More about: ABBA

The hunger for immersive music exhibitions shows now signs of being satiated with news that 70s superstars ABBA are to get their own show. Appropriately located at the Southbank Centre in – yes – Waterloo in London, the exhibition will allow fans to imagine they live in the world of the defunct Swedish band.

Entitled Super Troopers, the exhibition will gather previously unseen objects from Stockholm’s ABBA Museum and the group’s own private archives.

Paul Denton, producer at the Southbank Centre, said of the exhibition: "This show will be in the context of the socio-political situation in the 1970s and how Abba rose to fame during quite a grim time for the UK. We're looking at what was special about Abba and why they rose to prominence. I think they really like that.

"During the 1970s there was a three-day working week, a hung parliament and economically Britain was quite poor. Abba were seen as quite exotic creatures from Sweden.”

So a bit like today but in analogue and shades of orange and brown, then.

It is understood that only 17 people will be able to enter the show at any one time. The exhibition’s compact and bijou rooms will represent significant moments from ABBA’s career and will include replicas of the Brighton Grand Hotel room where the band stayed when they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, their Polar recording studio as well as handwritten notes, photos, instruments and their 1974 Eurovision medals.

ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus said: “Since our songs, which were written in the 70s, are still being played today it’s particularly interesting that the Southbank Centre exhibition is placing them in the temporal context in which they were created.

“We recorded Mamma Mia in 1975. What happened that year in the UK and in the world? One thing is for certain – it seems unbelievably long ago!”

Anni-Frid Lyngstad added: ‘We are so excited that the exhibition is taking place at the Southbank Centre, which is just a few short steps away from Waterloo.”

Quite whether Prime Minister Theresa May who claimed that ABBA “gets her up and going” will make the exhibition or not remains unclear.

More about: ABBA