Per Gessle

Per Gessle’s cooperation with Hep Stars

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Hep Stars was Sweden’s most successful band in the 60s. Benny Andersson (ABBA) was one of the members of the pop group back then. Actual members are: Svenne Hedlund, Bengan Arenblad, Totte Päivärinta, Todde Stoor and Joffe Enbom. One of their most popular song is ”Cadillac” (based on The Renegades’ ”Brand New Cadillac”). Cool song, isn’t it? Not sure if it’s the same baby and if the cadillac is big & black.

So, the guys are celebrating their 50th anniversary and for this reason, they are releasing an album in 2014 (4th week). Why am I writing about it? Because that album will contain a so far unpublished song written by Per Gessle. There will be 2 singles (”It´s Nice To Be Back”; ”I Wanna Be With You”), but I have no clue if any of these 2 songs is the one written by Mr G. Actually, there is a song with the title ”I Wanna Be With You” on The Lonely Boys album, but I guess it’s not the same, since they are talking about a so far unreleased song. UPDATE: As Per informs, it IS the song from The Lonely Boys… UPDATE (29th Jan 2014): here you can have a listen to it… Ehm… or maybe not if you don’t want to ruin what you have in your mind about this song.)

Per_Gessle

 

This is not the first time Per Gessle cooperated with Hep Stars. When EMI released their compilation album (Hep Stars: 1964-69!), it was Per who compiled those 30 songs the double LP contains. Not sure about the year, since some websites say it was in the early 80s, some others say it was in 1992. Would be cool to know the whole story behind it.

Google helped me to remember an old, fantastic SOAP interview (10/06/2006) with Per done by Jan Gradvall, where besides many many other interesting things he also mentioned that Hep Stars was his first favourite band.

Per said in that interview: “I liked them. I envied my parents that they could see Hep Stars on stage. I asked my mother about this just recently, but she couldn’t remember anything. She is 81.”

“I liked Hep Stars so much that I forced my friends to pretend that we were a band. We stood there with Carrom sticks as guitars and mimed to “Sunny Girl” from Hep Stars and “It’s My Life” from The Animals. But my friends were totally uninterested in music. They thought I was weird.”

 

 

MP_by_Hep_Stars

 

 

Another interesting information is that the upcoming Hep Stars album was produced by Mats MP Persson.

MP played and worked together with Svenne several times in the past. You can find some pics of MP and his studio from the past HERE and some new ones HERE. Don’t forget to check the walls! 😉

BBC Four will broadcast a documentary with Svenne and MP in it on 27th Dec.

 

 

 

 

 

Pic of Per is from ”Gyllene Tider sommaren 2013” docu, pic of MP is from Hep Stars / Hep House Records FB site.

Tack för musiken, Marie Fredriksson

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SVT broadcasted the show ”Tack för musiken”, for which the recordings with Marie Fredriksson were on 27th August. Click HERE to watch it!

It begins with Niklas Strömstedt and the band performing ”Tro” live. Niklas welcomes Ms Effe only after this. They are sitting and talking about Marie’s career (solo, earlier bands, Roxette, Per Gessle), illness (she’s healthy now and grateful to be there) and her family. Marie’s husband, Micke Bolyos was sitting in the band, playing the keyboards during the show.

You can see how much Marie enjoyed being there and how fine she is. She was very relaxed, smiling and laughing all the time. Tears appeared in her eyes when Niklas was talking about her album ”Den ständiga resan” that there are 13 songs about darkness, but the last song, ”Till sist” is different. He read up the first lines of the song and asked who these lines are about. Marie pointed at Micke and told it’s about him. They looked at each other with so much love during the whole show.

MF_Tack_för_musiken_01  MF_Tack_för_musiken_02

Marie started singing when she was a little child. She started the day with singing at 7 am, when everyone else would have loved to sleep. Later, at the age of 17 she wanted to be an actress. It was her dream. She was talking about how she loves writing songs, but after her illness it’s not that easy anymore. She talked about Lasse Lindbom, how much he means to her. They had a fantastic time and were writing a lot of songs together.

In the audience there were many familiar faces and at one point Niklas started talking about Argentina and the fans. Marie realized there were fans in the audience from Argentina, too and said that a lot of Roxette fans are here and they are fantastic. The fans are always by their side, following them and they are even here at this show. Marie told the fans know all the lyrics regardless of where they are coming from or which language the songs are in.

Niklas was joking about Marie’s name, Gun-Marie and pronounced it the English way: Gun-Marie from Roxette. Everyone was laughing.

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Gyllene Tider sommaren 2013

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TV4 broadcasted an approximately 70-minute-long cut of Gyllene Tider’s summer tour. Unfortunately, it is available only in Sweden, but here you can read a short summary of it and see some screenshots.

micke_syd_cocktail

It’s a fantastic documentary with tons of live footage from several shows, mainly Skövde, Eskilstuna, Stockholm and Ullevi, Göteborg. Grumpy Production did a great job! The whole program is nicely cut, it’s of very high quality and contains a great mix of interviews with band members, their travelling around Sweden, joking and having fun backstage, performing live on stage, crowd scenes, the walk to the stage, short interviews with fans and Ms Dimberg, Thomas Johansson, Micke Syd’s mum and dad, Mats Olsson journalist, etc., the stage decoration being cut into parts and signed by the Golden Guys, then given to fans at the last show and we can see some meet & greet scenes. One can even get to know the recipe of a perfect cocktail from Micke Syd. Oh! And the yellow radio has an important role again.

GT_sommaren_2013_01  GT_sommaren_2013_03

My gosh! Even without seeing a complete concert in this docu you can relive the tour. You feel you are back in time, it’s summer, you are standing in the front row and going crazy for Gyllene Tider, singing along, jumping and shouting. Awesome!

