podcast

Per Gessle on the Halmstad Hörs podcast to discuss 40 years of Roxette

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Lasse Pop Svensson and Staffan Karlsson sat down with Per Gessle and Jan-Owe Wikström to talk about Roxette in their 40th anniversary year on Hallandsposten’s podcast, Halmstad Hörs. Listen to it HERE!

Roxette celebrates 40 years on the throne – the guys ask Per if it can be said. Per doesn’t think so. Let’s say 40 years in the business, then. 40 years is mindblowing. PG says it’s a long time, but he has another band that has been going even longer. Haha. The guys ask Mr. G which of these two bands is the best. Per thinks it’s a good question. He likes both bands, he really does, but he has to say he is probably most proud of Roxette, because it was unexpected that it would become as big worldwide as it did. Staffan and Lasse agree that it was a tough beginning of the conversation, because it’s like asking to choose between your two children.

Here they introduce Jan-Owe, who is an expert, one who has followed Per’s career for quite a long time. Since his childhood. Staffan and Lasse thought he could help them along with some facts.

Gyllene Tider released The Heartland Café and there was a 6-track record where the band was called Roxette. Per confirms that it began when the guys in Gyllene Tider did their military service in 1983. He turns to Jan-Owe that he has to correct him, if he is wrong, because he knows it better. Jan-Owe thinks it sounds right. So far, so good. Per made his first solo album in Swedish and it wasn’t at all a sure thing that Gyllene Tider would come back. Instead, what happened was that he translated a bunch of Gyllene Tider songs into English, because he thought they should make an international push. They did some recordings, songs from Puls and the first albums, but they didn’t get very far. They reached local EMI offices and record label offices in different countries. They decided that if they were going to make a next Gyllene Tider album, it should be in English. And that became The Heartland Café. It came out in 1984, they toured in the spring of 1984. That was a slightly different version of Gyllene Tider, because they had brought in Janne Bark on guitar and they had two backing vocalists, Marie Fredriksson and Ulrika Uhlin, who sang with them on that tour. The tour wasn’t any big success. It was perhaps their smallest tour ever. That was one of the reasons that Gyllene Tider gave up. They just didn’t have the real motivation.

Per wanted to try to go abroad and he had no idea how that would be done. It took a very, very long time until the then head of the record label, Rolf Nygren, heard his demo of a song called Svarta glas, which Per had written for Pernilla Wahlgren, who had just broken through with Piccadilly Circus. When Rolf heard the demo he said, “write an English lyric for it and record it with Marie Fredriksson. Then we’ll try to get this out abroad.” And that became Neverending Love, which then became the first Roxette single in the summer of ’86. At that time, Per basically had two years out in the cold. He didn’t have a record contract anymore. He had written songs and recorded demos for a new Swedish album, but no one wanted it. He laughs.

At the same time, Marie had broken through with Ännu doftar kärlek and Den sjunde vågen and all of that, so her stock was significantly higher than Per’s and that was the reason why certain people at the record company (they had the same record company, Marie and Per) didn’t think Marie should jump into the same boat as Per, to do this single. So the compromise was that the record sleeve of Neverending Love contains two drawn figures. There was no picture of Marie and Per.

The guys ask Per if he was OK with that. Mr. G had no choice, but he was very grateful for the chance and that anyone at all liked anything he did. So that’s how they started. It was fantastic that it became such a big hit in the summer of 1986. Then suddenly everyone started shouting: you have to make an LP, you have to make an album. Then Per took his rejected Swedish album, which no one had wanted a year earlier, and translated it into English. That became the first Roxette album, Pearls of Passion.

The guys are curious what those who had rejected it thought then. They must have said, oh, those old songs. Per says they had forgotten them. Haha. It’s a fast industry.

Jan-Owe adds that the first song became a hit partly because Per did a little repetition of sending postcards to some program. Per confirms they have always had those sneaky little tricks. E.g. sending in postcards to vote for themselves in radio shows. PG says they did that back in the Gyllene Tider days. So, of course, he did that in Sommartoppen in 1986 as well. They did get in. He thinks they were number one on Sommartoppen or at least number two.

[The song entered Sommartoppen on 21st July 1986 at No. 3 and 2 weeks later it was No. 2. Then it went down to No. 4 and No. 5, but on 31st August it was No. 2 again. /PP]

Jan-Owe says they might have even missed out without sending those postcards. Per says it happened because mostly you felt like you wanted to help out. Haha. It’s not quite the same as playing the pools or buying a lottery ticket. Typically, as Jan-Owe says, you can never get a hit by helping yourself alone. You have to have the masses with you. It’s always the mass that makes something into a hit. It’s like on Spotify, you can’t bluff your way to 40 million streams.

Jan-Owe asks Per to explain where the name Roxette came from. It’s from the Dr. Feelgood song, but why that one. Per can’t quite remember. He remembers that he loved Dr. Feelgood. He thought it was a cool name. It’s a girl’s name. He thought that suited five guys very well. Haha. He had to eat those words many years later. Many thought that Marie’s name was Roxette and that Per was the manager. The guys are laughing. It did actually happen sometimes in the beginning when they came to a TV studio to do a playback of some song that Per had no dressing room. Marie had one. The one that had Roxette written on it was for her. So Per was wondering where he was supposed to change. In hindsight it’s a bit funny.

Before Per arrived, Lasse and Jan-Owe were talking about Dr. Feelgood having played in Halmstad twice. Lasse saw them at Pinocchio, and Jan-Owe saw them at Greven. Per wasn’t there at any of those shows, but he knows they played at Pinocchio. PG doesn’t even know what Greven is. Jan-Owe explains, it was later called Brogatan 13. The funny thing is that Jan-Owe met Lee Brilleaux, the singer after the concert and asked him if he was aware of Roxette. He said he had heard of them, of course. That was when Roxette was big. But he had never reflected on the fact that it was a song by themselves.

Staffan asks Per if there was panic when the single was released that they had to make an album. PG says it was complicated, because he wanted to get into modern pop, meaning into the digital world. You needed some machines and a bit of how pop music sounded then. That was somewhat the direction he wanted. The chosen producer, Clarence Öfwerman (who, by the way, wasn’t chosen by Per, but by the record company) and Mr. G had a meeting at Café Opera – how posh. You can’t say they exactly clicked. Per thought Clarence was very skilled, but Clarence turned down producing Roxette or working with PG. Then he was persuaded by Pelle Alsing, the drummer, who later became Roxette’s drummer. Pelle Alsing was a big fan of Gyllene Tider and of Per’s songwriting ability. So he said to Clarence: “You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this chance”. So Clarence came in and produced Neverending Love.

Clarence had the idea that he wanted real musicians, but that was exactly what Per wanted to leave. He wanted machines instead. So it became a compromise. Per said: “If you’re going to have a real drummer, then I’d like to have Tim Werner from Eldkvarn”. Raga de Gosch or Tim Werner or Werner Modiggård, it’s the same person. Per liked his drumming style. Clarence countered that he wanted Tommy Cassemar on bass. Then it was MP who played guitar on Neverending Love. Here Per is demonstrating the tunes MP played. He can’t remember if Jonas Isacsson was there. But anyway, there was a bit of a clash. Clarence wanted a real band and Per wanted machines. So Neverending Love, as it ended up on the single, PG never liked it. He thought his demo was much better, because it was done the way he had intended it.

Anyway, once Neverending Love became a hit, they needed to make the album. Then Clarence wanted to choose his drummer, Pelle Alsing, Tommy Cassemar on bass and Jonas Isacsson on guitar. Clarence himself played keyboards. So those were the four who essentially played on the first album. They weren’t a studio band that usually played together before. They knew each other and Per thinks they were mostly good friends. They probably sat in pubs in Södermalm and hatched plans, he has no idea. Per was grateful, of course, that they got to make a record. It was great fun to work with Marie and with everyone. But he still wanted to get into that new era with machines.

Staffan is curious if Marie was hard to persuade, since her career was going really well. Per says Marie was never hard to persuade. PG usually says that the only one who actually wanted to work with him was Marie herself. Everyone around her, e.g. Lasse Lindbom, who was her boyfriend at the time, her entire circle of friends, including certain people at the label, no one thought she should do this. But she wanted to. She explained it many years later by saying she sang in a different way when Per wrote the songs and PG heard that too. He has always said half jokingly and half seriously that Marie always sang best when Per was in the studio, because Mr. G was very good at “directing” her singing. She liked that. Per noticed it on the first album when she sang I Call Your Name, Soul Deep or So Far Away, these fairly difficult songs. She sang in a completely different way than when she sang in Swedish or when she did her English jazz things. But that’s just Per’s opinion.

Staffan says they should jump ahead to when the machines come into play, because that’s when things really started to happen. So they start to talk about album number two.

Per thought the first record turned out good in its own way. But it wasn’t quite how he had imagined it. His vision was different. Then he had a bit of luck. Their engineer, Alar Suurna, a very skilled engineer, broke his leg. Haha. That meant they needed a new engineer. Someone who had become very good and had begun working his way up as an engineer and producer in parallel with them was Anders Herrlin, the former bassist in Gyllene Tider. When he left Gyllene he started working at a music store in Stockholm and specialized in modern technology, the kind that was current in the mid-80s. So he was very good with machines, which made Per think it was a very good idea to bring him in. Meanwhile, Clarence wasn’t particularly interested in machines. But Anders and Clarence clicked and started programming, working, arranging and fiddling with what was to become the second Roxette album.

For the guys it sounds like Clarence is being contrary all the time. They are wondering if Per and Clarence have been able to find a good way of working together. Per says Clarence is quite a contrary type, but he is a wonderful person and, above all, he says what he thinks, and he is a fantastic musician. There is a really funny example from the first Roxette album. Per always used to hear from certain people he worked with (he mentions no names) that the problem with his songs was that they weren’t danceable. Too much pop, no natural groove. One day when he was downstairs in the EMI studio, he heard the coolest groove ever coming from upstairs. So he ran up thinking, “What the hell is this?” And what he heard was that Clarence had arranged I Call Your Name, which was originally called Jag hör din röst and he thought: “Wow, this is my song! My god, it grooves!” So he thought sure, it is possible to make these songs groove, if you know how. So to answer the question: Clarence really revolutionized Per’s music, so Mr. G is not dissing him at all. There are so many songs Per has written that Clarence has dismissed. He didn’t like them. And then you dig them up ten years later, record them with another artist, and they become huge hits. Clarence really does say exactly what he thinks, and Per respects that. He is humble and he can take criticism.

Per’s big musical problem is that he is really bad at playing. He hears exactly how he wants things to sound, but he can’t play it. Hand him a guitar or put him by a piano and you’d laugh at him, he says. The guys are laughing.

Clarence sat there playing variations of the intro to Listen To Your Heart until he found what it needed to be. (Here Per is demonstrating how the intro sounds.) Not many people can handle that. Most people Per has worked with can’t handle that. Staffan asks Per why he is looking at him when he is saying this. Haha. Staffan says Clarence is fantastic, that’s clear. He also mentions that once he sat next to Alar Suurna watching Roxette in the Globe. He’s very tall, but he said hello. Haha.

The guys are getting down to The Look. That’s where things really explode. Staffan says it’s very different from many of Per’s other songs. PG says it was written because he bought a new synthesizer, an Ensoniq ESQ-1. It had six, seven or eight sounds you could use and when you used sound number nine, sound number one disappeared. So you had to be careful not to lose something good. That limits you a bit. The guys are laughing. Per is completely technically hopeless, so he tried to learn how the synth worked and to do that, he wrote two songs – The Look and Don’t Believe in Accidents. They are both released, you can find them on Spotify. Anyway, he wrote a ZZ Top inspired bassline, an eighth-note du-du-du-du-du-du thing, to learn how to do it. Several of the sounds from that Ensoniq are still in the final production. Staffan asks if Anders approved of that. Per says he did and especially Clarence. Haha. Anders was more of a sound wizard. He contributed fun sounds, cool textures, suggestions when you needed something. That’s how he worked. He was great at what he did.

The team from the first album was basically gone by then. Clarence remained and the only song that has an organic band on the second album, Look Sharp!, which became their big breakthrough, is Listen To Your Heart. When Per wrote it together with MP, he told Clarence, “let’s make this as American as possible”. There was a big American sound at that time. Per said, “this album will never be released in the US anyway, so let’s at least be American here in Sweden”. It was amazing when it became No. 1 in the US, because it doesn’t sound particularly American, compared to US productions. Per always thought it sounded like the cousin from the countryside.

