Per Gessle on Nordic Rox – December 2024 – CBB30 Special

Per Gessle and Sven Lindström are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Crash! Boom! Bang! in the December episode of Nordic Rox. The album came out in 1994. Sven asks Per how it feels, because he is celebrating something almost every year. PG says that’s the way it goes. It feels good. Roxette had an eight-year span when they were at their prime. The Roxette heydays were between 1988 and 1995. Then in 1995, Marie got her first child and everything changed from there. Crash! Boom! Bang! is the last big album in that era. It was recorded in London, on the Isle of Capri in Italy and in Stockholm. It took forever to make, Mr. G adds. There are lots of songs and it’s got some nice stuff in there, he thinks.

Sven says it’s coming with a bonus CD as well with some demos and he promises an interesting flashback to 1994. But before that, they kick off with Driving One Of Your Cars by Lisa Miskovsky. Per thinks it’s a great track. It was one of Lisa’s earliest singles, but it’s still a great song. It has stood the test of time.

Ahead Of My Time is played by Teddybears featuring Daddy Boastin’. It’s taken from the Soft Machine album. Sven thinks it’s a cool band. Per agrees. Great productions, great producers, and they have been producing so many other artists as well. They always appear with the bear heads on stage. Something for the new line-up of Roxette to be inspired with, Sven suggests. Per says why not, then they are laughing.

Final Gørl by Sløtface from Norway is next. The song is from their latest album Film Buff. Sven thinks they are a great band. Sven and Per played some songs from them in previous shows.

Then comes Are You Still Having Fun? by Eagle-Eye Cherry. It’s a great song, PG thinks. The guys are having fun and Sven says they are going to have even more fun now, because now it’s time for the Crash! Boom! Bang! special.

The album came out in spring 1994, after about 12 months of recording and preparations and songwriting. Songwriting took even longer, Per says. They started recording CBB in 1993. They just came off the big Joyride tour and they started working immediately on this album. Sven thinks that if you compare it with the Joyride album, Per was in a different frame of mind when he started writing for this one. Mr. G says it’s true in a way. When they recorded Joyride, they had a breakthrough with the Look Sharp! album. Per wanted Joyride to be a super mainstream, catchy album. Basically, every song on the Joyride album was written to be a single. But it was a different ballgame when he started writing Crash! Boom! Bang!, because they had been touring for over a year and they were on top of their game. PG felt a little bit more relaxed. They started using other Swedish musicians and also experimenting a lot in the studio and trying things out in a different way. Maybe CBB didn’t become as mainstream as Joyride. Looking back at it, Per thinks there are a couple of tracks that you could have thrown away in the waste paper basket even then. Nevertheless, the highlights for Mr. G are really, really high in Roxette history.

Sven says the Joyride album was written to be smash hits all over the place. When they presented Crash! Boom! Bang!, it was a 15-track album and almost an hour’s playing time. Per explains that the vinyl was basically gone. The CD was there, so you could extend the album’s playing time. Those days they had these open budgets, so you just went on and recorded and recorded. They did so much stuff. When they eventually played what they had done for their record label, they loved it, but they said the classic words, „we can’t hear a single”. Per was really pissed off by that, because he thought they had so many great tracks. Especially, he thought that Roxette had made giant steps forward, artistically at least. And Marie was singing really great. Songs like What’s She Like?, Run To You and Love Is All are great tracks for Per and for Marie as well. But the record label didn’t agree. So PG was really pissed off and he went home and wrote another song. That turned out to be Sleeping In My Car, which became the first single. That was written out of frustration, in furious anger, but it turned out nice. Per always loved Marie singing that type of songs. It’s not really her cup of tea, she was never really a power pop girl, but when she sang songs like that, she was always the best.

Here they play Sleeping In My Car, the single that paved the way for the Crash! Boom! Bang! album.

