It really was the last weekend. Because rehearsals have officially started, so now my life consists of six-day weeks at a windy outdoor rehearsal site, and Mondays off filled with laundry, errands and other boring life admin. This meant that when Tom (he who so callously rejected the Needle Museum) mentioned the idea of slipping down to London for a visit, I was all for seizing that last opportunity for a proper weekend. Which is how I came to book an AirBnb in an unexplored part of London and hop a train for a few days of being a tourist in the city where I (nominally) live.
First up was perhaps the most exciting event on the agenda, at least for those of us who grew up in the 80's. Eight month ago, when the beloved supergroup ABBA announced that they were back and producing a new album and a revolutionary new "live" concert in London, I was pretty excited. Because... ABBA!
(ABBA haters please leave now. Because, like raisin-hate, that attitude disqualifies you from reading my blog. I can't put it better than my friend Nathan, with whom I had this brief exchange on the topic:
I'd heard the hype when this new ABBA venture was all first announced, but then it faded into the background until Needle-Hater Tom mentioned that he was going down to London, and might be seeing the show with tickets from a mate who was working on the gig. And I might have had this reaction:
Fast forward a month or so and it turned out that Tom's mate was also someone that I'd worked with, and several other previous work colleagues were also involved, and yes, we did get tickets to see the very first time they did the show for an audience. This is definitely one of the perks of a life in show biz. And it really doesn't happen all that often. And I really try not to take advantage of any connections I might have. But dammit... ABBA!
Despite the fact that the press sometimes mention holograms when talking about the show, we knew it wasn't going to be that, but we really didn't know what to expect otherwise. I knew motion-capture was involved. I think I knew that the actual 70-year-old members of ABBA had gone into the studio to record the songs in the show. And we figured, cynically, that we were in for a sort of glorified music video. Keep your expectations low and you won't be disappointed, that's my motto.
(Aside: In researching this post I watched several promotional videos about ABBA Voyage, both the album and the arena show. And I have to share a quote from Bjorn. When he was asked about the decades that have passed since their last album in 1982 and this new one he said, "It's a well known saying, in the music industry, that you shouldn't leave more than 40 years between albums." And I always thought Benny was my favourite...)
Tom and I Ubered to the ABBA Arena in east London and met up with a couple of the colleagues who were working on the show to get the lowdown. Naturally, we also got a couple drinks and took a mandatory selfie to send to Karen, who has to endure a lot of these kind of "look at this cool thing I'm doing" photos, often while she's shovelling herself out of a snow drift in Winnipeg. Sorry about that, Karen. Your time will come.
And the show? It was GREAT. It was also LOUD. The cynical side of me says that it is indeed a glorified music video, but it's also much more. You do spend the whole 90 minutes staring at an enormous, insanely high-definition video screen, but there's also a live band off to the side, and there are a lot of lighting and physical effects inside the auditorium that integrate seamlessly with images on the screen. And the digitally-produced de-aged avatars of Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid dancing and playing on what looks like a normal concert stage in front of you work surprisingly well. They've been extremely clever with how the video is designed and the illusion of depth and "realness" is excellent. The moments when they break from that convention and get into music video style are less successful, and the avatars still have a touch of the Polar Express Effect, which is magnified when they're gigantic close-ups, instead of human-sized figures on stage.
Regardless, it was great fun, and the audience clearly loved it and people sang and danced along and I think it's going to be hugely popular and successful. And after the show we got to have drinks with our friends who were all a bit loopy from an impromptu party backstage with Benny himself (!) and universally relieved that the show worked, and people liked it, and they could now take a breath and maybe relax ever so slightly, and maybe stop hearing "Fernando" in their dreams, which was a nice vibe to share in.
In summation: I give ABBA Voyage two thumbs up, but recommend ear plugs. (As the sound guy said, "When Benny tells you to turn it up, you turn it up.") And get a ticket on the floor, you Dancing Queens!
With one huge tick on our list, we met early the next morning for another of those things Karen gets annoyed about missing while she's busy in a snowbank. This one was also Tom's suggestion: an installation at an empty church in Mile End that an Australian artist turned into an enormous snow globe.