Staffan thinks that later it became a strength that Roxette didn’t sound like those huge ‘power ballad’ studios. Those sounded similar. Per says Roxette’s strength was that they sounded like themselves, the cousins from the countryside. When they broke through, everyone in LA and New York wanted them to move there, and they wanted Marie to work with American musicians. That was something they immediately rejected. Because that uniqueness, working with Clarence and Jonas and their gang, gave them their own sound. Like ABBA did. They worked with Rutger Gunnarsson, Ola Brunkert, Lasse Wellander. They had their own sound. As soon as ABBA made the Voulez-Vous album and moved to Florida to work with the Bee Gees’ musicians, it didn’t sound like ABBA anymore. It sounded like the Bee Gees with Agnetha and Frida singing.

The guys are wondering if it was tempting. Per says it wasn’t. Jan-Owe says they did a test on that album. That wasn’t something Per wanted either. He had a big supporter in the head of EMI Europe (excluding England, which was its own unit). He loved Gyllene Tider. He was probably involved in The Heartland Café. He thought Roxette, after Pearls of Passion, should become a priority act for EMI Europe. So he took the initiative that they should make things easier by working with an English producer. He and Per flew to London and met six different producers. They chose Adam Moseley, who produced three songs on Look Sharp! Lasse asks Per what else Adam Moseley had done. PG can’t remember. He says Moseley was very competent musically, but he didn’t have that “pop instinct” Per liked. He thinks those three songs are the weakest on the album. Jan-Owe agrees that those songs weren’t really Per.

PG met six producers, so the guys are wondering what made him choose Adam. All six had worked with various English bands. One had worked with Haircut 100, for example. None of them were exactly on Per’s wishlist. If it had been Jimmy Iovine, who produced Tom Petty, then Per would have cheered. But that was another generation. He can’t remember why it ended up being Adam. Per knows Clarence was very sad he didn’t get to produce Cry, because that was one of his favourite songs. Adam produced that one.

Before they move on, Per wants to tell one more thing about The Look. It was written for Marie, so originally it was called He’s Got the Look and the demo was titled He’s Got the Look. It was sung from a female perspective, and that made it more fun, Per thought. But Marie didn’t want to sing it. She said it wasn’t for her, so Per had to sing it instead.

The whole idea with Roxette, at least from Per’s point of view, was that he wrote the songs and Marie sang them. That’s what they were best at. So whenever a song came up that Marie didn’t sing, that meant she didn’t want to sing it. Everything was written for her, at least on the early albums. Per was the most surprised person in the world when The Look became No. 1 globally. The breakthrough song, and it was one he sang. So the whole idea of Roxette fell apart instantly. But at the same time, they realised that if they can succeed with a song he sings, imagine what will happen when Marie starts singing. And they really did get knocked out. Those songs also did quite well.

Two out of four US No. 1 hits are actually sung by Per. So Staffan thinks he must have been wrong about that. He tells Per he could have just told Marie to sing like he does and it would go great. Haha.

Per says, he has always felt musically limited when it comes to playing. But with people like Clarence, Jonas Isacsson, Marie Fredriksson, or MP from Gyllene Tider, you can write music with more dimensions than you yourself can play. Per has always tried to find people who are much better than he is, because then he can become better. If he has to stand on his toes, he reaches higher. If you listen to almost everything Marie sang in the future, she takes every song to another division entirely, far beyond what the song actually is. Exactly the way a fantastic singer should. And it’s the same with Jonas’ brilliant solo on Listen To Your Heart. It’s fantastic. And that alone is enough.

Jan-Owe says that he remembers when he heard the demo, He’s Got the Look, the riff wasn’t even there at first. That was Jonas who came up with it later.

Lasse turns to Per and asks him if he imagines who will help him bring his idea to life when he has an idea in his head of how something should sound. PG says it depends on the people you are working with at the time. If he looks back at his long career, there have been different people for different eras. So when he writes a song now, he doesn’t save it for something else that might happen later. It finds its home somewhere. A song can have different clothes.

Sometimes when he writes a ballad, since he loves acoustic music, he asks himself if an acoustic arrangement is enough. Or maybe it should have drums or a bigger production. Often both approaches work.

On the latest Roxette tour they are doing now with Lena, they play Spending My Time acoustically, just the two of them. And it works great. But it also works fantastically in a full production. So there are many answers. Jan-Owe thinks that a good song always works acoustically. Per agrees, if you are talking about melodic music, to which their generation often returns. You can play the entire Beatles catalogue on a harp and it sounds fantastic. Or Paul Simon’s catalogue.

Staffan says they won’t go through every Roxette album, but they have to talk about Joyride, of course, recorded in 1990, released in 1991. Staffan asks Per if it can be called the “peak” of that era. Per asks him what he means by peak. Staffan explains that that was the time when the huge tours happened, Roxette travelled basically around the whole globe. It’s the big harvest of the success from Look Sharp!, which also went well.

Per says it was a great era, for nearly four years they barely left the US Billboard chart, they just changed songs. And it probably would have continued another year if their record label hadn’t been sold. That hit them very hard, but that’s another story. Joyride became huge, of course because Look Sharp! had four big hits. Then they ended up in Pretty Woman. That was a blessing. It gave Per six extra months to write the Joyride album. During that downtime, It Must Have Been Love made them even bigger. So when Joyride came (Per inserts he doesn’t know if the guys remember, because they are so young), in 1991 there was the Gulf War. So when the album or the single was supposed to be released, everything got delayed six to eight weeks due to war and crisis. Marie and Per were at a radio convention somewhere in the US where all the major radio bosses were. There are hundreds of radio stations in the US and many of them were represented there. They listened to the song Joyride for the first time, and … keep in mind, Roxette came from five huge hits in the US, the last being It Must Have Been Love. So this was the follow-up. They listened and afterwards, standing there in line to greet Marie, the radio bosses came up to them and said: “Congratulations on your next US No. 1.” Even though the single hadn’t even been released yet. That’s bold. It was great. The guys are joking that they didn’t even need to release it, just check the box. Haha. Per says it was huge. It went to No. 1 in six or seven weeks. Per can’t remember exactly, but it went fast. [In 11 weeks. /PP] Then came Fading Like a Flower. Then the third single, which was supposed to be the big hit in spring 1992, coinciding with the US tour, Spending My Time. They made a massive, expensive video directed by Wayne Isham. That was meant to be the big one. It was supposed to peak on that album. It did in some countries. But in the US, two weeks after it was released, their record company was sold. 123 people were fired and 120 new ones came in. No one had any relationship to Roxette, so they didn’t work with Roxette. Roxette fell off in the US, unfortunately. Nothing they could do, it was politics. So they moved on to other countries.

Jan-Owe asks Per how high Spending My Time went in the US. Per doesn’t know. Maybe 20 or 25. [It peaked at 32 on the Billboard Hot 100. /PP]

Staffan says they anyway toured around the world. He asks if that was the time when the fanatical South American fandom began. “Fanatical” sounds a bit negative, but they really love Roxette passionately. Per confirms, they do. The Joyride tour began in autumn 1991. They toured Europe, Australia, everywhere. South America came in spring 1992. It was a time of economic crisis and war here and there, just like now, there was war then too. Not many bands wanted to go to South America, because there was no money to be made there. Per knows Guns N’ Roses, Madonna and Michael Jackson cancelled. Roxette was asked: “Do you really want to go to South America? There’s no money in it.” But Marie said, “Of course we want to go. We’ve never been to South America. It’ll be fun to play for fans there.” They were living the dream, the entire Roxette success story was amazing, so of course they said yes. They were booked into arenas of 6-8 thousand seats. Then they released the tickets, very cheap tickets, and it turned into chaos. Suddenly they were moved to football stadiums. They played 50-60 thousand capacity venues in São Paulo and Rio. Two shows in Buenos Aires. PG can’t remember the exact order, but they played a football stadium in Buenos Aires, around 50,000 people. Then they wanted to release tickets for another show. So when they returned later on that South American run, they finished in Buenos Aires again. To help finance everything, they sold the broadcasting rights to Argentine TV. They had two TV channels then, like Sweden used to. So one channel broadcast the Buenos Aires concert live. The competing channel broadcast Roxette live from Zurich from the previous autumn. The guys are laughing. Per always says they should be in the Guinness Book of Records, because the only thing you could watch on Argentine TV for 90 minutes was Roxette.

Lasse says maybe that finally brought in some profit. Per says it actually turned out very well financially. Jan-Owe adds that it was like Phil Collins doing Live Aid in two continents the same day, only Roxette was on TV twice at the same time. Per says it was fun and a fantastic experience.

Staffan says Per mentioned that it was unusual for huge artists to go there, but Roxette also went to China, which was equally unusual at that time. PG says that it was on the next tour, Crash! Boom! Bang! Per suggests Staffan needs to read up more. Staffan says he is not that interested in this band. Haha. He thought of blending all the ’90s world tours together. He asks Per what happened when Crash! Boom! Bang! came out, but Jan-Owe wants to rewind a bit first. He is curious about South America, because they are still the most passionate fans today. Lasse says it’s the same with football. They are incredibly passionate. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Per says they express emotions differently. In Peru, for example, students adopted Roxette as “their band”. They appreciated Roxette in a special way. And these are politically complex countries, very different from where Roxette came from.

Roxette returned to South America on the Crash! Boom! Bang! tour, and Per remembers playing in Buenos Aires (if he is right). They stayed at a hotel and that turned out to be Formula 1 weekend. There were maybe 2,000 people outside the hotel singing Roxette songs all night long. All the Formula 1 drivers stayed at that hotel except Michael Schumacher. Years later, Per met David Coulthard, who drove for McLaren, and they talked about this. Per told him the story and he said: “Oh, it was YOU, you f***er! We couldn’t sleep all night!” He was furious. Fans sang Roxette songs all night long. Jan-Owe asks Per if Schumacher won the race. Haha. He probably did. A clever strategy, Staffan says.

Many artists didn’t return to South America around that time, except Imperiet from Sweden. So it was basically Roxette and Imperiet, two Swedish bands. That’s cool.

Staffan wants to get into Crash! Boom! Bang!, so the guys move on. That became another world tour. Per says it was different vs. the Joyride tour. By then they were more established. They didn’t have as many shows, but still maybe around a hundred. The album was recorded in 1993, released in 1994. The tour really stretched through 1994-95. Staffan says that was a pretty tough time for pop music. The big super bands then were Pearl Jam, a lot of heavy, darker rock. A sort of ’70s-inspired but grungy, depressive vibe. Roxette was more pop, so they must have stood out a lot. Per says Staffan is absolutely right. Oasis had happened, Blur, and all that Britpop.

The Crash! Boom! Bang! album they recorded on Capri for several months, and then finished things in Stockholm. There were so many songs. They played the album for their Swedish label and everyone cheered, but they said: “There’s no single”. That sounds familiar from a Tom Petty song, “I don’t hear a single”. Haha. Per got really pissed off, because he thought the album was fantastic. He still thinks it’s their best album. It’s broad and has so many interesting elements. PG went home the evening after that playback, angry, and wrote Sleeping in My Car. Out of pure frustration. Roxette was huge then. They had both studios at EMI in Stockholm, Studio 1 and 2, so they worked in parallel. It was just them in the building. The next day, in Studio 2, Anders Herrlin and Per made a demo of Sleeping in My Car, while Clarence and the others worked in Studio 1. Clarence didn’t like SIMC at all. The guys are laughing, because the tradition continues. Haha. It’s like Donald Duck at Christmas in Sweden, something you expect. Per understands Clarence, because it’s almost more Gyllene Tider than Roxette. The chord progression jumps between major and minor the way Gyllene songs do. Jan-Owe says it feels like you could have put Swedish lyrics on it. Per agrees.

Per basically put together a brand new band to record that song. It was Mats Persson (not MP, but their percussion guy in Roxette), who played drums. He was in the same band as Clarence, Passagerarna. He was great. Pelle Sirén, who worked with X Models led by Efva Attling, was on guitar, and Per thinks it was Mats Alsberg on bass. [It was Anders Herrlin. /PP] A whole gang that had nothing to do with the usual Roxette lineup. They played on Sleeping in My Car. And the lyrics were specially made for Marie. It’s a very in-your-face, cocky song. There, they got their f***ing single. Haha. It’s a simple song, but maybe it didn’t represent the album as a whole. It’s kind of smart. That might be why Per loves the album. It keeps the whole gang on their toes.

Lasse thinks Sleeping In My Car is probably the best song on the album. Sover i min bil it would be in Swedish. The guys are laughing.