The CD version of the anniversary release has a bonus CD with quite a lot of demos written for the album. 23 demos. It was basically all the songs that Per wrote for the project. He looked back into his archives and it’s more songs than he remembered. Sven was a bit surprised to find out that this upcoming song, She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was written for the Crash! Boom! Bang! album. It was recorded by Per’s power pop band Gyllene Tider and it turned up on the compilation album Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!. Per says he wrote the song together with Mats Persson from Gyllene Tider, who also co-wrote Listen To Your Heart and Spending My Time. They wrote the song for Crash, but they didn’t record it. They had so many songs, these typical power pop, guitar driven songs. Per was basically the only one in the band who really loved that kind of music. And of course, since he was the writer, he presented these songs, many of them, for Marie and their producer Clarence Öfwerman, but it wasn’t really their cup of tea. So lots of these songs were leftovers. Then they recorded it eventually for the first compilation album that Roxette did in 1995, called Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!. It became a single, but that was years later. Sven says, if they asked him – nobody asked him at the time –, he would have taken out some of the slower numbers and replaced it with She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Per says, when you are in a band, you have to compromise. Just like in your marriage. Haha. Sven was a bit surprised that this was recorded in December 1992, so when they recorded material for the Crash! Boom! Bang! album, they considered those sort of power pop numbers. PG explains that when you make an album and you spend a year in the studio, time goes by and you write new stuff all the time. At the end of the day, you want everyone to agree on what you are recording. That’s also how you get a good vibe in the studio and what’s the best for the band. So sometimes you have to kill your darlings. On every album that Per has been involved with, if it’s Roxette or with other bands, it’s always compromises. There are always songs that he felt like this is a much better song, it should be on the album, but it became a B-side instead. Sven says it’s because you want everyone to be on the bandwagon as well. Sven adds that Per is never short of songs when he is recording an album. Per smiles and says no, because he keeps himself busy. Now they go back in time to a demo recorded in December 1992, probably shortly after it was written. We can hear Per and MP and a drum machine. This is how it sounded when it was written in 1992. She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Silly little demo, Per says. Charming stuff, the guys think.

They guys are digging deeper into this demo bonus CD with another track that never was recorded by Roxette, but eventually became a single by Belinda Carlisle. Per wrote Always Breaking My Heart also in 1992 for Roxette’s Crash! Boom! Bang! album, but they never recorded it. He kept it and a couple of years later he got an invitation to produce and write a couple of songs for Belinda Carlisle, which was amazing. She was one of Per’s favourites. He loves The Go-Go’s and he was really honored by the request. PG wrote a song for Belinda called Liberty, which she didn’t like, so they never recorded it. Then this song, Always Breaking My Heart, came to mind, and Per felt like this sounds like an old The Go-Go’s song. Belinda liked that one, and the A&R guy who worked with her, loved it too. So they decided to record Always Breaking My Heart. Then Mr. G wrote another song called Love Doesn’t Live Here, which also turned up on that album of hers. ABMH was actually written for Roxette to begin with, so what they have here now is Per’s acoustic demo from Christmas 1992. Both She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Always Breaking My Heart were written around the same time. Per explains that they stopped touring, the Joyride tour ended in summer 1992, and they released the Tourism album with Roxette. One of their biggest songs was on that album called How Do You Do! in summer 1992. As soon as that tour was over, Per started to focus on writing. Autumn 1992 was a big writing time for him. Sven asks PG if he remembers where he was at that time, December 1992, music-wise, things that inspired him. Per says it’s far away. The grunge scene just started to happen, so of course he listened a lot to Nirvana and Oasis. But as always, the ’60s and ’70s stuff, the glam rock thing, all those things are in his DNA. Every time a new band came along that he really liked, it didn’t really change his life that much, because he is still a child of You Really Got Me by The Kinks.

Sven thinks that the best moments of the ’90s, guitar, pop, rock, is like a confirmation of all the things Per loved about the British Invasion. And also the new wave thing in the late ’70s, Per adds. Technology moved forward, it sounds different, it sounds harder and rougher, and better, for that matter. You start to listen to the same things with new ears, so to speak. Sven says in this case, we have to imagine the distorted guitars and the crashing drums, because it’s Per in troubadour mode. There is just an acoustic guitar, a tambourine and a little piano on this demo. This is how it was written. Per says that recently – that means the last decade, haha –, when he makes demos, he makes them just on an acoustic guitar or just a piano, to get the vibe of the song and the vibe of the lyrics. When he wrote the songs for Joyride, he basically produced the demos. Roxette producer Clarence Öfwerman didn’t like that Per came to him with a sort of finished product, because he wanted to produce it, which makes sense. So Per gave that up eventually. This is the other side of the spectrum. Sometimes it depends a little bit on what kind of music you are working with. If you are going to hire an outside producer, it’s better to just show a little bit of what you are after, lyric-wise, melody-wise and chord-wise and then let the producer do the rest of the work or at least suggest something and you do it together with him or her.

Here they play the 1992 demo of Always Breaking My Heart.

