Le Monde, on 18 October, returns to a London dream: dead idols, on stage, without lifting them from the grave. The firm is Unit1 Studio. The money was announced in September. The Guardian put the figure: nearly £15 million, $20 million. Balderton Capital, through Daniel Waterhouse, the Spotify backer. Alongside: Mercuri and Paul McGuinness, who managed U2 until 2013. The founder is Barney Wragg. For five years, from late 2011, he ran Andrew Lloyd Webber’s empire. The startup, the Guardian says, is from last year.

The model everyone cites is Abba Voyage, from 2022, in a hall built for it, in east London. Costly to make, costly to move. Unit1 wants the cheaper, movable version. Balderton writes that it has already shifted a KT Tunstall showcase from Hammersmith to a new studio at Tileyard. That is their proof of a “barrier” broken. It is not a planetary tour. It is a move across a borough.

Tunstall worked with Wragg at EMI. In the pilot, motion-capture cameras filmed her recreating a two-decade-old number from Later… with Jools Holland. The avatar updated her features to the way she looks now. On stage, Wragg says, live musicians. On an LED screen, the digital figure. Lights, sound, props. For the audience, “seamless”. He calls it teleportation. That is a sales sentence. It is not physics.

Living artists who no longer tour. Dead artists, with families and estates. Wragg: in most cases you deal with the heirs, on “extremely well-known” concerts, so as not to be “distasteful”. He named no booked shows. He said what he wished he had seen: Queen at Live Aid, the Beatles at the Cavern, Hendrix at Woodstock. That is a wish list. It is not a poster.

The technology, on paper, would let the same show run in several countries at once. Abba Voyage showed the appetite for a hall. Tupac, a hologram at Coachella in 2012, showed the appetite for a ghost. Unit1 sells the interval between them: cheaper, more movable, with flesh-and-blood players beside a screen. Whoever buys a ticket buys an admitted illusion. Whoever sells an estate sells a right. It is not a resurrection.

Until a poster, it remains a $20 million round. After a poster, the families remain. Anyone who mixes them turns an LED into a cemetery with a PA.

Image: Raph_PH, the Abba Voyage show, London, 27 May 2022, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows the Abba hall, not a Unit1 concert of dead idols.

Sources consulted: Une start-up londonienne rêve de recréer les concerts des idoles disparues — Le Monde; UK startup snares $20m to recreate gigs with hyper-realistic digital avatars — The Guardian.