Staffan says Roxette also made some tour albums. Tourism is quite special. Per says he had to fight hard for that one. He thought it was quite tough to be on tour for so long and not be able to work and record. He had listened to the Running on Empty album by Jackson Browne which was recorded during the tour. So the idea was there: why can’t they, when they arrive in a city in Spain, go into a studio and record a song there? Or why can’t they record in a hotel room? So the whole idea of recording during the tour grew from that. Nobody really liked it, because everyone wanted time off. The guys are laughing. But the Tourism album, which was recorded during the Joyride tour, came out in the summer in 1992. The track that became the driving force for the album was How Do You Do! It became the first single and became their biggest song in Germany. It was number one for twelve or fourteen weeks. And another single from that album was a leftover track from Joyride called Queen of Rain. Many of those songs, like Never Is a Long Time, were recorded at a rented nightclub in Buenos Aires. Staffan asks if it was open. Per replies it was closed. They recorded there during the day. Jonas, Clarence and Marie were there, and Per sat next to them. Jan-Owe asks Per if he already had the songs or he wrote them then. PG says it was a mix. The Heart Shaped Sea he wrote then and How Do You Do! as well. Some songs were leftovers from Look Sharp! and Joyride. For example, Here Comes the Weekend. Other songs were single B sides, e.g. Come Back (Before You Leave) was the B side of Joyride. Silver Blue was the B side of The Look; they made a slightly updated version of it. And there were three live recordings as well, to keep this live connection in the production. So it was a mix.

Staffan is curious what the others thought once it was finished. Lasse asks what Clarence thought. Haha. Per doesn’t know what he thought, but the album sold 6 million copies or something like that. It sold a lot. Rolf Nygren, the boss who brought Marie and Per together back then, didn’t think it should count as a real album, because it was recorded on tour. So he didn’t think it should be included in the contract.

The guys get to the point where Roxette took a break. In 1995 the Crash tour ended. In 1996 Roxette turned ten, and then they released their first compilation album called Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!, and they recorded some new songs. Marie had had a baby and needed some time off, and Per wanted to make a solo album in the meantime. He couldn’t wait. PG wrote lots of songs for himself, and one of them ended up on that Roxette compilation, called June Afternoon. And it’s Gyllene Tider playing on it, even on the Roxette recording.

The album came out in 1996, and it was the first year off from Roxette, and of course the first Gyllene Tider comeback happened in 1996 in Sweden, Återtåget. Staffan says resting and holidays are not Per’s thing. Per laughs and says it’s for people like Staffan. Haha.

Already in 1995 when Roxette was touring with Crash, they talked about a Gyllene comeback. They did a few concerts with Gyllene Tider in 1995, and they released an album, Halmstads pärlor, a Gyllene Tider compilation in 1995. It had several new songs, one of them Per wrote in Japan is called Det är över nu. It became very good. Staffan says it sounds very Japanese. Haha. Per says it was produced together with Michael Ilbert. He was a huge catalyst for the Gyllene Tider reunion. He made them sound exactly like they always wanted to sound, but never managed before, so it was very fun working with him. That song, and maybe one more, Kung av sand, became big hits from that album. So Halmstads pärlor became Sweden’s best-selling record in 1995. And in 1996 came the Återtåget tour and then they reissued Halmstads pärlor and added some new songs. Gå & fiska! and Juni, juli, augusti. Which meant that Halmstads pärlor also became Sweden’s best-selling album in 1996. Why not. The guys are laughing and Staffan asks Per how 1997 was then. Per says everything fell apart then, it was the house of cards. Haha.

With Roxette, there was still a break. Per released his first English solo album in 1997, The World According to Gessle. Humble title, Staffan says. Per turns to Jan-Owe and asks what he was doing in 1998. Haha. Jan-Owe says he wrote songs. PG says they recorded an album called Have a Nice Day. During those years he wrote a lot of songs. They recorded them in Spain. Marie had had her second child and Per had had a little son in 1997, so it took a very long time. And it was a very nice album with lots of good songs, Wish I Could Fly and Salvation. And it was the first album they didn’t tour with. PG had gotten to know Anton Corbijn, the photographer, and they wanted to work together. He made two videos for them. One for Wish I Could Fly and one for Salvation. [From here Per messes up WICF and Stars, so I write Stars instead. /PP] Mr. G explains he had gained weight, so he didn’t want to be in the videos. That was perhaps one of the reasons he didn’t want them to tour. He didn’t feel comfortable with himself. So in the Stars video he is lying in a little street corner with a sign in front of him in the first scene, and then he is morphed into another guy who plays his role. Then he had lost weight for Salvation, so he is in that video. The guys are laughing.

The HAND album came out in 1999, and in 2000 Per wrote songs and they started recording what became Room Service. It became a tour in 2001. A European tour only, though. Jan-Owe is curious why it was only a European tour. Per says it wasn’t easy for them to sell many tickets then. The music they represented was a bit off. He remembers they did Fading Like a Flower acoustically, because the production style it had was no longer modern. Now it’s fun and cool again, but it wasn’t then, so it wasn’t easy. Staffan asks PG if that was when Max Martin started dominating all the charts. Per says it wasn’t just him, it was pop music in general. It’s in the nature of pop music to constantly change, and pop always reflects its era.

In 2002 they decided to take a break. Marie wanted to work with her husband and do her own things. She wasn’t super interested. She wasn’t involved much in the recording of Room Service. It was more Clarence and Per. Ronny Lahti was the engineer, a very skilled one. Marie came in and sang when they called her. Sometimes she came in, sang, and had the taxi waiting outside the whole time. So she really wasn’t very interested.

It wasn’t surprising that they took a break. Then they received a fantastic offer, financially speaking, to participate in something called Night of the Proms. It’s a large symphony orchestra that backs up 3-4 songs. Most artists have done it over the years. It’s a production based in Antwerp, and you tour in Europe – Germany, Switzerland. On the way to the press conference where they were going to announce this, Marie became ill. So it was cancelled. Then everything stopped for several years.

Per did some other things, Mazarin and Son of a Plumber. Staffan thinks Jo-Anna Says is the best song Per has ever done and he is usually right, he says. But here the guys jump ahead, because this podcast is supposed to be about Roxette. Things started again in 2008-2009 when Per was on tour. PG says he worked intensively in the 2000s. Mazarin came in 2003. Then the huge Gyllene Tider tour in 2004. Then came Son of a Plumber. Then En händig man. He can’t remember everything. Then he made the Party Crasher album. It was an English solo album and he went on a European tour with it. He played e.g. Cirkus, clubs for 1,200-1,400 people. When he played in Amsterdam, Marie and her husband came to visit. Per didn’t know they were coming, but he was very happy. Marie had stayed out of the spotlight for many years. So Per asked her if they could perform a song together. She hadn’t sung since the Room Service tour eight years earlier and she wasn’t super eager. But Per has always been good at convincing her, so he did. They went on for the encore and performed… Per can’t remember what. It Must Have Been Love or Listen to Your Heart acoustically. Per has never seen so many people cry as when they saw Marie walk out. She was shocked by the response. She was happy, of course. They all were. Then she called after a week or two and said: “I feel ready. Can’t you write a new Roxette album?” So Per wrote one and that became Charm School which came out in 2010. Then they went on tour. Marie defied everything – doctors, recommendations. She thought it was fantastic. It was truly fantastic that she managed. It was a high tempo. They played 160 shows on that tour and kept going for several years.

Staffan asks if there were breaks when she could rest. Per says there were breaks, but still, when you are on tour, even if you are home for three weeks, you are mentally still on tour. You must stay healthy, you can’t get sick. Maybe there is something you have to adjust, then you must rehearse. It’s a bit on or off. Even when you are home, you are not fully off.

Jan-Owe asks Per how it felt to play smaller venues when they already played stadiums in the past. Per says Roxette never played small venues. Only Per did. Haha. But he doesn’t think like that. When Gyllene Tider plays, they play as big as possible. Often 8,000 and up. Roxette is the same. As a solo artist in Sweden, same. Per plays Brottet in Halmstad or Trädgårdsföreningen in Gothenburg or Sofiero in Helsingborg. But when he goes out into Europe alone, he must start from scratch. He is known there, but he doesn’t have that following. And he also plays differently. He plays from the Son of a Plumber album or maybe some (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone cover, which The Monkees recorded when he was little. It’s no problem. It’s fun. Not everything has to be maxed. It can be fun to play in a small club.

Now with Lena on the Roxette tour they have had maybe 3,000-4,000 people. And suddenly it feels like a club gig. And those can be the best. If you are going to play 8,000-10,000 or more, you need the production. You might need screens and you must rehearse a good production. Because people expect that and you want to provide that. But you don’t need it when you play somewhere like Pinocchio. Haha.

Jan-Owe says it’s another challenge then, the connection with the audience. He mentions that Per had those hotel shows when Covid came and he could really talk to the audience differently. Per says he took the opportunity. He always wanted to try it, but never really believed he could. When Covid came, there were 10 meters between tables and you couldn’t have 400 people in one place. With those hotel gigs you also avoided the pressure of what if I don’t sell tickets. Because 400 tickets will sell. But if you announce your own acoustic tour, it’s a lot of pressure. Later he did announce a tour like that, but by then he had proof it would work.

Jan-Owe asks Per if he benefited from that tour later, going out with Roxette again. PG says everything you do teaches you something. What he has learned the last 20 years is – and he thinks about it often on the Roxette tour – he can lean back and trust his songs, because the songs are so big. People don’t go to a Roxette concert or to see him to watch a high-tech Lady Gaga production. They come because they love the songs. Mr. G thinks it’s incredible. If you think of many artists, especially young ones, it’s a lot of production. Lots of pre-recorded things, lots happening visually. An ADHD feeling. But if you look at Springsteen or McCartney or Leonard Cohen, that generation is different. One of the best concerts Per has ever seen was Leonard Cohen delivering amazing music. He doesn’t know if it’s generational, but he learned that once they start playing, it will work.

The guys start to talk about the present. Per is out again, with auntie Philipsson, Staffan says. PG corrects him that she is not an old lady. OK, miss Philipsson then. Jan-Owe warns Staffan, “watch what you say. She might be listening”. Staffan says hi to Lena on the podcast, then he asks Per when the idea came and what his thoughts were.

Per says this question could take hours, because there are so many angles. When Marie passed away, the whole Roxette concept disappeared. Per didn’t know what to do. The obvious choice was to leave it all. Time passed and he realized there is this huge song catalogue, his whole life. Should he never play these songs again? He needed years to decide whether there was someone who could sing them and who would want to sing them. It wasn’t easy. He almost gave up.

It was a coincidence that Lena came to MP’s studio in Halmstad and sang on a song called Sällskapssjuk. PG had met her before. He co-wrote her breakthrough hit in the ’80s, Kärleken är evig, but they had no real relationship. When she started singing, Per thought: wow, she’s good. Really, really good. And you rarely feel that. So he thought she could sing Roxette songs. She doesn’t sing like Marie, but she has enormous professionalism and vocal capacity.

Per arranged a meeting in Stockholm and presented the idea to Lena. She almost fell off her chair. She didn’t say yes or no. She wanted to think. Then she called and to Per’s surprise she was positive. Staffan asks Per what Clarence thought. Haha. He was very positive according to Mr. G.

Lasse says, with all respect to Marie, this isn’t the first band to change singers. There are many examples. AC/DC is one of them. And it works.

Per says it works. Lasse adds that many people are stuck, they think things must always stay the same. They don’t. PG says it doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. What makes it work with Lena is that she is strong in herself. Per is not starting a new Roxette with her, she is hired to sing the Roxette catalogue. She is a hired gun and she does it fantastically. She does it naturally and in her own way. She is more faithful to the songs than Marie was at the end. Marie chose different ways. Even in her peak years she did that. It was her style, not to follow the rules. Lena is different. She sings as intended, but in her own style.

They did 43 shows in 2025 and they have at least as many in 2026.

Staffan says now it’s the 40-year anniversary of Roxette. He is curious if anything else will happen. Per confirms that many things are coming. They have a plan with the record company to release something every month, to celebrate. For example, the Spanish ballad album will come on double vinyl for the first time. Room Service will come on double vinyl with many extras. Some remixes will come too, Per won’t say which. So a lot of things are happening. There will be other surprises as well. The musical continues in Stockholm and opens in Malmö in the fall. It will go abroad from 2027. Things are happening constantly. Roxette is alive and thriving.

Jan-Owe wants to know if Per plans to write new songs with Lena as a hired vocalist. PG doesn’t think new Roxette releases will come. He released a song with Lena, but under the Per + Lena name. He really doesn’t want to start a new Roxette. Roxette is the past. But he would love to work with Lena in the studio and release new material. Per is writing a new album where she will be involved, along with others.

Jan-Owe says he saw that Roxette UK is on a world tour and he is curious about what Per thinks of them. PG has no problem with them, but they can’t use that name. They are in a legal process, because it’s gone wrong, since Roxette is touring too. There are many tribute bands and that’s fine. They do a great job. But they shouldn’t step on the trademark. Roxette had to clarify it’s not them. Even their record company in Stockholm thought they could do something in England when they were going to play there. But it was not Roxette, it was a cover band that played there. That’s a problem, but it will be solved.