There is another leftover that never made it to the album back in the days, but for a while Per thought of this one as a single. PG confirms, he always loved this track, Crazy About You. It was written for the Crash album and they had a little problem with it. It sounded really fresh, it was something really new for Roxette to do a song like this. Then they did another take, this is the second version actually, this is a little bit faster than the first one. In those days you had to re-record everything to change the tempo, not just press a button. Haha. Per always felt that this could be a contender for becoming a single, but at the end of the day, they had lots of tracks on this album, so this became a leftover. Per doesn’t know if it became a B-side or if it came out on something else, but it wasn’t on the album. It found its way into the extended version of Crash! Boom! Bang!. This four-minute-long song wraps up the CBB special. Sven says there was a heavy competition to get on the album. Per thinks it’s a nice song. He doesn’t know how good or bad it is, but at the end of the day, you try to make the best possible mix of ballads and mid-tempo songs and up-tempo songs on the album, so this was a leftover. Life sucks. Haha. Life sucks, but you can always enjoy some fine wine, which is a bridge over to the next song, I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer by The Cardigans from Malmö.

Painted By Numbers by The Sounds is next from 2006, from the album Dying To Say This To You.

The show ends with this and the guys thank the listeners for joining them. Cigarettes by Anita Lindblom is played as the last track, as usual.

Still is from the Bag Of Trix talks recorded by Anders Roos.

Thanks for your support, Sven!

Vote for the Roxette musical at the 2024 BroadwayWorld Sweden Awards!

Hello, you fools! You surely remember you could nominate Joyride – The Musical for the 2024 BroadwayWorld Sweden Awards until 31st October. Voting was said to start early November, but nothing really happened, so I decided to contact BroadwayWorld a couple of days ago and asked about it. Now they could manage to put together the lists of nominees in all categories and the voting for the 2024 BroadwayWorld Sweden Awards is now open until 31st December!

The 2024 Regional Awards honor regional productions, touring shows and more which had their first performance between 1st October 2023 through 30th September 2024. Local editors set the categories, readers submitted their nominees and now you get to vote for your favourites! Don’t miss out on making sure that your favourite theatres, stars and shows get the recognition they deserve!

Winners will be announced in January 2025! During the entire voting period you can check the current standings, but read the terms and conditions carefully and vote only once.

You can vote HERE!

Categories in which Joyride – The Musical is nominated:

  • Best Musical – Joyride – The Musical at Malmö Opera
  • Best Ensemble – Joyride – The Musical at Malmö Opera
  • Best Performer In A Musical: this one is cruel, because 4 actors from Joyride are nominated in this same category: Jessica Marberger, Marsha Songcome, Alexander Lycke, Tilda Hallström
  • Best Supporting Performer In A Musical: another tough category, because 4 actors from Joyride are nominated in this same category: Sanna Martin, Patrik Martinsson, Oscar Pierrou Lindén, Sara Lehmann
  • Best Direction Of A Musical – Guy Unsworth
  • Best Scenic Design Of A Play Or Musical – David Woodhead
  • Best Lighting Design Of A Play Or Musical – Ulrik Gad
  • Best Costume Design Of A Play Or Musical – Torbjörn Bergström
  • Best Sound Design Of A Play Or Musical – Avgoustos Psillas
  • Best Choreography Of A Play Or Musical – Miles Hoare
  • Best Music Direction & Orchestra Performance – Joakim Hallin
  • Favourite Local Theatre – Malmö Opera

Cast your vote by simply checking one nominee in each of the award categories. If you have no choice in any particular category, simply choose ‘No Nominee’.

Cast your vote only once. After submitting your vote, you will receive an electronic confirmation via e-mail. If you submit your e-mail address incorrectly, your vote will be disqualified.

All voting results will be tabulated and will be audited at the conclusion of the voting process to remove fake, duplicate and other invalid votes. The results you see here may alter slightly or significantly as a result of that auditing process. No automatic, programmed, robotic or similar means of voting are permitted. Participants who do not comply with these Terms and Conditions, or who attempt to interfere with the voting process or the operation of the Site in any way will be disqualified and their votes will not be counted.

Good luck, Joyrider nominees!

Roxette – Listen To Your Heart played 7 million times on US radio

BMI is excited to celebrate their exceptional family of songwriters and publishers in the UK and Europe whose groundbreaking music is making an electrifying impact on the global music scene.

At the 2024 BMI London Awards last night they recognised the top UK and European songwriters, composers and publishers of the past year across US streaming, radio, film and television. The Million-Air Awards were also presented throughout the evening and among the hit songs honoured was Listen to Your Heart by Roxette. Per Gessle and Mats MP Persson appeared at the event to receive the award.

