If you hate Abba, 2024 is really not going to be your year…

Fifty years after the Swedish Fab Four won the Eurovision Song Contest, rumours are circulating – about yet more new music, a third ‘Mamma Mia!’ film, even a zombie horror flick about an Abba covers band. But there’s only one thing that superfans are really crying out for, says Paul Clements

Abba, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with ‘Waterloo’, look set to release new tracks (AFP via Getty Images)

If you’re one of those fun sponges who doesn’t leap to their feet on New Year’s Eve when someone puts on “Dancing Queen” (and, oh, they will…), brace positions, please: I’m afraid 2024 is not going to be your year.

In case you somehow hadn’t noticed, Abba are having an extraordinary, and unexpected, late-period revival. Abba Voyage, their futuristic concert series that uses digital trickery to conjure up the band in their late-1970s pomp, is still attracting sellout crowds in east London’s purpose-built ABBA Arena, a good year and a half after opening.

Having contributed a third of a billion pounds to the economy in its first year alone, the show – which is pure sensory and nostalgia overload – has also spawned an entire new entertainment art form, opening the way for other “heritage” acts to take to the stage again without having to actually take to the stage. US rockers Kiss recently announced they are now planning their own avatar show.

Abba have always had good heads for business, at their most imperious they famously rivalled Volvo as Sweden’s biggest export. Next April marks 50 years since “Waterloo” won the Eurovision Song Contest, a moment that sent the Swedish Fab Four into the stratosphere. Over the years, the band has racked up almost 400 million album sales, nine UK number ones, the longest chart run of any greatest hits compilation in UK history, a jukebox stage musical that’s broken records in the West End and on Broadway, and been translated into almost two dozen languages – as well as spawning a billion-dollar film franchise (about which, more later…).

For a group that broke up in 1982 (before reuniting to release one last album in 2021), the Abba bandwagon has been revving for a while, and isn’t in danger of tailing off. In fact, it’s about to step up a whole new gear.

Then there’s the small matter of all the songs that Abba recorded in the heyday, some only in part, but never got round to releasing

It’s almost too perfect that Eurovision is to be held next May in Sweden. Abba have turned down the inevitable offers to take part – but fans refuse to believe they won’t be press-ganged to appear… somehow. And there’s good reason to think there’s something going on.

Around the time Malmö was unveiled as the 2024 host city, tickets for Abba Voyage on April 6, 2024 – 50 years to the day from their famous song contest triumph – disappeared from sale. Given Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Bjorn don’t actually perform in person, only as “Abbatars” (that pun wearing thin for anyone else yet…?), why pull the shows? Might the Abba Arena be needed for something else? Might the live backing band that accompanies the pop apparitions be needed for a live link-up performance or announcement? What could it all mean?

Online message boards (certainly the ones I hang around) are abuzz with possibilities for Abba’s big anniversary year – many of them plain wishful thinking, but some alive with possibility.

In 2024, a special TV documentary about the band is to be released. Another Mamma Mia! film is in the offing, too. The franchise’s producer, Judy Craymer, recently told a Hollywood newspaper that a third outing “will happen”, saying: “I don’t want to over-egg it, but I know there’s a trilogy there” – one in which Meryl Streep might even be persuaded to return, “if the script is right”. Again, which songs will feature? (My fingers are crossed for “The Day Before You Came”.)

There’s even a horror movie in production, called Bjorn of the Dead, about a covers band, Abbatoir, who find themselves trapped in a nightclub as a zombie apocalypse begins. Even more remarkably, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has signed up for a lead role.

Bjorn and Benny have also confirmed that the band have readied “five or six” songs not yet in the Abba Voyage concert, telling Newsnight that “Super Trouper” and “Take A Chance On Me” have been given the Abbatar treatment. Might 2024 be the year they join a refreshed setlist?

The most solid rumour is that, in 2024, Abba Voyage will be going on a world tour. The lease on the Abba Arena site in east London runs out in a couple of years, and as the stadium has a timber frame and was designed as a flatpack – so Swedish… – it can, in theory, be rebuilt anywhere. The only question is: who’s first?

Will it be Las Vegas, where global pop acts get vast sums to play in residence (or virtually, in Abba’s case). Except the band only ever topped the US charts once and remain something of a curio there.

Instead, how about Australia, where 1970s Abbamania hit hardest? It was reported earlier this month that Victoria’s state government is in “advanced conversations” to bring the show to Melbourne, but that New South Wales had also lobbied hard for it to go to Sydney. For an outsider bet, I’d take a chance on Singapore.

However, there’s one persistent rumour above all others getting Abbaologists really excited – that new Abba tracks are on the way.

When Catherine Tate appeared on Zoe Ball’s Radio 2 show, said she had it on good authority (from *cough, cough* Russell T Davies, the Doctor Who screenwriter and friend of Bjorn’s) that new Abba tracks are to be unveiled at a “special event”.

The recording sessions for their 2021 comeback album Voyage yielded at least two new songs: “They’re good sort of stuff, but not really finished,” Benny once told a German radio station. “It takes more work, from me, at least, in the studio.” (Something got lost in translation there, but you get the gist.)

Now, the new song titles have leaked – “Hit By A Train” and “My Story Ends With You” – and messageboard discussions are at full shriek.

And then there’s the small matter of all the songs that Abba recorded in the heyday, some only in part, but never got round to releasing. When I spoke to Benny and Bjorn a decade or so ago, they insisted there was simply nothing left in the vaults. But then “Just A Notion”, an abandoned 1978 demo, was polished up to feature on Voyage.

As any fan with Google access knows, there are several other gems still to be had. While working on the Chess musical in the early 1980s, Bjorn’s car was broken into and a demo tape stolen. It contained one of the last tracks the band had recorded before splitting in 1982 – and it might be their greatest as-yet unreleased song.

“Just Like That” has mythic status among Abba fans. An uptempo ballad with Agnetha on lead vocals, it already exists in several distinct versions, including an almost-finished one with a saxophone solo by Raphael Ravenscroft, who performed on “Baker Street”; all that’s missing are Frida’s backing vocals. Despite protestations from Benny and Bjorn that it doesn’t “work” (see for yourself on YouTube – it really does…), they must be fond of it: it was scheduled to feature in the original Mamma Mia! stage musical, as a duet between Sophie and Sky, but was pulled from the running order so close to opening night, it featured in the souvenir programme.

So, B&B, as a 50th anniversary gift to the fans, how about gussying up “Just Like That” once and for all – perhaps as a “final” single, or a bonus track on a deluxe Voyage reissue? It might just be the greatest way to thank us for the music.