Jan-Owe asks Per how these tribute bands operate, if they contacted Per. Mr. G says they didn’t. They just play. Jan-Owe would think they want feedback and Per says maybe they do, but Roxette doesn’t interfere. Per is flattered they exist, there are many tribute bands worldwide. Playing their songs, that’s great, but they can’t use their images or their name. Jan-Owe says it’s a sign you have made it when there are tribute bands.

With this, the guys wrap up. Lasse and Staffan thank Per and Jan-Owe for joining them on the podcast.

Selfie by Lasse Pop Svensson

Per Gessle about “Kvar i min bil” in Skräpkulturpodden

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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.

Per Gessle on DJ 50 Spänn podcast

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Per Gessle was a guest on Tommie Jönsson’s DJ 50 Spänn podcast the other day. He is introduced as a person who loves pop music incredibly. Tommie knows Per has some stuff going on in 2024, e.g. a new solo record. He asks if it is in Swedish. Per says it is and it’s his first Swedish album with new material since 2017. Tommie is curious how Per decided that now is the time for a Swedish solo album. PG says it’s probably his restlessness that determines his ADHD. The guys are laughing. The last thing Per did was Gyllene Tider’s Hux Flux album last year and before that it was PG Roxette in English. So now he thought he had written songs that would fit a Swedish record and he had an idea. There are quite a lot of duets on this record and that’s something Per didn’t really have before. He has sung duets before, of course, there was Roxette, of course, but now he wrote songs in a different way. It feels like – now that he is in his retirement age – he has to find some kind of new angle. A new angle every time, so that you can kind of focus on yourself in a new way. Per says it often happens that you feel like you are repeating yourself a lot. It’s very easy to repeat yourself.

Tommie asks PG if he can tell who he sings duets with. Per says it depends on when Tommie broadcasts this program, haha, but he doesn’t want to share it yet. All he can say is that there are a lot of Swedish artists that Tommie has probably heard of.

Tommie mentions that there is a lot more going on: there will be a musical based on Roxette songs, there will be a feature film based on the true story of Gyllene Tider. He wants to know how much Per is involved in these projects. Per laughs and asks it depends on what scale they are talking about. Mr. G says when it comes to the GT movie, it’s based on his good memory. All 5 of them thought that it should be a movie that is based on their good memories. It’s quite unusual to make a film based on a band that actually still exists. Tommie reminds Per that The Beatles made a movie when they were still around. Per agrees, but he says it was loosely based on that.

It’s more about how Per went to school and met Mats and founded Grape Rock, which became Gyllene Tider. It’s not a documentary, not a kind of tribute to Gyllene Tider’s great, long career. The film ends when Sommartider is released in 1982. It’s about 5 crazy guys, small town boys who have fun together and their strange fate.

Tommie asks Per if there is anything new coming under Mono Mind. There is nothing planned, Per replies. Mono Mind released an album in 2019, but it already started in 2013, so it was a long project. From the beginning it was quite secretive. As PG said before, he has to have a new angle on every project he does. The new angle here was to do modern pop music, but he was so sick of his voice that he felt like he was limiting himself. That’s why he loves working with other singers, because they can make his songs so much better. He felt so limited by his voice so they created this fake voice. It was Christoffer Lundquist who managed to do it. Per sang a fifth down and then they fixed everything on the computer. PG made the melody on the computer, in the program itself.

Tommie says Per has something that Neil Young doesn’t have. He talks about this weird synth album, Trans. Even if Neil Young sings with such a robotic voice, you can immediately hear that it’s Neil Young. Per agrees. He says the idea for Mono Mind was that there is this made up, fake band with 4 names and 4 characters. There were cartoon characters, a bit like Gorillaz, but more than that. Each character got a biography. The first single was Save Me A Place, sung by Dr Robot – as Per called himself back then – and … He can’t remember the character name of the girl who sings with him. Tommie can’t remember either, he blames it on the fictional pop stars. Anyway, the song was No.1 on the US dance charts for 6 weeks. It was fantastic. It got a lot of radio plays, but there is a big difference between ending up on the dance charts and ending up on the Hot 100. Per thinks they were just Bubbling Under Hot 100. Tommie says maybe next time. Haha.

The guys get down to the classic DJ 50 Spänn task of digging up 5 used records without breaking the budget ceiling of 50 Swedish crowns. They went to Nostalgipalatset in Stockholm. Tommie asks Per how scary it was to find himself there. Per laughs and says it just happens that you go to a second hand shop and you find your old Gyllene Tider records there. He wasn’t scared, he was just wondering if he could find albums that he has a relation to. He found actually quite a lot more records that he liked than he thought.

Tommie says the task was to get 5 records, but Per went to the checkout with a bundle that was maybe 15-20 centimeters high. Haha. What Per thinks is interesting about the idea for this program is that you go to any record store and look for records, you’ll come out with stuff you like, but maybe not the records you would have played or picked if you asked him to pick 5 favourite songs. It’s a different angle here too.

Tommie says one of the reasons why he is running this idea is that he has noticed that most of the people get total anxiety from listing their 5 favourite songs. Per gets that question often in different contexts, what your favourite records are, which records mean the most, bla bla bla. He decided that he would only answer it by day form. The thing that just pops up in his mind right now. This morning when he woke up the first song he heard was I’m Crying by The Animals, so he would say it’s his favourite song today. Maybe it wouldn’t have even popped up in his memory.

Tommie realizes that the intro is very long, it feels like they already have some kind of Emerson, Lake & Palmer intro, but he tries to make itt he Gessle way and get to the chorus, fairly quickly in the program. So here comes the first single, which Per already had in his collection and it sounded amazing when it came out. It’s a huge hit and it still sounds amazing. It’s Pop Muzik by M, Robin Scott.

Tommie asks Per if he also feels that there is something ironic about this song, a crooked smile. Per says it feels like Robin Scott has done this with sarcasm. About the production, PG thinks it swings so incredibly much. This synth music that was made at the end of the ’70s, he still likes it. It has a great dance groove.

Tommie is curious what Per feels when he listens to this song from 1979. Mr. G thinks it’s great pop music. What he loves the most about pop music is the romanticism around pop music that you grew up with. This song brings him to that universe. Tommie says when he listens to it in detail then he could almost hear that this is some kind of manifesto. Robin Scott sings „everybody made it, infiltrate it, activate it”. He thinks you should just take pop music and infiltrate it in some way. PG says in the ’60s and ’70s pop music had a position in our society that it doesn’t have today, at least he feels so. When The Beatles and all that happened, pop music, fashion, film, theatre, newspapers, books, TV, long hair on guys, it all belonged together in some kind of teenage revolution. It reflected our time in a different way. After all, pop music always reflects its own time. That’s why it’s called pop music. When you think of 1979, punk happened, it came and went and then disco happened. The ’70s were a hot pot of lots of music styles. This song here is a tribute to everything altogether.

Tommie asks Per what he thinks made him get so incredibly high in pop music. PG thinks it was something so tragic that he thought pop music and this pop universe had everything that he didn’t have in reality. He was a bit of an overweight nerd with glasses and lived a bit on the fringes of society. He spent all his waking hours sitting in headphones and listening to Ummagumma by Pink Floyd, for example. Mr. G says when he works with Christoffer Lundquist and Clarence Öfwerman as intense – they are prog rockers, that is. They love Yes and Gentle Giant and everything like that. Per can understand it, because he listened to James Harvest, Moody Blues, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He loved their Trilogy album. So it’s not strange to Per and you can actually hear that in his music too. For better or worse, he has quite different themes, even if it’s pop music, maybe the whole song ends with a brand new theme code. It might be a whole new little theme. Per likes moderations and that something new is happening all the time. However, over the years he has shrunk his songs down. If you look at his previous stuff, there are a lot of songs that are almost 5 minutes long. Billy is longer than 5 minutes, but that’s a long story, so it needs more time. But these days, he is cutting things down. He often records longer versions, then he cuts it down when he starts working on the production. Tommie is curious if it also happens the other way around, that songs become longer. In jazz, the songs become all of a sudden 7-8 minutes long. Per says that might be the next step for him. Haha.

Getting back to the band M, or the person M, it’s a bit mysterious. Tommie tells that Robin Scott went to art school with Malcolm McLaren in the late ’60s. McLaren started this clothing boutique, SEX, but Scott was not interested. He was doing a bit of folk rock, he produced some pub rock and worked with R&B band Roogalator. He worked for Barclay Records in Paris and in 1979 somehow he got by this song with some session musicians and for some reason it became a big hit in England. And then he disappeared pretty quickly. He went to Kenya and Tanzania and started recording with a band called Shikisha. Very weird, Per thinks. Tommie is very grateful that this song exists, because he loves it. It’s an earworm and is stuck in your head for weeks. Per says there are more songs that will erase this one.

Tommie says, when you make a music program, it should swing properly between years, genres and maybe also level of coolness. The time has come for the next song. Per says it’s one of the best singles that have been made in Sweden, Stefan Rüdén’s Sofia dansar go-go. This is fantastic music, he thinks. So well they play. Tommie wants to know what is so great about it. The text, PG thinks. He always loved it. Tommie says it’s like the musical or maybe lyrical equivalent of Benny Hill. Per agrees and he mentions this line: Alla tycker hon är läcker när hon vickar på sin häck är. It’s a fantastic rhyme, Mr. G thinks. It’s a bit like hembränt and Rembrandt in the Gyllene Tider song. The guys are laughing and Tommie says it’s a really good one. PG says he had one of his big moments on old Arlanda, when a man came up to him in a trench coat many, many, many years ago and said „hello, do you recognize me?” Per didn’t recognize him, so the man said, „I’m Stefan Rüdén”. Mr. G got a little star struck there. He didn’t ask for his autograph, but he is on Per’s top 5 list among the great ones he met in his life. There is Paul McCartney, Tom Petty and some others and Stefan Rüdén.

The song came out in 1972, so Stefan fought with Ziggy Stardust and Marc Bolan. Tommie says it feels that this music doesn’t fit in there in its time, but you shouldn’t forget that a lot of top Swedish schlager music continued to sound like this for a very long time. Tommie asks Per if he remembers this song from when it was on the Swedish charts for quite a long time in 1972-73. PG has no direct memory other than that he has always liked it. As a lyricist, he thinks this is fantastically written. This is Povel Ramel’s class, Hasse Alfredson’s class. Ewert Ljusberg wrote the text. In other words, it’s very, very well written and funny. And the swing and the great melody with a text like that, it’s kind of unique, according to Per.

Tommie thinks it’s an earworm too. This one can get stuck in the head pretty hard too. It’s originally a Danish song called Fut i fejemøget. Tommie is curious when was the last time Per translated a foreign song into Swedish. Per says it was a long time ago, he thinks. When he started writing songs, he translated Cygnet Committee by David Bowie. When Tommie heard this in an interview, he was wondering what it was in Swedish. Per can’t remember that, but from the same album he also translated Memory Of A Free Festival. He loved that album. He also translated Ain’t It Strange by Patti Smith. It was a way to learn how to write lyrics and how not to write lyrics. The first song on the first Gyllene Tider LP is actually a cover of Send Me A Postcard by Shocking Blue, Skicka ett vykort, älskling. Tommie thinks the original song is damn good, but it’s a real smoker on the GT record as well, a great start into the album.

PG says they played a lot of covers at their concerts in the early ’80s, e.g. Dinga Linga Lena, ABBA’s S.O.S. They even made a bonus EP for their second GT album. They did a Beatles cover, a Beach Boys cover, a Mott The Hoople song and a Tom Petty song. You often did covers to show a bit of where you come from. They played Hanging On The Telephone live, to show where they belong.

Then came this whole cover band boom in the ’80s and then it became kind of embarrassing to play covers. You didn’t want to get mixed with cover bands if you wrote your own songs. Per thinks it’s great if you can make good covers, especially if you can add something to a song of your own.

Tommie loves song translations into Swedish. From Per’s stuff there is Marie i växeln. It’s Switchboard Susan written by Mickey Jupp, recorded by Nick Lowe. Then there is Varje gång du är i samma rum (When You Walk In The Room) by dance band Flamingokvintetten. Per says this song was written by Jackie DeShannon. She is one of his absolute favourite composers. Besides this, she wrote one of Per’s favourite songs, Come And Stay With Me. What a song! It was also recorded by Ola & The Janglers on their Patterns album. It was Lasse Lindbom who asked Per to write a Swedish text for When You Walk In The Room, and he released it as I samma rum, but Per never recorded this song. Tommie is curious how it ended up with a dance band. PG says, maybe because the publisher who had the original wanted to have a Swedish translation and there was already the one Per had translated.

