Bjorn Again

A pseudonym from the Victorian snowfields

Rod Stephen was born Rod Woolley in Nunawading, on Melbourne's eastern edge, on 24 October 1958. He studied computer science at RMIT and worked at a metallurgical research centre while playing bass in covers and originals bands around the city. When his group The Crows folded he was at a loose end, and in October 1988 he landed on the idea of an ABBA show. He weighed the Beatles and Queen first and rejected both: ABBA offered two married couples, a Scandinavian accent and a wardrobe, which gave him something to act as well as play. The name came from a pseudonym he had been using on the Victorian ski fields since 1986.

He built the thing with drummer John Tyrrell, whom he had met in Melbourne in the mid-1980s. The first performance was on 6 May 1989 at the Tote Hotel in Collingwood, an inner-suburban rock pub with no obvious appetite for Swedish pop. Dorina Morelli played Frida, Kathy Riseborough played Agnetha, Peter Ryan played Benny, Gavin Charles played an invented guitarist called Stig, Stephen played Bjorn on bass and Tyrrell drummed as an invented Ola. The satire sat in the framing rather than the musicianship — the parts were learned straight, and the talk between them was not.

Stockholm, Reading and a telegram

Sweden came before Britain. The band played its first overseas dates there in 1990, and during a Swedish television appearance in 1991 Björn Ulvaeus sent a telegram that read: "The best of Luck! Anyone who looks like me ought to have a successful career!" That endorsement has done four decades of work; the show still bills itself as the only ABBA tribute the original members have put their names to.

The British and European debut followed in 1992, the same year the band met Benny Andersson and Ulvaeus in Stockholm. Its strangest early booking came at that year's Reading Festival, where the slot was arranged by the headliners, Nirvana — a piece of 1990s indie mischief that put six Australians in nylon flares in front of a crowd that had come for something else entirely. In 1993 Stephen moved the operation's base to London and began splitting the act into more than one touring company.

The records, and the revival they are credited with

The discography is small and mostly sideways. The "Erasure-ish" EP in 1992 took Erasure songs and played them as ABBA, inverting Erasure's own ABBA covers EP, and reached number 25 on the UK singles chart. A reading of "Flashdance… What a Feeling" reached number 27 in Australia in 1993, and the album "Flashback!" peaked at number 40 there in 1994. The band's own tally of recorded material runs to 133 songs: 55 ABBA titles, 62 other covers and seven originals. The most recent release traceable is the 2019 single "Christmas Is Björn Again".

The live record is the substantial part. The band was special guest to the Spice Girls at Wembley Stadium in 1998, opened the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 1999 and returned to it in 2009 and 2019, and played Sonisphere at Knebworth in 2009. It sold out four nights at the Sydney Opera House across 2007 and 2008 and held a summer residency at Taronga Zoo for fifteen consecutive years to 2018. It played the Buckingham Palace Christmas party in 2012, attended by the Queen, and private bookings for Bill Gates, Rowan Atkinson, Russell Crowe and Vladimir Putin. Channel 5 made a documentary about the group, "ABBA: Bjorn Again!", in 1999.

Ulvaeus has described the show as the one that single-handedly started the ABBA revival of the late 1980s and early 1990s — a claim that is easier to accept now that the catalogue is a stadium hologram show and a pair of films than it was when the group was playing Collingwood pubs for beer money.

Two companies, and a numbers problem

By 1997 three separate lineups were touring simultaneously. The structure today is simpler: a UK and European company run by Stephen and an Australasian one run by Tyrrell, drawing on a pool of performers who take the four ABBA roles plus Stig and Ola. Nobody in the current cast is billed under their own name.

The scale claims deserve a caveat, because they do not reconcile. Reference material credits roughly 5,500 shows in 72 countries across 34 years. The Australian site says more than 120 countries. The listing for the Dublin dates in March 2027 advertises over 5,800 shows in 78 countries across 39 years. The show count is plausible and rises steadily; the country figure depends entirely on which page is doing the counting, and 120 is not a number that survives much scrutiny.

Where things stand in late October 2026

The current package is the ABBA Forever Tour, and the Australasian leg has been running through 2026. The band played two nights in the Concert Hall at Brisbane's Queensland Performing Arts Centre on 28 and 29 August, then the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre at Auckland's Aotea Centre on 17 October. Still to come this year: the Palais Theatre in St Kilda on 31 October, two shows at Her Majesty's Theatre in Adelaide on 21 November and the Odeon Theatre in Hobart on 27 November. The Taronga Zoo booking in Sydney returns on 20 February 2027.

Britain gets the show next spring. Twenty-one dates are advertised between 10 March and 11 April 2027, opening at the Orchard Theatre in Dartford and taking in Ipswich, the Brighton Centre, Basingstoke, Northampton, Halifax, Derby, Carlisle, Harrogate, Truro, Poole, Sheffield, Gateshead, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Symphony Hall in Birmingham, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Bath and De Montfort Hall in Leicester. Two Dublin nights at the 3Olympia Theatre sit inside that run, on 26 and 27 March 2027 at 8pm, with tickets from €37.20. As of 24 October 2026, aggregated listings showed 31 dates on sale across both hemispheres.

What recent audiences got

The Auckland show on 17 October 2026 was reviewed by Greg Haver, who had seen ABBA play in 1979. He found the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre packed with several generations in sparkles, feather boas and wedding veils, every word known, and the set bookended by "Waterloo". His verdict was that the band "keeps the music alive with such respect for the songs and the ABBA legacy" — and that the arrangements expose how much harder the material is than its radio friendliness suggests.

The show is not a straight recital. Detours are built in: the Auckland night took in Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" and a drum solo, and the Sheffield City Hall date on 1 November 2025 tagged "SOS" with a snippet of "Message in a Bottle", ran Van Halen's "Jump" out of fragments of "Eruption" and "Sweet Child o' Mine", and kept Erasure's "A Little Respect" in the first half as a nod to the 1992 EP. Whether that lands depends on appetite for the gag; the pacing is relentless by design, and audiences who want a quiet passage somewhere in the middle do not get one.