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.