 

The songs (no complete songs, but almost) you can hear & see performed live:

GT_sommaren_2013_02

  1. Juni, juli, augusti
  2. Sommartider
  3. Gå & fiska!
  4. Man blir yr
  5. När vi två blir en
  6. Ljudet av ett annat hjärta
  7. (Kom så ska vi) Leva livet
  8. Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sej
  9. (Dansar inte lika bra som) Sjömän
  10. Det hjärta som brinner
  11. Min tjej och jag
  12. Kung av sand
  13. Ska vi älska, så ska vi älska till Buddy Holly
  14. Flickan i en Cole Porter-sång
  15. Det är över nu
  16. Dags att tänka på refrängen

 

You can hear some other short GT tunes as well, however, I missed Flickorna på TV2 and Billy from the live footage, but something must be left for the DVD, too. 😉 No release date is set for the DVD yet, but hopefully, we don’t have to wait too long. Provide us with a live CD, too, please!

 

PS: You can see PG wearing glasses in the docu for a short while. And I’m not talking about sunglasses. 😉

 

Exclusive photos from the recordings of the radio docu

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As we already informed you about it several times, Tove Meyer and Tara Moshizi, who are also Roxers just like all of us here, did interviews for a radio documentary for the 25th anniversary of Look Sharp! It’s gonna be on air for the first time on New Year’s Eve.

Sveriges Radio P4: 31st December, 12:03 pm CET
Sveriges Radio P1: 31st December, 16:03 pm CET; 3rd January 18:15 pm CET

As Tove and Tara informed us, they did interviews not only with Marie, Per, Clarence and Anders, but also with Ms Dimberg. They kindly shared some yet unpublished photos with us from the recordings.

Enjoy and tune in on 31st December!

 

RXB_02_Per  RXB_02_Marie

RXB_03_Per  RXB_03_Marie

RXB_01_Per  RXB_00_Per

RXB_06_M_Dimberg  RXB_04_Marie

RXB_04_Clarence_Anders  RXB_05_Clarence_Anders

Alla tiders Gyllene Tider – a fab book!

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GT_omslag_131028_rsI’ve just finished reading ”Alla tiders Gyllene Tider”. The book is of very high quality, anyone can tell it already at the first glance. It’s unbelievable how fast Jan-Owe Wikström could put all the stories together to release this fab book appr. a half year after the thought of writing this gem was born.

I love this road movie style he chose and even if most of the information in the book we could read / hear in old and recent interviews, it’s great to have all these things together in one book and one can still find some new info. Many things I read made me smile or even laugh. One of these was when Lasse Lindbom said: ”There is hardly any pop star potential in these boys. And I’m a little hesitant about the singer.” 🙂 Or when MP forgot to bring his guitar for the Bio Reflex show in Getinge, 1978. Loved Göran’s quote from Leksand (audience: 7 661), thinking about his past and not being an active musician when there is no GT in sight: ”I never play for less than ten thousand people.” One of the funniest stories is still Micke Syd’s with the girls in Malmö. They couldn’t recognize him and even if Micke Syd told, the girls couldn’t believe him it was really him, the drummer from GT.

There were other things that made me ”ahaaa, so that’s why it was like that”. For example, regarding changing the setlist and putting ”Gå & fiska!” towards the end instead of keeping it as an opening song – to spare Per’s voice. ”Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sej” was anyway the best choice for being the opener. Another thing I’ve never been thinking about is where the name of DJ Fritzon’s magic instrument, Farfisa (Fabbriche Riunite di Fisarmoniche) is coming from. Nice to know now this, too.

It was sad reading about the 1981 Kristianopel tragedy again, but it also made me think how lucky we were with the numbering system during this tour. However, we are living in an another century now, when fights were tougher for the best picnic places this time.

I like it a lot that all the band members and some other important guys and girls from the tour got shorter or longer chapters in the book. The Gessleist in me, of course, likes chapters ”Per Gessle” and ”Låtskrivandet” the most. No matter how much I already heard and read about his songwriting or how much he was sharing about it so far, I never get tired of reading about this topic again and again. C’mon, this guy wrote ”(Dansar inte lika bra som) Sjömän” in only 8 minutes! Wow! Reading this chapter about songwriting and seeing a pic of Per’s ”Röstmemon” app made me think it would be nice to have some of those files as bonus on some future release. Wishful thinking. 🙂

Besides these chapters I really mean that the whole book is a very enjoyable reading. I didn’t know, for example that Anders and his wife, Jennie are that much into making music for movies and TV series.

It’s nice to see all the old pics, mainly because lots of them we could have never seen before. I can’t even count how many times I mentioned that the actual photos of the Golden Guys are fantastic, all 5 of them look extremely hot on all pics. Anders Roos, the photographer did a splendid job. Tons of shots are in the book from the tour, from backstage, of many details we can’t see from our crowd positions and we can see lots of familiar faces. I would love to see all the pics Anders took (20 000), but couldn’t make it into the book. Even a separate photo book would sound good. 😉

Well, there are some typos, but the high quality, the great stories and the awesome pics make you forget about them quite soon.

I love 2 of the last few sentences in the outro: ”It should not take nine years for the next comeback. Everyone agrees on it.” Indeed! And until then, can’t wait to see the upcoming GT DVD.

PS #1: If you haven’t bought the book yet, I can highly recommend you to obtain it. It is really worth it.

PS #2: Oh and when I’m back to Sweden, I definitely have to check the second-hand bookshops to get hold of Jan-Owe’s GT book from 1997.