Bjorn Again, Glastonbury review: My my! What a sunny, glorious start
The first set of Glastonbury’s most famous stage is rarely as momentous as one might have expected. With 100,000 people on site by Thursday morning (more, even, than last year), most ticket-holders had endured a sun-drenched 48 hours of festival even before Bjorn Again declared the Pyramid Stage open shortly before noon on Friday.
Has a tribute act ever opened the Pyramid Stage before? It feels like Bjorn Again are the only ones who could get away with it. The Australian ABBA parody band have been entertaining large crowds in their home country since 1988, when the thoroughly divorce-riddled Swedes were relying on windfalls from endless compilation albums of their Seventies hits.
Thirty years on, and ABBA couldn’t have imagined a more powerful comeback - not least because the band hadn’t made a public appearance since 1982. But news of their reunion last April met with international excitement. ABBA weren’t just newsworthy again - they were cool.
The past decade or so has been particularly kind to ABBA’s reputation. In 2008, Mamma Mia became one of the highest-grossing films of the year and an instant classic. Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again emulated its success, gleaning feverish reviews and triumph at the box office.
ABBA-themed club-nights sprung up around the country; “serious” artists such as Brian Eno, Noel Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker praised their musicality and songwriting prowess. Max Martin, the Midas-touched Swedish songwriter behind Adele, Britney and Ariana Grande, doused the charts with Benny and Bjorn’s legacy.
And so it makes sense that four middle-aged Australians should open the greatest festival in the world by singing Gimme Gimme Gimme and Does Your Mother Know.
Between the blazing sun, the retro hits and the scale of the crowd, this could have easily been mistaken for Glastonbury’s famous Sunday afternoon Legends Slot, which Kylie Minogue will fill later this weekend. Perhaps Bjorn Again’s presence at the festival suggests the real deal may take to the Pyramid Stage for the 50th anniversary next year. We should be so lucky.
Bjorn Again’s “Benny”, “Bjorn”, “Agnetha” and “Frida” (the names of the musicians who pretend to be them are kept secret) present a little like Eurovision Song Contest Hosts, with brilliantly hammy Swedish accents and deliberately staged gags filling in the gaps between their convincing renditions of hits such as Super Trouper, Dancing Queen and S.O.S.
The most obscure song on the setlist was Ring Ring, the single that gave ABBA their first big break in 1973, which was accessorised with an enormous fluffy phone, which Benny used to have a conversation about the Healing Fields. This was not a place for ABBA’s more powerful sad-bangers, such as The Visitors or The Winner Takes It All, but rather those that would induce mass disco-dancing and mild hysteria.
If it had been drizzling, with mud underfoot, all of this would have been a considerable effort. It’s easy to see some of Bjorn Again’s more ludicrous gags fall flat - there wasn’t really need, for instance, for Benny and Bjorn to loop Van Halen’s Jump into the setlist, no matter how energetically, while Agnetha and Frida seemingly put on coats.
But the fact is that the grass is still soft and green at the Pyramid Stage, the sun continues to shine, and - maybe just as improbably - an ABBA tribute band can prove a glorious start to Glastonbury.