The guys get back to talking about Stefan Rüdén. This is probably his big hit, it was a huge hit on the Swedish charts in 1973. Impossible to top, Per says. Tommie adds that he released 4 solo albums in the ’70s. If you like translations, you can enjoy Elvis Presley’s In The Ghetto in Swedish and The Bellamy Brothers’ Let Your Love Flow. Then he ended up in trouble with justice around 1979. It was some kind of fraud thing that was related to very expensive carpets. After that he made some smurf recordings with Bert Karlsson. If you want to hear how it was, you can look up the B side of Bert Karlsson’s cover of Hoppa Hulle, a weird Israeli Eurovision song. Stefan is in the singing booth on the B side.

The next song is Looking For Clues by Robert Palmer, a single from his album, Clues. It’s from 1980. Per was a bit surprised that he found this on sale, but this is fantastic music. It has an incredible swing too. Tommie says it has a little stressed tempo. PG agrees and says that’s a bit of amphetamine music. It’s not quite divo, but it kind of has a divo-ish energy, according to Tommie. Per agrees and says he likes the production a lot. Fat snare drums that are a little too strong, but it still sounds ’70s style. PG also likes that he sings octaves with himself. It’s an old trick that Per has also tried many times.

Tommie says Robert Palmer’s 1980 album Clues is super modern and well ahead of its time. It was a hit in Sweden, it was number one in Sweden, but in the rest of the world it wasn’t a big deal. Per says he had another song that was very big on that record, Johnny and Mary. Per remembers that Palmer was in a band called Vinegar Joe with Elkie Brooks in the ’70s, but then he left and made solo albums. This song sounded a bit like something you hadn’t heard before. The production was so special and this is one of those songs that stood out. It’s not like the best composition in the world, but it’s a damn cool one, Per thinks. Tommie says they have even hit it off with a vibration solo. Per says it’s crazy.

Long after this record came out, Tommie has understood what a free-thinking composer and artist Robert Palmer was at the time. He did what he felt. He was hanging out a lot in the West Indies in the Bahamas. Apparently, he lived across the street from Compass Point Studios. Practical, Per states.

Palmer became friends with Gary Numan right around this record. So Gary Numan is on 2 songs on the album and it’s hard to imagine two pop stars who are more different from each other. Gary Numan is a little dark and robotic and a little angsty. Robert Palmer is a kind of playboy.

When Tommie listened to Clues, he heard that Palmer was very much into constantly seasoning with some kind of Caribbean stuff. There are some steel pans, xylophones, reggae grooves etc. Per adds that he was also signed to Island Records.

Tommie asks PG who Robert Palmer is to him. Mr. G says Palmer is not really for him. He had never picked this record up, had he not found it on sale. Haha. He remembers this song and this production, that it was very cool. We are talking about 1980, it’s the same year as Ashes To Ashes and the Scary Monsters album came out. It’s also a transition to the ’80s.

Tommie is curious if Per has ever met Palmer. Mr. G met him once on a TV show in Germany where he afterwards was very intoxicated, if you can say so. It was only a quick meeting. PG says they did all these big TV shows, Peter’s Pop Show and others. Then you ran into everyone from Phil Collins to Prince, but you didn’t know them, you just met them, had a little small talk about what a cool song it was, thank you very much, stuff like that.

Tommie asks Per which was the weirdest TV show he was on. Mr. G says the weirdest was when they did The Look on a German TV show called Formel Eins. They had dragged in some goats in the background, which were right there behind them. They did The Look like three times a day on TV shows all the time. He had his own moves and at a certain point he would spin around, do something with his guitar, probably a cool, sexy move and just when he did that, when he turned, this goat was standing there and farting a bit elegantly. Per doesn’t know if it appeared in the TV broadcast itself, but it was like that. He thought aha, then they had to keep going. It was a bit odd actually, but they did a lot of weird stuff anyway. They did a TV show with Status Quo. Status Quo did In The Army Now and Roxette did Neverending Love or I Call Your Name, Per thinks. It was before they had broken through. It was a little TV program somewhere and Status Quo were so angry, because they thought that no one took them seriously. Rick Parfitt had a tough pocket flask in his back pocket while he was playing, a liquor flask.

The guys get down to the next song. Another one from the ’80s. Per was again a little surprised to find that one on sale. He is surprised that it existed in someone’s possession, because it wasn’t a huge hit. It was a hit in Halmstad though in the ’80s. It’s Hanging On A Heart Attack by Device from 1986. This is a typical ’80s song, a bit too strong snare drums. Per loves this style of pop music where you have a really strong verse like this. It’s just as strong as the chorus and it’s written by Holly Knight. She was in the band too. Mr. G thinks Mike Chapman was responsible for production and he is a master at that.

Tommie asks Per what made him pick this single. Per says it was there in the store completely alone and just waiting to be picked up. Per has this in his collection. He thinks he even has their only LP. Holly Knight later became a great songwriter. She wrote The Best, for example for Tina Turner. She and Mike Chapman. Mike was one of Per’s biggest favourites as a producer. He did all The Sweet singles. He did a lot of rubbish too, Tom-Tom Turnaround by New World and Sister Jane. Later he produced Blondie’s Parallel Lines. He also produced Agnetha Fältskog’s first solo album after ABBA. Wrap Your Arms Around Me.

Hanging On A Heart Attack is so typical of the time. This is the year Per and Marie started Roxette. There was a Roxette version before Marie, with Gyllene Tider, but for the sake of simplicity, Tommie adds when they talk about Roxette, they mean the real thing. The successful one.

Tommie wants to know whether Per can just listen and enjoy music or he analyzes the songs when he listens to them. Per says it’s a good question. Unfortunately, you get to know a little too much, so you note things like this verse is as strong as the chorus and how exciting is that chord there, stuff like that. When you were little, you just listened more, you just took it in. It’s hard for Per to listen to music and be neutral.

This Device song gives Tommie really deep flashbacks to 1986, because he is pretty sure he hasn’t heard it since then. It was on the radio when he was in the eighth grade fighting acne. He remembers he liked that, but there was something dark in it, something strange. Per says they tried to be a little dangerous. It was a bit like Mad Max.

Funnily enough, there is a slight connection. Holly wrote a song that ended up on the Mad Max 3 soundtrack. Per says, she became a very successful songwriter.

Tommie says that on Hanging On A Heart Attack it’s Paul Engemann who sings and for all the Giorgio Moroder geeks out there, Paul Engeman is the one who sings on Push It To The Limit, which is on the Scarface soundtrack. Per says Tommie knows so much. Tommie says it’s Wikipedia knowledge, but he got there while checking who Paul Engemann is. Per says what’s so fun about the pop world is that it’s a small world. Not today, because there are well over a hundred thousand new songs every day on Spotify, but back in the days in the ’60s, ’70s, 80’s, ’90s everyone was in connection with everyone in some way.

Tommie says this song is from 1986 when Roxette really started rolling. He is curious what Per and Marie were listening to at the time. Per has always been hooked on his ’60s and ’70s catalogue. He listened to that, still does. But they also listened to the music of those days. There was a lot of europop in the ’80s. Modern Talking and stuff like that.

Tommie is wondering a little, because around 1986-87, when Per and Marie worked on hitting not only Sweden, but also to reach out into the world, there must have been other artists and hit songs that they thought like „why are they breaking through and not us?” Per says Tommie is partly right, but to begin with, it was so clear that their ambition was to become an international band. At the same time, they were also very aware that they were from Sweden and the odds were not on their side. When they started doing local TV in the Netherlands and local TV in Germany, they were quite grateful for it. It was kind of unheard-of that they could do it. It was something they had not been able to do before. The first country they broke through in was actually the USA, and it was absolutely insane. Tommie says so they skipped Europe. Per says they tried Europe, but when he wrote It Must Have Been Love for the Germans to release it as a Christmas song in 1987, they didn’t want to release it. The record company didn’t like it. So everything was against them, but then it happened in January 1989 with The Look.

Tommie thinks it was around 1986 that a few things started to happen. Europe all of a sudden started getting some attention, reaching critical mass also abroad. Per says it’s hard to compare them to Roxette. They were a bit more like Bon Jovi, hard rock light or top 40 hard rock you can say, with songs like Desmond Child wrote. Per didn’t think they were competitors. They were compared to Eurythmics back then, because they were a duo. Many people compared them, because they even looked similar. Great ’80s hairstyles and shoulder pads. So Roxette tried it their own way with their budget to create something unique and the probability that it would succeed internationally was very small. They were very lucky that they succeeded. Per remembers that a few years later, when they recorded the Look Sharp! album, he had quite a long time to write songs for it, because Marie did a Swedish solo record in the meantime. PG thought that production turned out fantastic. There were a lot of coincidences, too. They started working with synthesizers in a different way. Per said to himself that if they succeed with any song from this record, they will have a lot of sequels, because it was a very, very strong record. They didn’t have only one good song on it. They were lucky when The Look happened, but they had Dressed For Success, Dangerous, Listen To Your Heart. They had Paint, which became a big hit in Brazil. It was as big there as Dangerous. They had the capacity, but you have to get your foot in the door, and how do you do that from Stockholm… They had no budget and no expensive videos. It was the era of video explosion.

Tommie says speaking of Roxette, nowadays there is PG Roxette, which is a band or project that exists to carry on the Roxette legacy. He asks Per if he has ever thought about creating avatars or holograms of themselves instead. Per laughs. He says he wanted to make a record in that Roxette spirit, so he created this PG Roxette. But no, avatar is not something that can happen until he is alive. The guys are laughing and Per says he will write in his testament. Tommie is wondering if there are any avatar rights to consider these days. Per says it’s a good question. They have to ask Björn and Benny about this.

Time flies when you have to play through 5 singles here. They only have one left. Per loved this one when it came out, it was on Tio i topp. It’s Cracklin’ Rosie by Neil Diamond. Per has always been very weak for Neil Diamond’s compositions ever since he wrote I’m A Believer, a big hit of The Monkees. It was one of Per’s first singles. Tommie says it would have been enough for him to write I’m A Believer and he would still have been a legend forever. Per mentions Solitary Man as another great song of his. Cracklin’ Rosie is from 1970. Tommie wants to know if Per liked Neil Diamond there and then also when he was charting. Per liked him in this era, but it was somewhere around here that you stopped listening to him, he says. Cracklin’ Rosie was a huge hit on Tio i topp. Then in retrospect when you study it from a songwriter’s point of view, it’s a very cleverly written song with different themes. Per thinks what is a bit boring about today’s pop music is that people are satisfied with the sound being good. They often use the same chords and then raise the melody in the chorus to the same chord that you had in the verse. It’s classic. But it wasn’t classic at this time. There would have been a great verse and then comes the bridge and then maybe a little pre-chorus and then comes a chorus, then maybe a little tail on the chorus. Mamma Mia is a great example of that style. There are 5 parts, all of which are really hooky.

Tommie says that during those times, it seems like an incredible amount of things have happened in songwriting. He wants to know what was the biggest thing for Per when it comes to that. For PG the big thing was the technological development, how you can edit and work in the studio. When they recorded Listen To Your Heart in 1988, it was quite complex. It’s the only song on Roxette’s Look Sharp! album that has a real band. Everything else was programmed. They had no more channels, so Clarence played keyboards to Listen To Your Heart when they mixed it. So what he plays is on the mixer, but it is not recorded. They reached the max. Now there are no longer any technical restrictions and you can edit, cut, copy, auto tune and do whatever you want.

Tommie says he also thinks about that now there seem to be so many people who sit and work on the same song. It may not be an entirely new thing, there have been songwriting factories before, but just by looking at the Eurovision Song Contest, there are all these 3, 4, 5,6, 7, 8, 9 people who have written a Eurovision song. Per says that is precisely because digital technology allows it. You can send stuff to each other in a different way, someone is programming. He has always tried to write songs on his own, because he doesn’t like to compromise. That doesn’t mean that he plays all the instruments himself, but that means that he brings in people who can develop his idea. He has tried to choose musicians who are much better than he is. They are easy to find, haha. Tommie asks Per if he is really so bad at playing instruments. PG says he is not bad at playing, but he is bad at playing the way he hears it in his head. He can’t really handle that, so he needs people who can do that and who make the songs the way he wants them to be. That was the basic idea of starting Roxette with Marie. It was that Per wanted to find someone who could sing his songs better than himself. He is limited as a singer and almost all the songs he wrote in Roxette were written for Marie. Marie would sing them including The Look. It was called He’s Got The Look from the beginning, because she was going to sing, but she didn’t want to, because she didn’t think it was her style. And it wasn’t. So Per sang it instead.

Per thinks it’s hard to leave stuff for someone else to start writing maybe another part of a song. It has happened though. He works with other people too, but he loses a bit of interest then. Tommie understands that people are different and he knows there was a songwriter factory in England and the guy had the idea that you would bring in a lot of people who would be given very narrow assignments within the song to write. You’re going to write a hook here, we need 4 notes at the beginning that arouses interest and he dished out these assignments to several songwriters who had no communication with each other. He collected the parts and then he sat and put them together. Several of these became hits. Tommie thinks Tove Lo worked there for a little while.

