It’s all there, 2 storeys below ground level. The music, the costumes, the photos and music video clips, lots and lots of memorabilia. The ABBA museum opened less than 2 months ago and it seems as if its already on every tourist’s Stockholm ‘must-do’ list. Well, it’s our first day here and we’ve ticked it off.
It was great, really great. We booked our tickets online and collected them from an ATM in the museum foyer. We booked for 11.15am (it’s open from 10.00am to 10.00pm daily), thinking that would give us enough time to get the subway into the centre of the city and then walk to Djurgarden Island, which is full of museums, including Skansen the world’s first open-air museum, where Annifrid ‘Frida’ was ‘discovered’ during a singing contest. Our knowledge of ABBA-related trivia has increased exponentially today! We got to the museum with an hour to spare, so we wandered around past some of the other attractions and found a little well-stocked supermarket and bought drinks and a Danish pastry.
The museum is set up in ‘rooms’, with interactive stuff throughout. You can sing onstage as the 5th member of the band, do quizzes, record yourself singing ABBA songs, and with all the activities you can scan your entry ticket and then look at the videos/photos/quiz results online later. Sorry to disappoint but we didn’t sing or perform and our quiz results were so woeful that we’re not sharing them with anyone!
There are reproductions of the music room where Bjorn and Benny wrote lots of the hit songs, the recording studio at Polar Music, the sewing room where a lot of those amazing glam-pop costumes were designed and sewn, and there is a whole room full of the costumes, with hundreds of album covers and gold records lining the walls. There are recent videos of each band member, remembering their lives pre-ABBA and one of my favourites – Lasse Halstrom the film-maker who at the time worked for Swedish Television and made a few music videos on the side, remembering the early days of making ABBA video clips. The museum plays ABBA: The Movie on a continuous loop. A lot of that movie was filmed in Australia.
We spent just under an hour and a half in the museum, and by the time we left it was getting very busy. We did the right thing going in the morning.
Brilliant. This all sounds so exciting Judy. I remember coming home from a friend’s 21st singing along to Waterloo on the radio. Them were the days. <3
ABBA songs really just make you sing along, whether you want to or not. Even yesterday at the museum, the attendants would occasionally sing a few words of songs they must hear all day, every day
So you got there Judy !!. i suspect you wlill be singing their songs all day xx
Ha! Yes, I keep getting snippets of their songs running through my head. I just remembered one day when we were talking through Spain the first time and we were in a supermarket. We heard the familiar music of one of their best-known songs … then it took us a little while to realise that they were singing it in Spanish!
Love ABBA . Always cheers me up to hear an ABBA song ! Pleased your luggage has found you ! xSal
Sal, you would LOVE the ABBA Museum! Will post some photos of the costumes soon. J xx
Oh, those jumpsuits! It took me a moment to register that the MEN wore those costumes – they left nothing to the imagination…..
lol Kel. If anyone had asked me what ABBA wore in their video clips, I couldn’t have thought of anything, but as soon as I saw them all in the costume room the memories came flooding back.
Great pictures Judy of the ABBA museum . Now you are going to Ikea . We are about the only two people in the world that has never been to one of these stores. Have fun xx
Wow, Margaret. I’m just trying to think how I would describe an Ikea to someone who has never been. They aren’t really like anything else