Knowing how popular an insta-firendly event like this was likely to be - especially on the last few days of its run - I pushed Tom to arrive well in advance of the 10am opening time. (Not my first rodeo...). He was sceptical but agreed, and we met at the church an hour before opening, where we were already about 30 deep in the queue. It was a sunny morning and we had a lot of ABBA to discuss, so the time passed pleasantly and we felt more and more smug as the queue snaked further down the street the closer it got to the opening time. We London-savvy folk were ushered into the church in the first batch of punters allowed to enter for our allotted fifteen minutes, right at 10am.
Big blowers were mounted to a scaffolding structure on the roof outside and fed the confetti through several holes. The press photos I'd seen in advance did not do justice to the sheer volume of eco-friendly white confetti that blanketed the inside of the church. I suspect those photos were taken at the very beginning of the run, and we arrived at the very end, after the snow had been accumulating for at least nine days, and it was deep!
Even without the confetti, the church itself would have been quite lovely on its own. It has an appealing rundown quality and though it's sad to see a beautiful building in a state of disrepair, at least it hadn't been torn down and was being used for something great.
Fifteen minutes may not seem like much, but it was enough. We had time to take lots of photos, and to watch other people interacting, and to get annoyed by the amount of time and attention given by other people to taking selfies. And yeah, we took a few fun pictures ourselves.
Once we'd had our fifteen minutes of snow, we wandered back towards the tube station trailing eco-friendly confetti along the street with us, as many had clearly done before. I'm sure the local residents were getting a bit tired of the installation and will be grateful when the rain finally dissolves the last flakes. Though as anyone who's ever done a snow effect on stage before knows, they will surely still be finding flakes of the stuff in that church decades from now.
Since it was a decidedly East End-ish weekend, our next location was Spitalfields for a lovely late breakfast before the next site of the day. I'd given Tom a few suggestions of slightly quirky London things to do, He picked Dennis Severs' House. It's a spot I've blogged about before, so I won't go into it here, but it was nice to revisit the place years later, especially while sharing it with someone new. (The other suggestions are ones you've already heard about here and here. Also, I admit to feeling a bit smug at being able to offer a menu of activities that might appeal. It's almost like I've been here a while.)
After Dennis Severs we wandered around Spitalfields for a while, enjoying how successfully we were spending our time that weekend. So for an encore, Tom checked out which West End shows might have matinees the next day, since an afternoon performance would still leave time to get back up to Birmingham by early evening and be rested and ready for work the next day. And yeah, "Life of Pi" had tickets. So Tom bought a pair on his phone as we were sitting in a pop-up food court outside Brick Lane Vintage Market, while I ate vegan cashew "ice cream". And lo, our self-satisfaction knew no bounds.
Tom had other plans for Saturday evening, so I took a long walk back to my AirBnb in Wapping. And rather than spending the whole journey with my nose stuck in Google Maps, which is my default state when navigating London (or anywhere, really) I decided to put my phone away and find my way home by instinct. And it worked! It may not have been the most direct route, but I found some streets I've never seen before in the City, and I walked a lot of the Thames path, and I got back to the AirBnb in time to pick up a few supplies for a picnic dinner at home and also rest my tired feet and enjoy a pint in one of several very nice neighbourhood pubs nearby. And then I binged three episodes of "Bridgerton" and went to bed early. Perfection.
Sunday went precisely as planned, and the show was very good, and the train journey back to Birmingham was fine. But you don't need to hear about that. What you need to hear is that yes, I know that was kind of a magic weekend. And I know I'm very very lucky to have been able to design my life in the last decade in a way that means I'm able to spend a few days seeing ABBA, and frolicking in a life-sized snow globe, and hitting a West End show on a whim. Very lucky indeed. But I also don't own a home, and my retirement savings are not what they could have been if I'd been sensible and stayed employed in Canada like a normal person. And I don't exactly have a solid plan for my fast-approaching golden years. Or even know what continent I'll spend them on. So I'm kind of hoping that Karen's garden shed might be available, because she is totally my backup plan.
And she and are definitely going to the ABBA show together. With prosecco.
Because we are Dancing Queeeeeeeeens!