American radios played Listen To Your Heart now more than 7 million times! That means more than 67 years if it were constantly played! Pure awesomeness!

Roxette reached their 2nd No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with LTYH on 4th November 1989. In 1998 they received an award from BMI for this song being played over 2 million times on American radio. Phil Graham of BMI said it was very unusual for a song to get over the 2 million mark in such a short space of time. In October 2006, helped by DHT’s cover, Roxette were awarded again by BMI for the song’s 3 millionth broadcast on American radio. Per and MP got the Million-Air Award for 4 million plays in 2008 and for 5 million plays in 2014. Listen To Your Heart was covered by American hard rock band Through Fire and they put the song back on the US charts in March 2020. In 2020, PG and MP got the Million-Air Award for 6 million plays.

Congratulations to Per and MP for creating this most amazing, timeless gem and for reaching the 7 million mark! Neverending love to Marie Fredriksson without whom it wouldn’t have been possible!

Per says in the 10th December press release:

Every time I hear Listen To Your Heart, I think of Marie’s magical voice. Yesterday it was five years since she left us and without her contribution, Mats and I would never have received this fantastic award. 7 million radio plays in the US is hard to grasp. I’m super proud, of course.

Check out BMIs website HERE!

Check out more photos HERE!

Check out the highlights video from the event HERE!

Interview with Mikael Bolyos about Marie Fredriksson’s upcoming live album release

On Friday, 6th December, a double vinyl live album (also available digitally!) of Marie Fredriksson’s last solo tour (Nu!) in Sweden will be released – ten years after the tour and almost to the day five years after she passed.

Former RoxBlog member Kirsten Ohlwein and Oliver Zimmerman thought we would all want to hear more about the release and that was reason enough to ask Marie’s husband Mikael Bolyos – who is behind the release – about the new and yet not so new album.

Kirsten Ohlwein: – Mikael, you can imagine that everyone is super excited about this release, it’s a dream come true. The last live album we got was “Äntligen”, which was 24 years ago. First of all, I am pretty sure many fans wonder: How are you doing these days? You know you are in the thoughts of many people out there who send you their best wishes and highest regards.

Mikael Bolyos: – That’s very kind of you, it’s touching and I really appreciate it! I am alright, thanks.

KO: It’s been ten years since the “Nu!” tour which we all loved and have the fondest memories about. Now it’s apparently time to release the live album. What has been the initial thought to look into the live recordings again and decide that the material is good enough to release it?

MB: – I always wanted to release a single, EP or even more songs from the concerts, and when I heard a video clip last summer, I decided to go through the concerts again.

KO: Can you tell us which shows have been recorded back then and why you picked Stockholm as the one to release?

MB: – We recorded every show in 2014. Christoffer and I went through all of them and realized that Marie and the band sounded so good at all of them, it was impossible to choose. The Stockholm concert took place at “Cirkus” which is a great venue, the crowd was very enthusiastic, and it was a magic night.

KO: How long did it take to go through the material again and when did you make the final decision to release the Stockholm show as an album?

MB: – I started to listen to the different concerts pre summer 2024. It took a couple of weeks and together with Christoffer Lundquist we decided that the Stockholm show had an energy that was impossible to ignore. Peter Domnérus at Cosmos Music (our record company) came up with that brilliant idea to release the whole concert on a double vinyl record.

KO:Were the moments when you went through the songs again when you thought: „Wow, this is much better than I remember it” or „why didn’t we do this earlier?”?

MB: – As you probably remember, Roxette started a world tour later the same year, 2014. Christoffer made some mixes already then, but we were all too busy to start the work with releasing anything from the “Nu!” tour. The Roxette tour went on until spring 2016, when Marie was too weak to continue. It was a very tough time for Marie and our family. And if this wasn’t enough, I had to do a heart surgery in 2017. I was recovering during 2018 and in 2019 as you know, Marie passed away.

The following years, I have been mourning. On 1st June this year I wrote to Christoffer and asked him to make a first brief mix of all of the songs, and in October we sat together in his AGM studio to do the mixes, and here we are now!

KO:How did the process of going through the tour material feel for you? I can imagine that it wasn’t the easiest thing to do for you and yet probably very warm and special as well?

MB: – It was many tears…

KO:What are your memories regarding that tour? What did you preserve from back then? Which one was your favourite song to play and what were your favourite moments?

