Technically, I should have written this yesterday, but somehow Christmas Eve feels like an even less appropriate time to be writing than Christmas Day.
Christmas coincides with my birthday, something that’s been a bane and a boon over the years. On one hand, it opens the opportunity of a REALLY BIG PRESENT as a joint Christmas and birthday one, and one I can open a few days before everyone else gets theirs. Although as a child, there were always a few aunties and uncles who managed to sneak in the same present they would have bought me for Christmas anyway.
On the other hand, it’s always meant that my birthday was overshadowed by the big day itself. In my teens and early 20s, this didn’t matter: my birthday was just an excuse for friends to start the Christmas week’s drinking early.
But as friends and family got older, my birthday has always tended to get forgotten, or pushed to one side. Happily, that has coincided with getting old enough that each passing year is treated with as much suspicion as optimism. Your best days might be ahead of you, but there is a hell of a lot less of them than you would like.
Getting old also means that the old acquisitive urges lessen, too, making present buying for me difficult and less obvious. Kim chose wisely, of course, because she puts a great deal of thought into it.
Hence, spending my birthday evening somewhere near Stratford, seeing ABBA Voyage.
I’ve always loved Abba. Old enough to remember when their singles were new and much-anticipated, even as a child I loved the melancholy in their songs. Abba have two modes: full on joy (Dancing Queen) or heartbreak (Knowing me, Knowing you). No band in the world has ever managed to hit both modes so well.
I’ve argued in the past that Abba’s greatest hits are better than The Beatles, and I still think that’s true. There’s something to be written about how Abba are queer in a way that The Beatles never could be. But that’s another essay, and one that I am probably not entirely qualified to write.
Of course, Voyage is holograms: but after about five minutes, you stop thinking about that and just enjoy it. And it’s wonderful: genuinely the best “live” show I’ve seen. It might have made hundreds of millions of pounds, but you can see where the money went to set it up. Even the building was built specially for the show.
I cried. It’s a mark of the breadth of music that I like that the last band I saw live that made me cry was Van Der Graaf Generator, when they reformed in 2005, and I went to their first show.
But perhaps there’s a connection. I cried at VDGG because they were a band I had loved, who I never thought I would have the chance to see. Abba, despite the physical absence of the protagonists, felt in some way the same.
Anyway, if you get a chance, go and see it. It’s good.
