Gigs in London this week

It's been an exciting fixture in London's musical calendar since 2013, and it's back next year with a line-up of some of the biggest stars on the planet. Taking place across weekends in June and July, Hyde Park will host an upmarket festival vibe complete with food, drink and a posh VIP area. The 2022 headliners are shaping up nicely already, with Elton John, Eagles, Pearl Jam and Duran Duran. However, perhaps the most anticipated act announced is Adele, who'll be belting out ballads to her home town on two dates.  BST Hyde Park takes place on Fri 24 June – Sun 10 June 2022. Find out more here. 

ABBA are back with their first live show in 40 years… but they’re not quite the band we once knew. ‘ABBA Voyage’, which takes place in a new, spaceship-sized venue in Stratford, is a digital gig, which means ABBA themselves don’t actually perform. You don’t find out what that really means until you’re in there.  On opening night, the venue was full of everyone from older couples reliving their ’70s heydays to trendily-dressed Gen Zers who probably first heard the Swedish stars as a TikTok audio. It’s not just any venue, either: it’s a purpose-built arena with 500 moving lights, 291 speakers and a capacity of 3,000. It even has dancing booths.  Chants roar through the audience as the show starts and then you see them: Benny, Björn, Agnetha and Frida. Dressed in tight, sequinned jumpsuits, crowned with full heads of hair, they’re glowing, smiling and flawless. The 3D digital avatars (or ABBA-tars, as they insist on calling them) were created by George Lucas’s company Industrial Light & Magic and were made by blending five weeks of motion-captured films of ABBA’s current selves with a younger body double, engineered to look like their ’70s prime. It’s a wild idea. But ABBA have always been innovative, so it sort of makes sense that they’re pioneering one of the most exciting, and most ridiculous, technologies in live entertainment today. ‘Last time we played London was 1979,’ says Benny, who fumbles his words, adding to the effect. Björn’s cheeky smile and Frida’s mannerisms are