Per says it’s a different kind of songwriting. This thing about being personal in your music disappears completely. Whenever Per is working on Swedish songs, the lyrics have a very big position in the song. If he was to leave it to 8 other people, then they can interpret his text differently, so it will be a completely different kind of thing. It doesn’t work. Those kinds of pop factories think now we’re going to try to write hits. Tommie says this resulted in a lot of songs, e.g. of Girls Aloud and they probably worked super well. The fun Per likes about pop hits written by usually the artist himself is that even when time has passed, it’s still very special. For example, the early Bryan Adams songs, they sound very special today, because it was him and Jim Vallance who wrote them. Per remembers that when Roxette broke through, they were told they have to move to London or to LA or New York and work with American musicians. Then they said, no, they don’t want that, because then they will sound like Richard Marx. Then they will sound like LA. They shouldn’t sound like LA. They should sound like Sweden, because once they have made it, that’s what makes them unique. They don’t sound like Richard Marx or Heart or anything else. They sound like Roxette.

It’s the same thing with Gyllene Tider. If you remove one person, it doesn’t sound GT anymore. When Per plays GT songs with his solo band, he sometimes laughs a little, because it sounds like a Gyllene Tider cover band. Because even though they might be even better musicians, they can’t really play that kind of music. GT plays music from Halmstad together, haha. Per finds it really interesting, but he is not too keen on this songwriting team idea. It might be effective, but it gets very impersonal.

Speaking of Neil Diamond, Tommie says he didn’t understand him until he got a gray beard. Then the token fell down, damn, how good is this. It might be the same thing as with country. If you are too young, maybe a lot of that music goes over your head. Per says that Neil Diamond is very, very big in the USA, it has always been so and he doesn’t care at all about any market other than the US. The years have passed and now when Johnny Cash did a cover of Solitary Man, there is a new generation that listens to him. Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon by Urge Overkill in Pulp Fiction, too. Those songs have been chosen because those American productions have Neil Diamond in there automatically. It’s like Billy Joel in a different way. Maybe you don’t really understand Billy Joel – Per doesn’t understand him at all when he listens to Piano Man. He thinks Elton did it much better.

Tommie says Neil Diamond sold his song catalogue the year before. He couldn’t find the sum, but he is curious if Per received offers like this. Mr. G has received offers several times. He said that they should wait 10 more years. Per thinks it was probably because of his personality, but he has been lucky enough to get into a position where he owns all his songs. Everything that he has written in his whole life. Tommie says it must be worth so much. His daughter now listens to Taylor Swift.

Per knows it’s worth a lot of money, but it is above all worth the feeling that they are his babies and he makes up his own mind about them. If they are going to be in commercials or movies or Netflix or whatever. So Per has the last word there. He is not really ready or in need of the monetary reward of what this is worth.

Tommie is wondering why so many people have sold their catalogues recently. There has been news like this almost all the time in the past few years. Per thinks there can be many different reasons. Bruce Springsteen has sold his song catalogue. What does that really mean? Has he sold the rights to his songs, or has he sold his recordings or what has he sold? Neil Young has sold half of something. Half of what? Per thinks that many who sell, maybe they want to divide the money among all their 18 children before they die. Then they won’t get into a lot of trouble. Then maybe there are also those who want to retire. Paul Simon seems to want to retire and he has sold his catalogue as well. Dylan doesn’t retire. Tommie says he will continue for 50 more years. Per says we must also not forget that many great artists do not own such rights. McCartney and The Beatles catalogue, he doesn’t own the rights of the catalogue.

Tommie says he thought of something brave that he would listen through everything that is released by Per. But he gave it up, because he just went on Spotify, checked everything under Per Gessle and the list was endless. A lot of stuff with Roxette, there was an endless amount of stuff with Gyllene Tider. So he almost had to scrap this project, but what he thought about then is that there are a lot of Per’s demos, outtakes, stuff like that published fairly recently under The Per Gessle Archives. Tommie is curious how many archive albums are out there, maybe 6 or 7. Per doesn’t know, but he thinks there are surely more. He says fans request to release demos, because they know there are a lot of them.

Tommie says it’s the same with Roxette. There is the Bag Of Trix collection. There are also a lot of Gyllene Tider demos. If you really want to listen to the depths, you can really get stuck in that rabbit hole. Per says Bag Of Trix is a compilation of all the remixes and single B sides. All those kinds of things that were lying around here and there. All of a sudden, via streaming services, you can do it quite easily and bring them back. In addition, there are physical boxes too. This way you can write a little story about it. It is appreciated among maybe 5-6-7,000 people who are interested in such things.

Tommie thought he would ask whether this was a need for Per to get everything out or he wants to archive it on an ongoing basis. PG says there is no immediate need, but he is thinking from a songwriter’s perspective. He thinks it would be very interesting to listen to these demos. Listen to the demos to the Revolver album. Especially songs that have become big ones with Roxette and Marie is singing them, Per thinks that’s pretty fun to hear the demos, how it sounded when he wrote it. It could be an acoustic recording or it could be a real production. The more time went by the more finished demos he made. The Joyride demo sounds almost exactly like the real Joyride.

Tommie thought it was fun to find stuff that he had never heard before until he actually sat down and tried to listen through it all. There was a demo to Segla på ett moln that became an Anne-Lie Rydé song, but here it’s Per and Marie. Very nice. Per thanks for the compliment. He wrote it for his first solo album and it didn’t make it. Anne-Lie was in a Gothenburg band called Extra and she was going to make her first solo album, which Per thinks was produced by Dan Sundqvist. Somehow they got this song and completely redid it into some kind of grand thing. Per’s demo was only acoustic. Albin Lee Meldau also recorded this song later.

Tommie says one of the Mono Mind songs sounds like Segla på ett moln. It’s a translation called Shelter From The Storm. Lyricist Hasse Huss wrote an English text which ended up with Diana Ross in the ’80s. She had it on hold for an album for six months, so it was not allowed to be sent to anyone else. But then she dropped it. It would have been fun if she had recorded it though. Hasse Huss is a legendary DJ and a great lyricist.

Per has more of those old demos with Marie from the times when everything started in the beginning of the ’80s.

Tommie wants to know if Per has always been the kind of person who was careful to write down the dates on the tapes. Per says absolutely, he is pedantic. He always has the records in alphabetical order and in the old days, when he was little, he put small numbers on all the items, so they were listed chronologically after the purchases. It became a big collection in the end. Then you have to have it organized.

Tommie is curious if Per is the old-fashioned type who still buys records. PG still buys records, vinyls. Last time he was hunting for Jim Croce. He usually gets help from a guy who looks this up for him online. As he said before, he likes album sleeves. It may happen that he sits down in front of his stereo system and listens to KD Lang on Spotify, but he has the album cover in his hand and reads the lyrics as in the past. Per thinks the cover is the face of music. It makes music even more important and even stronger, because you get a physical connection to it.

The conversation is coming to an end. Per says they can finish it here and do this one more time. Now he knows how to do that and it’s always fun to go and buy some records for 50 Swedish crowns. Tommie says you just have to thoroughly wash your hands with nail polish remover and hand sanitizer afterwards. Per laughs. He says it’s also fun to run into those people who are in these stores.

Tommie asks Per what’s next for him. PG is going to finish the recording of his Swedish album with another duet that will be recorded on Sunday and then it’s ready. The first single will be released at the end of February. 23rd February. Then there will be TV for him and then it is rolling on. He loves it when a lot of things are happening. Tommie says what else could he do as a pensioner, he would be stuck there in front of the stereo with a record cover in hand, doing nothing. Haha. In the fade-out we can hear one last thing, that Per won’t tour this summer.

Per Gessle and Magnus Börjeson discuss ”Station to Station” on Bowiepodden

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A Swedish David Bowie podcast, Bowiepodden invited Per Gessle and Magnus Börjeson to discuss David Bowie’s Station to Station album. The conversation was recorded at T&A in December 2022 and the guys talked about the album track by track. Listen to it HERE!

After the podcast host, Sebastian Borg welcomes Per and Magnus, he turns to Per and asks him about when Station to Station came into his life. Mr. G says it happened as soon as it came out at the beginning of 1976. He has always listened to David Bowie a lot and followed him. He attended the Station to Station tour at Scandinavium. He remembers they went there with a group and wore platform shoes, because they thought it was appropriate. Then they were a little disappointed when David Bowie entered the stage looking like Frank Sinatra. Haha. There was also Luis Buñuel’s short film, Un Chien Andalou shown, but it was a fantastic concert, Per thinks. Sebastian can imagine it was magical. Mr. G agrees that Bowie was magical. Sebastian thinks Per was the right age to be a Bowie fan. PG was 17 at the time. On the other hand, Per says these albums from 1976 still sound depressive in a way. Destroyer by Kiss is probably the worst. Hejira by Joni Mitchell was quite good, although it was complicated. You can’t miss Hotel California by the Eagles, but it didn’t mean much.

Per says when he was 11 or 12, he bought New Musical Express and Melody Maker every week and sometimes he bought Goal which was about English football. Magnus adds Per probably bought Buster (sport comic magazine) too. Per says indeed, he forgot about that one. Mr. G remembers that there were a lot of pictures of Bowie all the time. Bowie usually travelled by train, he was afraid of flying. Also, you heard that he stocked his urine in the fridge. It was quite a tough time. ”Or a good PR campaign”, Magnus adds. He thinks you have to take it with a pinch of salt, like everything. Sebastian thinks the whole myth-making around how decadently Bowie lived had an impact on him when he discovered the album long afterwards. He feels like it can’t be removed from the music and sometimes he would just like to listen to it without knowing any background to it. Magnus thinks the album is a bit detached. Per agrees and he adds it has very complex texts and there were no texts printed on the sleeve and there was no internet back then. So you didn’t understand it all, all this weird stuff he referred to, especially in the title track. You don’t exactly understand it even when you read it. Magnus says he has read through it a hundred times, but he has got only half of the answers still. Sebastian says you need to have Wikipedia available when you want to keep up.

Per says there is a book called Bowie Books. He collected books and it’s a book about 100 books that were most influential in his life and there is a lot of stuff he refers to in his texts. Sebastian says Bowie was a bookworm, he read a lot. Sebastian thinks it might not be that interesting to dig into why Bowie did things. He thinks it makes perfect sense that Bowie buried these and also his fascination with Hitler. Sebastian feels a bit that it is a storm in a glass of water, because it’s clear that at some point you are interested in those powers. Magnus says Sid Vicious had Nazi ties back in the days. It was the easiest way in England to provoke at that time. There is a PR element in all this, you have to remember that. After the war, it was so present. It was there all the time. Per says that after Woodstock and the Summer of Love, it feels like the ’70s itself was a real mess if you look at Pasolini, books, music, fashion and everything. Sebastian says he read someone who wrote that Bowie was like a roll of film exposed to too much light, because he was good at taking in all the impressions at the same time.

He was so extremely receptive. There were talks about drug abuse and using drugs, his main thing was cocaine. If he had gone hard for heroin, then he might not have survived. Sebastian feels that Bowie didn’t take drugs for partying and hogwash, but because of being extremely productive. So he had it more as a fuel to endure. He wanted to make music, he wanted to read, he wanted to write, he always had a thousand ideas going on. He was also quite isolated. He didn’t meet many people at the time and mostly hung out with himself and his musicians. There is a story about him putting up little piles of cocaine in the studio in different places, so that he doesn’t have to stretch so far if he was sitting by the piano for example. Magnus inserts it was the same with Fleetwood Mac. That was a Los Angeles thing.

Sebastian adds that Bowie also wanted to keep away from rock at this time. He had already done Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs. Sebastian has a quote where Bowie says himself: „I was absolutely infuriated that I was still in rock ‘n’ roll. And not only in it, but had been sucked right into the centre of it. I had to move out. I never intended to be so involved in rock and roll… and there I was in Los Angeles, right in the middle of it.” Sebastian thinks you can feel very clearly that this is a transition album and it’s not so rocky. It has really come a long way from the Ziggy Stardust sound. Per says if this record had come out today, he wouldn’t have listened to it at all. You gave records so much more time in the old days. Magnus adds that this record needs much time. He listened to it so much on a cassette in a car he had one summer. It always went on and after a while he thought, wait, this is damn good. But in the beginning, listening to this long, long, long intro, was not the best thing in the traffic. Per says it’s better to listen to it in your bed with your headphones on. Mr. G thinks it’s not a fantastic album. He thinks there are elements in Stay, for example, or TVC 15 that are damn good, but the other 5 minutes they could have edited a bit more, to make it more effective. Station to Station, the song itself is extremely protracted. Sebastian says that’s a typical cocaine impact. PG says he never liked Word in a Wing at all. Wild Is the Wind was his favourite, because that was a real song.

