UK press loves to build you up and slap you down, or slap you down then build you up… All those papers were just vicious with him.”
Casino Royale put paid to those criticisms, and Craig went on to become the longest serving Bond of all time. “15 years is a long time to be in an iconic role, and I think it’s very difficult to give up,” Walsh says. “If you become one of the biggest stars in the world playing this role, walking away from that is quite a hard thing to do.” Pierce Brosnan, of course, famously followed up his turn as Bond with a role in Mamma Mia! “There we go,” Walsh says, “why don’t we bring Dan into ABBA? Those two worlds collide again…”
ABBA Voyage is booking until May 2023, abbavoyage.com
