Thursday 2 June 2011

Hitkrant, August 1979: Spectacular run on ABBA tickets

Thursday, September 13 is the day. Then ABBA’s gigantic world tour will kick off in Edmonton, for which – considering the advance ticket sales – the interest is overwhelming. Never before has a tour been as well prepared as this one. Nothing has been left to chance and that’s why it seems as if the Swedish quartet wants to put an end to the rumours that this will be their farewell tour once and for all.

For weeks on end, the group has worked and rehearsed for the new show in Stockholm, that will last for at least two hours and – apart from several hits – will contain new songs as well.

Once again, ABBA will be strengthened by several Swedish musicians. They are: Ola Brunkert/drums, Anders Eljas/keyboards, Rutger Gunnarsson/bass, Mats Ronander/guitars, Ake Sundqvist/percussion and Lars Wellander/guitars.

In several countries, the tickets have gone on sale already and this has made for some spectacular statistics. In England, Scotland and Ireland, the tickets were sold out in one day! And that’s a total of 75.000 tickets!
In Copenhagen, the concert was sold out within two hours and in Edmonton, all tickets were gone within three hours. Furthermore, in America all concerts – for which the tickets have gone on sale already – are sold out.
It’s very likely that there will be an enormous run on the tickets in our country as well, when they go on sale on Saturday, September 22.
A television crew from Radio Sweden is going to film ABBA during the week in November when they perform in London. At ABBA’s request, a 52-minute TV special will be filmed, that will be broadcast in the beginning of next year, hopefully in our country too. This film will contain footage filmed in North America as well. On top of that, manager Stig Anderson is negotiating with the BBC to air a radio special called ‘ABBA In Concert’.

Only after the opening concert in Edmonton, the group will have a big press conference. Apart from that, there will be small, informative gatherings after the concerts, that only one or two members of the group will attend. This arrangement has been made because the tour will be extremely hard and exhausting and will demand a lot from the ABBA members.
Meanwhile, we were allowed to take a peek in ABBA’s rehearsal studio and Agnetha assured us that they have never been this well prepared on a tour as this one: “If this doesn’t become a resounding success, I will be flabbergasted. The show is very well crafted and thought out. It can’t be bettered!”
You will be there too, won’t you, on October 24 in Ahoy Rotterdam?

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