Before Gyllene Tider perform in Ekenäs, Finland, Kjell Ekholm from Västra Nyland did an interview with Per Gessle. Kjell met Per in his Stockholm office on Strandvägen.
As Kjell says, Per is a music addict. He has lived and breathed music since he was a child. In addition, he is the only artist who has managed to keep three different careers going at the same time and succeeded in all of them.
Together with Marie Fredriksson, Roxette became bigger than ABBA themselves in the US. The duo managed to get a total of four songs to the No. 1 position on Billboard Hot 100 and over the years, as a solo artist, he has given us many immortal pop classics in Swedish. Now Per Gessle is coming to Finland and Ekenäs for the first time with Gyllene Tider.
According to Kjell, it’s always fun interviewing Per, because he is still so enthusiastic when talking about pop music. Already as a child, Per was able to experience various forms of creation via his mother. She wrote a fairy tale about Ferdinand the ant for him and made her own illustrations for it. As an 11-year-old, he started writing his own songs, but without music.
I have always liked to express myself and when I started school, I also liked to write essays. I created pop music first through lyrics, because I could not yet play an instrument.
He tried to translate songs by David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. He admits that the result would hardly stand the light of day today. But the fact is that Gyllene Tider got their first record deal largely thanks to Gessle’s lyrics.
Per Gessle has always been obsessed with pop music. He says himself that it has meant everything to him since childhood. He and his older brother bought a lot of records, by the time he was ten, he had 100 LPs, while his friends owned five at best.
He earned money for the records by handing out newspapers. Sometimes he managed to get the records a little cheaper when he bought them from his brother’s friends, who needed money for cigarettes. That’s how he came across Lovin’ Spoonful’s album and Los Bravo’s single Black Is Black. But he didn’t just invest in records.
When I was ten, I started buying the English music magazines Melody Maker and later, when punk came along, also New Musical Express. I actually still have those magazines.
20 years ago, Per Gessle coined the expression that a new song must be better than the previous one. Kjell is curious if he still thinks that way today.
Oh no, that no longer applies. I was talking to my wife the other day and stated that if I were to stop making music now, I could probably feel quite satisfied with the songs I’ve written.
I am in the same situation as, for example, Bryan Adams and Tears for Fears. I’m simply not what you could call mainstream anymore. Pop music must always reflect its own time. When I was a child in the ‘60s, the entire youth culture was dominant. It influenced visual arts, film, theatre and clothing. Everything belonged together.
In today’s digital era everything is controlled from our phones and laptops and you notice that in music too. All the music on the charts today sounds the same. There is no place for madmen like Brian Wilson, David Bowie and Frank Zappa. Other artists, who are the same age as me, like Belinda Carlisle and The Bangles, have fallen into the classic “vintage guys and girls” category. We represent a different era.
When Per was 16, he received a Spanish guitar as a gift from his mother and when he learned the basics, things quickly progressed. After school, he was unemployed like so many other young people in Sweden. Quite surprisingly, he and a friend got employed as troubadours at the county council in Halmstad. They went around to nursing homes and hospitals and played and sang. Gessle says it was a great school for him to play at four locations a day and entertain the patients and the elderly.
It was a success and their contract was extended to six months. The repertoire was a blissful mix of Drömmen om Elin, Svarte Rudolf and Streets Of London, but they could also throw in the occasional CCR classic.
He laughs when he suddenly remembers a special event in the long-term care ward at the hospital in Halmstad. They had never played there before and when they arrived, there was no one to receive them. They went in, took out their guitars and started playing. They thought it was a little strange, because in the great hall there were only two beds, and the people in them did not take much notice of the young troubadours.
We settled down and played “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. At the same time, a nurse arrives and asks what we are doing there. At the same moment, one of the patients sits up in bed and looks at us. The nurse is completely shocked. It turned out that we had come to the wrong place and in this room there were two patients who had been in a coma for a long time.
The nurse lost her temper, the troubadours quickly scurried out of the room and a whole medical team came in to confirm that a small miracle had happened to that patient.
It was fate that wanted us to be there and this is a proof of the strength there is in music.
When Gyllene Tider started their career, the whole band went to London to buy guitars. In a guitar shop far outside the city, Per bought a burgundy Gibson Les Paul Custom. It was a similar one that Ray Davies had in The Kinks.
They also bought amplifiers, which they had shipped to Sweden, but they wanted to take the guitars home as hand luggage. When they arrived in Sweden, they had no money left and tried to smuggle the guitars in without paying customs.
Of course we were caught for it and customs seized all our new instruments. We were completely devastated. When I got home, I wrote an emotional letter to customs and explained that we had no money left and that we were still young and ignorant. They were human and we got the guitars back, but I was fined 2000 SEK, which was a lot of money at the time.
Today, the financial situation for Per Gessle looks different. He is a partner in eleven companies and has built up a fortune and millions of assets. His music business is divided between three companies, of which he is also chairman of the board. Together, they have assets of over 30 million euros.
In addition, he is a partner in Tylösands Havsbad and Tylösands Kompaniet Aktiebolag, which are estimated to be worth over 50 million euros.
He has a passion for cars and owns 15 exclusive cars from brands such as Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and McLaren. His favourite car is a Ferrari Dino from 1972. His interest in cars had been awakened when he saw the pictures of John Lennon’s psychedelic painted Rolls-Royce as a child. Then he had to settle for collecting Corgi Toys toy cars and building car tracks with his older brother.
The guys discuss the beginnings of Gyllene Tider and the early songwriting. Kjell claims that the style he had then was a combination of The Beatles’ melodic loops and the energy of new wave music. Per agrees, adding that he always liked bands that could combine good melodies with energy, like the Ramones and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The latter became the house gods of the entire band.
I’ve always had lousy self-confidence when it comes to my music and especially my voice. I’ve always hated my singing voice. What punk and new wave music did for me was that I realized that you didn’t have to be very good. I felt safer when I heard that everyone else also had faults and shortcomings.
If you have a band that is not super competent, there is often more energy and adrenaline in the playing than technical quality. I still like that today. For example, I never liked Mariah Carey’s singing style. That’s the expression I want in the singing and playing.
Kjell is curious what the secret is behind Gyllene Tider’s success.
There is something strange that happens when we play together. I know I sing differently when I play with these guys. There is some DNA molecule in all of us that is activated when we play together. It’s impossible to explain, but it feels absolutely magical. Age and experience certainly play a role as well. We now have a film in the works and then we have gone through old memories and it is a wonderful journey we have made together.
Kjell says the guys will probably never say it again that they are quitting.
No, I didn’t like it either when we said in 2019 that now we are saying goodbye. It was our drummer, Micke “Syd” Andersson who thought we should finish with the flag at the top as long as everyone was alive and well.
Over the years, I have learned that it’s not good to paint yourself into a corner. I remember an American lawyer I hired once upon a time used to say, “my preliminary opinion is”. Then you can always change your mind. Then came the corona pandemic and nothing was the same anymore. In addition, we made a new record and therefore it felt good to go on tour again.