Sebastian thinks that a large part of the album’s sound and Bowie’s songwriting was also characterized by the fact that he was in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Actually, he wanted to make the music for it, he wrote a lot of music. Magnus says Bowie got super pissed off when they didn’t use it in the end. It was John Phillips from The Mamas & the Papas who got to do the soundtrack instead. Sebastian says he hasn’t seen that movie earlier, but he gave it a chance now before this conversation. An alien, Newton comes down to civilization, trying to find water is the storyline, but it’s a bit loose. And that’s how the sound is on Station to Station too. The cover of the album is a still from the movie.

Magnus says that Bowie got the world’s best partner on this record, producer Harry Maslin, who is so extremely underrated and not talked about. Per says Harry produced 2 albums of Bowie, Young Americans and Station to Station. He also produced Air Supply. Sebastian says Young Americans is also much Tony Visconti, but for example, Fame was produced by Harry and David, without Tony.

Per says it’s true that the sound of Young Americans is very different to Station to Station. There is a distance, STS is a little more metallic, a little cold. Magnus says it’s hard to get into it. PG says when the lead single, Golden Years was released, it was very surprising. He gave it like 30 chances and then finally put it away. It’s not an obvious single right away. For Magnus it was in the late ’80s when he discovered it and started listening to it. It was after Ashes to Ashes, so it was another Bowie.

As a fun fact, Sebastian mentions that Bowie was together with a designer named Ola Hudson who had a son who later became famous as Slash. So Bowie nursed little Slash. His real name is Saul Hudson.

The guys here get down to this epic album, which opens with Bowie’s longest song in his career, Station to Station. When the intro starts, Per says here comes the train. Magnus asks if this was the sound that was during the movie screening. Per says no, the whole concert started with this train and then it was Earl Slick standing in the front of stage doing the intro. Bowie was standing at another place and started singing [here Per demonstrates how deep his voice was] „the return…” It was fantastic.

Still listening to the intro, Per says you would like them to sprout up the song a little bit, get a little tough. Magnus says maybe that was cocaine. PG says, but then it should be fast. There is a little turn though, but you feel like it’s at 4 BPM. It gets a little faster, Per says. Magnus adds you get the reward when Bowie starts singing. Sebastian says the singing starts only 3 minutes 16 seconds into the song, so it’s a massive intro. From the first lines you get a little goosebumps, but musically, it could have been more cheeky. At one point Per asks Magnus what instrument is the one that comes. Magnus thinks it’s melodica, but he is not sure. Per says it sounds like being played with the mouth, so it can be. Sebastian says that when he heard this song for the first time it was at KB in Malmö. A Bowie tribute band was playing with Fredrik Karlsson. The opening lines were inspired by Aleister Crowley, an occultist about whom there is a story that he lured a young couple into his apartment and terrorised them until they died.

Sebastian thinks that there is something strange about the „return” of the Thin White Duke, because it was the first time we heard about him. Who is this guy that he was apparently talking about? Magnus says these characters always come back and descend and come back to take over. It was the same with Ziggy. Per says Bowie is such a storyteller in his lyrics. There aren’t many love lyrics in David Bowie’s catalogue. Per can’t even remember if there is any. Wild is the Wind has beautiful love lyrics, but it’s not Bowie’s song. All the lyrics are about… it’s impossible to say what they are about. Sebastian feels like this is Bowie’s way of tying together a lot of song ideas. It’s a little patchwork that applies to songs like this that have many parts in them. Like a symphony. Magnus says it kind of has a small connection to symphonic rock. It’s not symphonic rock at all, but the form is close. It was big back then. Such super pop people like McCartney did a lot of this sort of thing and there were other bands that made a whole career out of doing it.

Sebastian thinks the intro is magical. Maybe a bit too long, but the second half of the song brings him to Young Americans land. The transition isn’t that pretty. Per and Magnus think differently. They think it’s damn good. Sebastian thinks it’s a bit Jethro Tullish. Per thinks this part is in the song’s DNA. Sebastian thought about comparing it a bit to the title song on Blackstar, because it was also almost 10 minutes long. It’s funny that Blackstar was actually over 10 minutes, but they had to cut it down to 9 min 57 sec, because iTunes didn’t sell singles that were over 10 minutes.

Sebastian thinks Blackstar works better. The parts there fit together more neatly. Regarding why these songs have to be so long, Carlos Alomar talked about it in an interview. It was because he found out on Station to Station that they pay you extra money if your song is longer than three minutes. So it was because of more money.

Sebastian thinks there is a lot to talk about in terms of Station to Station‘s lyrics. They don’t need to talk about every single line, because it’s almost too much, but there are some things that are very interesting. For example, Bowie sings „such is the stuff from where dreams are woven” from The Tempest by Shakespeare.

Above all, he was into Kabbalah and there is this mysticism. It’s dark, but it feels pretty harmless. Then he sings „here are we one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth”. Sebastian says it was hard for him to figure this out without internet. Per agrees that it’s difficult to understand that. He looked it up on the internet too, but he must have forgotten it. It is a reference to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, where Malkuth is the lowest branch and represents the physical world. Kether is on the top of the Tree of Life. It means crown. Life is a journey from one to the other.

Talking about the title, Station to Station for Sebastian it has a train reference, but it’s not really. He thinks Bowie is referring to the Stations of the Cross. It also fits better. The journey goes from station to station, he is on his way from the dark to the light. But it’s a bit misleading that they start with train sounds. So it can be both. Per has always thought that it’s Bowie’s life, he is on his way, but from A to B or from A to F and it’s really wonderful, simple and effective to illustrate it with a train. It could be a boat or any other vehicle, but it’s also like a mental journey. Magnus says Bowie always had a lot of themes going on at the same time, overlapping one another. It might be a dream game. It’s just that things go on and on and on. Per thinks that is the magic of pop and rock music in general, that you can interpret texts in so many ways. Sometimes you can think that it’s all about you. Of course it isn’t, but you interpret it that way and that’s the power of this. Magnus says texts should stand on their own. They can always rest in the music and you can just throw in a line to hold it together. If you have listened to a song a lot, you’ll eventually get into the lyrics too. Every now and then it starts to stick and then you try to draw your own logical conclusions.

Sebastian says that in the lyrics, Bowie was very figurative and has poetic descriptions that are now quite straight to the point when he sings „it’s not the side effects of cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love”. Magnus says it was one of these lines that you were hooked at first, but that was it.

Sebastian says that Bowie’s texts are not really why he bought a ticket for. They are hard to understand. Per agrees. Magnus thinks these texts do work, but on a much more subconscious level. Sebastian doesn’t like this song as wholeheartedly as everyone else. He thinks some parts are better than others. He is curious if this is one of Per’s favourite Bowie songs. PG thinks it’s really good. It’s long, but he has listened to it a lot. As he said, he was 17 years old when it came out and that’s exactly when he really listened the most for the music.

Magnus says he was maybe 20 when he started listening to this record. Per thinks it’s very difficult to say which are Bowie’s best songs. It depends a little on what you are out for. He thinks Life on Mars? is fantastic, even though it is from a certain angle. Drive-In Saturday from Aladdin Sane he loves. It’s one of his strangest songs. Time Will Crawl is also a fantastic one.

Regarding Station to Station, Sebastian says he tried to get into it. He listened to it closely, listened to it a little less closely, but he can’t get over the fact that for him it’s a little too much of a collection of song ideas that he doesn’t think fit together. He can’t see what everyone else is seeing or can’t really hear what everyone else is really hearing. Per says it helped a lot for him that he listened to it when it came out. Back then you gave music so much more time to get into it and like it. If it had come out today, PG would have never listened to it. Magnus says that back then, you’d never heard a song like that before, but today you don’t have that patience with music. Per adds that it was also the case that everything that came out then was new. It felt new.

Mr. G remembers that when he heard stereo for the first time in the headphones, it was fantastic to experience it. Magnus says it was like a new dimension. Per explains we don’t live in such a time anymore. Today there is such a huge range of everything.

Magnus says it’s so funny that even if Bowie is supposed to be experimental, there is always this damn boogie. Both Per and Magnus demonstrate what they mean by boogie. It’s also there on Heroes. That’s what makes it so cool that you get 2 dimensions.

Golden Years is the next song the guys are talking about. These kind of songs are Sebastian’s type of pop songs. He really loves these pop singles and this, of course, was the lead single and it came out before the album was released.

Per thinks it’s quite lovely to hear a live band that plays funk and soul. It doesn’t exist anymore. Today everything is fixed. Sebastian thinks that this is like a groove and it has different perfect guitar parts that sync up so very well. It’s almost like a duel between two guitarists.

Magnus says it’s also very much the ’70s, where everything is a bit messy. Then there is Let’s Dance in the ’80s, but that record is super swingy in its own way and is organized in a completely different way.

Per says he hears a little Elvis echo on here. Magnus says Bowie wrote it with Elvis in mind. Per says he can’t hear Elvis doing it actually. Sebastian confirms that Bowie indeed thought that Elvis might be interested in doing that. Bowie also forwarded it to Presley’s management, but as far as Sebastian knows, he never got a yes or no from them. He doesn’t even think that Colonel Parker passed it on. Sebastian can hear it with Elvis and thinks it would have been cool if he sang it.

It resonates like the electronic music that Kraftwerk were doing, but not as swinging. Sebastian thinks that songs like this must be hard to learn. It feels natural when you hear it, but if you were to stand alone and try to keep up, you would lose track. Sebastian thinks a bit of Beyoncé, too, having such songs where everything is connected. Sebastian is just very grateful that he doesn’t have to learn the formula.

According to Sebastian, the inspiration for this one apparently came from a song called Happy Years by The Diamonds, but there is also a song called Funky Broadway by The Blazers. Sebastian rather thinks that Carlos Alomar was probably right when he said that it came from when Bowie wanted to do something in the style of On Broadway. He also sings a line from On Broadway on Aladdin Sane on the outro. Per says the song jumps out on the album, because it’s rather commercial. Magnus thinks it’s an obvious single. Per agrees.

Sebastian says that Bowie’s childhood friend, Geoff MacCormack has a big role here. Bowie had some problem with his voice during the recording, so Geoff had to sing some parts. It was his idea to add „run for the shadows” as backing vocals. You would think it’s Bowie singing, but it’s Geoff. Sebastian tried to separate their vocals. Per thinks that when Bowie sang live, his singing was perfectly clear, everything was fantastic. PG has never heard him sing out of tune. Sebastian says that it’s strange that Bowie didn’t play this song live from 1983. He wonders if it could have been something with the key, something that made it difficult to sing it. Mr. G says it’s very falsetto. Magnus says he knows they usually liked to keep first takes on the records. It was almost always the case. According to Sebastian, it is said that if you can sing clearly, you can also whistle clearly. He doesn’t know who is whistling here, but it’s just perfect.

Magnus says it’s so much fun to hear vocals from the time before all became so fixed. We are reminded how exciting it can be with singing. Per says he understands that if you sing out of tune or you make a mistake you can correct it now, but if you have the vocal capacity like Bowie, you wouldn’t want these voices to be autotuned.

Sebastian says drummer Dennis Davis plays wonderfully on the whole album, but here he is in his element. The band is in its full power on this song. It’s so incredibly good, it’s so far from swinging. Sebastian thinks this mixture is so perfect, the black band, the white music. Per and Magnus also find it awesome.

Sebastian says this song is not as long as some of the others, but 4 minutes is about right. Magnus says they got more money for this length too. Haha.

The guys start talking about what the song is about. Sebastian thinks there are lines that are either about Angie Bowie or about Bowie’s girlfriend, Ava Cherry. At the same time, as Bowie said himself, he wrote this with Elvis in mind, so who knows. Per doesn’t think it’s about anything special. It’s that you can interpret it in so many ways. He thinks it sounds pretty nice. The song came about very quickly, Sebastian says.

Now the guys are at the last song on side A, Word on a Wing. Sebastian loves that tentative piano that feels like testing the sound. He is also very fond of how Bowie starts singing. Per thinks it’s the world’s strangest arrangement. He never liked this song and always skipped it. He never liked the melody, the construction of the song. Sebastian likes it quite a lot, but he realized that he wouldn’t like it if it wasn’t written by Bowie. Then he would think it’s too buttery. He maybe also has a little difficulty, because there is a very Christian message in it. Sebastian chose to see it as a love song that might as well be a tribute to a woman, but the consensus seems to be that it’s Bowie who turned towards Christianity or religion in general. He himself had never really been an outspoken Christian like Dylan in a period. Here Bowie sings „Just because I believe, don’t mean I don’t think as well / Don’t have to question everything / In heaven or hell”.

Sebastian says that it’s said that you become more religious by getting older. Per says once again that he thinks people put in so many interpretations. Bowie was probably just looking for a good rhyming word with „well” and found „hell”. Haha.

