Take a Chance on Them

ABBA makes a triumphant return.

- James Parker

I've seen the best. The maddest and the fieriest and the deepest and the heaviest. I've watched them, openmouthed: HR, from Bad Brains, executing a perfect backflip to land crisply on the band's last syllable of chord-crash; Patti Smith singing "Beneath the Southern Cross," heaving open the doors to the underworld with the pressure of her own breath; Iggy Pop, berserk, doing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" with Sonic Youth as his backing band. And none of these, none of these, transported me in quite the manner in which I was transported a few weeks ago by a vision of ABBA.

And it was a vision. At a purpose-built arena in East London, ABBA-those smiley, soft-spoken radicals; those almost blandly futuristic Swedes-has orchestrated an immaculate 3,000-person, 95-minute digital hallucination. This is CGI stuff, the outer limit. Four figures appear onstage before us, avatars, daemons, numina, whatever they are, denser than holograms, more shimmeringly charged than human beings, with a kind of atomic brightness, composites of light and longing. And we know them: Björn, Benny, Agnetha, Frida, in their late-'70s/early-'80s pomp, their poppiest plumage, variously nodding and swishing and keening and twinkling and making little gracious gestures. Huge side screens give us close-ups, flashes of realism-the eyes, the sweat on the cheekbones. Holy shit. ABBA!