A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

It's not every day that you get to read something like this:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's office moved on Friday to quash claims he attended a mystery concert featuring ABBA lookalikes singing to him from behind a veil at a military-style compound.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov reacted after the London-based Bjorn Again, a long-established act that imitates 1970s pop super-group ABBA, said it had put on a show, cloaked in secrecy, for Putin, seven male guests and a woman who may have been the premier's wife.

"I can tell you officially and for sure Vladimir Putin never took part in any concert of the kind. He wasn't there," Peskov said.

However the musicians' manager, Rod Stephen, said he was in little doubt about whom the concert was for, and one of the band's singers said she saw Putin himself at the performance.

"It was quite obvious where Mr Putin was sitting," Aileen McLaughlin, who doubles for blonde ABBA vocalist Agnetha Faltskog, told AFP by phone from London.

"I got a glimpse of his face in the lights."

And a glimpse of his soul as well, no doubt.