MB: – It was a very special tour. Marie was so keen on doing the tour, she knew it was going to be her last Swedish tour, singing her own songs. Personally, I felt so good touring again, playing music in a band, consisting of friends. I always liked to play “Bara för en dag”, and “Efter stormen”, but my favourite moment was playing ”Så skimrande var aldrig havet”.

KO:You have been quite busy spoiling fans with unreleased stuff in the past years. Every now and then you find a song or a recording that gets to be released either in December or May. We are very grateful for that! Is there more to come in the future?

MB: – Sorry to say, but I don’t think so. This double LP will probably be Marie’s farewell.

Thank you so much for your time, Micke and thanks a lot for your interview, Kirsten!

Live från Cirkus is out on 6th December! The record is a beautiful 180-gram double vinyl in a gatefold edition, with a total run of 1,000 copies. You can order it at Bengans.

Tracklist

Side A

  1. Så stilla så långsamt
  2. Kom vila hos mig
  3. Bara för en dag
  4. Det regnar igen
  5. Sista sommarens vals

Side B

  1. Ber bara en gång
  2. Sparvöga
  3. Ett hus vid havet
  4. Ett bord i solen
  5. Så skimrande var aldrig havet

Side C

  1. Ännu doftar kärlek
  2. Så länge det lyser mittemot
  3. Om du såg mig nu
  4. Efter stormen

Side D

  1. Den sjunde vågen
  2. Mellan sommar och höst
  3. Den bästa dagen
  4. Tro

Per Gessle about “Kvar i min bil” in Skräpkulturpodden

The 38th episode of Skräpkulturpodden is about soundtracks. Per Gessle is the icing on the cake, he joins Josef to talk about Kvar i min bil, his song that is included in the movie Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). This part starts at 35:10 into the podcast and PG joins in at 37:39. Listen to it HERE!

Josef asks Per if he remembers how the request found him. PG can’t remember exactly how it happened, but he remembers that Tomas Alfredson wanted to meet him. They met in Stockholm and he told Per about this film and wanted him to write a song for the movie. PG didn’t really have time for that, but he had a leftover song from En händig man (2007) that he really liked. It didn’t fit on the record, Per thought, but he liked the song anyway, so he played it for Tomas and he liked it a lot, Kvar i min bil. It was like a match made in heaven. It was not written for the movie itself. It was a leftover.

It’s almost always the case when you make an album that you have leftovers. In Per’s generation anyway, when you start an album project, you have maybe 17, 18, 19, 20 songs and you record as many as you can. You finish 15, 16 and then you use maybe 12 for the album. Then there will be a few songs left over. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the leftover songs are worse, but it could be that maybe there are two songs that are quite similar to each other or it’s the same kind of tempo. Then you remove one and save it.

It was the same with It Must Have Been Love. It was an old Christmas song from 1987 that ended up in Pretty Woman in 1990. Queen Of Rain was recorded for the Joyride album as the closing song and then Per wrote Perfect Day with accordion in it and then they moved away Queen Of Rain, so it became the closing song on the next record, Tourism instead.

Josef says it’s good when you can breathe new life into a song. Per agrees. Josef listened to En händig man again and he could understand why this song became a leftover, because it sounded a bit different. Josef thinks it fits perfectly in this context, a film set in the early ’80s. He asks Per if he has any memories of what the sources of inspiration were when he wrote this song. PG says it was the kind of song where you sit and play a guitar riff. The whole song is a big guitar riff in a way.

When he recorded En händig man, he worked a lot with Christoffer Lundquist, Jens Jansson on drums and Clarence Öfwerman. This is a typical song that suits Jens, his style of playing. When Per wrote this song, he didn’t make a demo, just played it right away. They recorded it in Skåne in Christoffer’s studio. So the demo and the finished recording came about at the same time. They played this song maybe three times in the studio, there was a take 3. So it went pretty fast.

Jens and Christoffer are playing on this song. Clarence Öfwerman was also there the whole time, but Per doesn’t know if he plays on this particular song. Clarence usually jumps in and plays the tambourine or something. He plays keyboards, but it’s not a keyboard song.

Per says he doesn’t have a story behind the song. He hadn’t read the book, Let The Right One In either, so Tomas had to explain the movie through the script to PG. But it didn’t matter, because Mr. G didn’t write anything adapted to the script.

The movie was a great success. Per thinks it was a fantastic film and Tomas is extremely talented. PG is very proud to be involved in it. Josef also thinks it’s a great movie. There isn’t much horror in it for being a horror film. PG agrees, but adds that it’s quite psychological this way.

Josef thanks Per for the call and they say goodbye to each other.