Sebastian reads Bowie’s words: „I had never been so near an abyss of total abandonment. When they say that one felt like a shell, an empty shell, I can really understand that. I felt that any of life’s intrusions would crush that shell very easily. I felt totally, absolutely alone. And I probably was alone because I pretty much had abandoned God.” A couple of years later, in 1980 he says: „There was a point when I very nearly got suckered into that narrow sort of looking… finding the cross as the salvation of mankind.” Sebastian says that here Bowie admits a little that he had at least opened up the idea that there could be salvation in God, but quite quickly realized that it wasn’t for him. Although he was wearing a cross on his necklace throughout his career. He wasn’t an outspoken religious person, but an intellectual. Sebastian says he is not a convinced atheist, but he has a hard time when there are Christian messages like this in a text, but he chose to ignore it and like the song anyway. Magnus thinks that Bowie sings so terribly well and he can do these super theatrical things that still don’t make it too ridiculous. It gets a little ridiculous and good at the same time.

Per says that in the ’80s and ’90s Bowie’s music became so tough and so harsh that his voice disappeared. Earlier PG mentioned Time Will Crawl and he thinks Bowie sings amazingly on that one, but he also has a lot of resistance. The production is so powerful that he kind of has to push through it.

Sebastian thinks the drum accompaniment is strange, some double beats are a strange choice by Dennis. Then comes the part where Sebastian says this is the only song he has a little difficulty with and that’s when you go into this so-called chorus. There’s something about the falsetto that doesn’t work for him right here. Per and Magnus think it’s nice. Sebastian realizes that he and the guys think a little differently all the time. Haha.

Sebastian says if you want to hear a little Springsteen in a Bowie song, here it is. It’s Springsteen’s pianist, Roy Bittan playing here. Sebastian thinks the song as a composition feels a little Springsteenish. Magnus has never thought about it. Per says Bowie recorded Springsteen songs as well, e.g. It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. Sebastian has never seen Bowie as being inspired by Springsteen, but he has seen Bowie as someone who looked up to Springsteen musically. Magnus thinks they were contemporaries, but they were completely different. Sebastian feels a little Springsteen vibe in this song, but he doesn’t know Springsteen too well. Per says maybe it’s only because Roy Bittan sits at the piano. Sebastian feels that at parts there is a little too much space for the piano. Per agrees, but says it let’s Bowie relax a bit. Sebastian played with the thought that this is what it would be like if pianist Mike Garson was on this record. Per says there wouldn’t be less space for the piano then. The guys are laughing. It became a bit more theatrical and Garson didn’t really fit.

Sebastian says there is this instrument at the end of the song, a Chamberlin. Per thinks it sounds a bit like a Mellotron. Magnus explains it’s almost the same thing. Mellotron was used a lot in Bowie’s songs.

The guys get down to side B and start talking about TVC 15. Sebastian says it was this song that Roy Bittan was invited to play on, it was only meant to be on this one, and then he stayed and played on all the songs except Wild Is the Wind. Bittan had just recorded Born to Run and Bowie mentioned he was looking for someone who could play like Professor Longhair. So David asked Roy if he knew Professor Longhair and he did, of course. Sebastian thinks the intro is very similar to Hey Now Baby by Professor Longhair. Per says there was Elton John and Leon Russell who played this New Orleans style, so to say, Magnus adds Dr. John.

Sebastian says even this „oh-oh-oh-oh” you can find in a song by The Yardbirds, Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. So it also sounds like it had been borrowed, but if you were to look in the history of music, you would find quite many of such things and that’s totally fine. Magnus says Bowie was a filter for all this stuff that was in the air at that time. That happens today too, lifting the vibe from another song and stuff like that. It has always been so, just we didn’t know about it before.

Sebastian loves this chaotic soundscape. Per says you hear a little of that guitar chaos that came later with Robert Fripp. There are no keynotes anymore. Magnus says it’s like trying to get through a chaos. PG says it sounds a bit like how the test picture looks on TV.

Sebastian says the sound pattern creates the airiness that then enters into this wonderful transition part. Per says it’s empty, but it’s fun. Magnus thinks it’s damn good.

This song also became a single, Mr. G says. He thinks that if they had skipped Roy Bittan’s intro, it could have been a very effective single.

Sebastian says that the lyrics were inspired by a dream that Iggy Pop told Bowie. He had dreamed that his girlfriend was eaten by a TV. Apparently, TVC 15 is a TV model. Sebastian doesn’t know more than that. The text can actually be read as a narrative. After all, there is a story and it’s a bit twisted.

Sebastian says that according to Maslin, the mixing was a nightmare with the very many different parts. So he had to make sections by the help of an assistant and then cut it together. You don’t work like that today. They had a 24-track tape, which was also a lot at the time and all the tracks were full of different instruments, so it must have been tough to mix them. Bowie wasn’t involved in the mixing at all. He kind of let them take care of it.

Sebastian thinks it’s one of the highlights on the record. It’s one of Bowie’s classics, one might say.

The guys go into song number 5 called Stay, which was a single in the US. Per thinks it’s amazingly good. It’s enormously good according to Magnus too. Sebastian was sure that the guys would say this. He is a guitarist himself, so he should like the intro, but… he will try. He feels like it could be something that John Frusciante from Red Hot Chili Peppers could have come up with. It feels like a punk riff.

Per has always thought that this intro is promising so much, but then nothing comes out of it. Magnus also thought the same, that it was just building and building, then nothing. Sebastian says it could be half the length, because half of it is just guitars. Per thinks it wouldn’t have gone wrong with a nice melody. It could have been a big hit.

At a point, Sebastian says this is a reworking of John, I’m Only Dancing (Again). Bowie never released it on any record. Per says it sounds like the Young Americans sessions. It’s not that good, but it’s very similar to Stay. Sebastian says it’s the same chords and same arrangement. John, I’m Only Dancing (Again) is also insanely long. It’s 7 minutes.

Sebastian has a clip here with Carlos Alomar where he tells a little about Stay. Stay is John, I’m Only Dancing. The music is the same. Bowie said: „Hey, Carlos, I have a great song. Could you have a new arrangement of that song for me?” And that was it, he got this all new song by changing the lyrics. Sebastian says the album consists of six songs of which one is a cover and this one is a reworking of another song. Sebastian says Bowie started working more and more with soundscapes, ambient pieces and that was of course because he wanted to, but also because he couldn’t write songs. Per says that you can hear that he is moving more and more away from melodies. These are not really songs, but grooves. Sebastian agrees, it feels like he was writing less and less compositions in the way he had done before as a songwriter. Magnus thinks it was a bit like Bowie had ideas, came to the studio and he had the world’s best band and then he wanted to see what they can make out of his ideas.

Per says Bowie is singing amazingly here. There is a fantastic groove to it. Sebastian says that from 3 minutes 50 seconds into the song there is nothing interesting to him anymore. Per can imagine it was very good live. He thinks this part is pretty good, it’s better than the melody. Magnus also thinks it’s fantastic. It sounds like they had much fun.

Here comes the last song on the record, a cover, Wild Is the Wind. Per thinks it’s magical. Sebastian thinks the intro sounds so soft and lovely. It’s also nice that the acoustic guitar comes in. He also thinks that it sounds like this could have been mixed by Tony Visconti. There is something about the drum that sounds differently. It sounds a bit like a Bond song. Per says when there is a really good song on the record, it really pops out. This is really magical music. Bowie sings just amazingly. PG has always thought it’s Bowie’s best vocal performance. Sebastian read it at several places that this is considered as his best and he himself thought so too. Bowie was extremely satisfied with this one.

Per says there is a little slip in there, which is like what you have in Golden Years too. He thinks it is so very attractive. Sebastian says Bowie even got a compliment from Frank Sinatra who came by the studio. He was recording in another part of the building and heard this version and was very appreciative. Magnus says it started with Nina Simone’s version of the song. Sebastian adds that originally, it’s a cover of a song sung by Johnny Mathis for a movie Wild Is the Wind. That version was nominated for an Oscar and peaked at number 22 on Billboard. It was a hit. But it’s Nina Simone’s cover that Bowie actually covers on the album. He was very fond of that version. Bowie and Simone were friends. They had met at some club in 1974 and talked a bit and then later that night Bowie called her at 3 am and wanted to talk a little. According to Nina, the first thing he said was: „The first thing I want you to know is that you’re not crazy. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re crazy, because where you’re coming from, there are very few of us out there.”

Nina Simone told in interviews that Bowie didn’t think he himself was a talented or a particularly good singer, which feels so damn strange, Sebastian says. What Bowie said was „I wasn’t a genius, but I planned, I wanted to be a rock-and-roll singer and I just got the right formula.”

Sebastian thinks that one can understand why Bowie got stuck with this song and this is one of the rare cases of Bowie choosing a cover which is absolutely perfect, because he sometimes had extremely strange and boring choices and here he really does a good version, not just a carbon copy.

Per says it would be interesting to know why he chose a cover. Maybe he felt he didn’t have enough material. This song is a rather odd choice on the album. He heard an interview with Nile Rodgers where he talked about Let’s Dance. He said there wasn’t much coming from Bowie what to make with the songs, but it kind of was like „can you do something about this?” That’s how Let’s Dance and Modern Love were produced. Bowie probably never saw himself as a songwriter like Elton John. It just strikes Per right now that it could be one of the reasons of doing the Pin Ups album to gain time. He didn’t have time. He planned to do an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, but he was denied the rights, then he was busy with the ambitions to make Diamond Dogs. Sebastian thinks so too. The record company also wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so he could gain time.

Sebastian feels that Station to Station is an album of a rather searching and slightly confused Bowie who still manages to do something that is so comprehensive. Even if the record may not have hit Sebastian the way it would have if he was 16 or 17 when it came out, it’s impressive that Bowie somehow manages to get out of this state he was in. Of course, to a large extent it’s thanks to that now he had great musicians and had a machine that controlled things, but he didn’t care that he was in the studio working and toiling. He wasn’t out there rumbling around like Morrison or Zeppelin. But he realized that somewhere around here he had to find his way out of LA and go further. He was damn lucky that he made that step, because Sebastian thinks Bowie wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

Magnus thinks it’s really incredible that he made a record like this when he was in that state. Even he himself couldn’t remember recording the album at all.

Sebastian feels like this is Bowie’s journey, that he sort of makes his way from the darkest dark up through to lights. The ending is amazing, a positive, beautiful song. It’s a big difference from how the album starts. Magnus says Bowie is really like a Renaissance man.

Per says he met Bowie in 1983 on the Serious Moonlight Tour. PG got down to Lyon, France and had the honor of meeting David. Magnus asks if it was at that gig. PG says yes and it was fantastic. He was blonde of course and he had a pastel coloured suit on. He looked amazing. Per was 23, it was the year after Sommartider. So it was a „hej hej, good luck” before the concert. PG was impressed because Bowie had an environmental manager, a girl who built up those ugly dressing rooms including furniture and stuff.

With this, the conversation comes to an end. Sebastian says a big thank you to Magnus and Per for joining him and he also thanks MP to let him sit in his studio, Tits & Ass in Halmstad and lent them his equipment and the studio itself.

Picture is from Bowiepodden

Micke Syd Andersson about Gyllene Tider on Norwegian podcast

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Micke Syd was a guest on Oppland Arbeiderblad’s podcast, Backstage the other day. It’s a Norwegian podcast, so the questions were asked in Norwegian, the answers were given in Swedish. Since these two languages are so close to each other, there is no need for an interpreter to understand each other. Here comes the English transcript of the chat between Micke and Frode Hermanrud. Listen to the podcast HERE!

Gyllene Tider had a concert in Gjøvik on the Moderna Tider tour in 1981, so a bit more than 40 years ago. Micke says it’s a lot and he informs that they are going back to Finland also after more than 40 years on this next tour. He says it’s great to come back and say hello. When GT was there last time, 41 years ago, the reviewer wasn’t too happy, Micke says. He explains he got a clipping of a review from Frode and from that he sees that the reviewer didn’t think GT was that good. Frode reads from the review that the music goes straight to the heart of teenagers in the Nordic region, it’s built on worn-out clichés with lyrics that address youth love and all its variants. „Jag vill känna din kropp emot min…”. It can’t be Swedish top music and the vocalist wasn’t shining either. Micke laughs and says here we are 41 years later and the singer has had three careers and GT is still there. He thinks it’s awesome and it would be fun to meet this guy who wrote the review. His name is Tore Hansen, Frode says. Micke thanks him for the review and says maybe they see each other in Fredrikstad in summer. He puts the guy on the guest list, he promises. „Let’s see if you feel the same way now.” Haha.

Micke says it wasn’t unique that guys didn’t like them back in the days. It’s because the girls thought they were cute. But what could they do… They were nice, sweet and kind. They were on the Swedish charts and so there was a lot of screaming girls. It has evened out over the years. Now the girls don’t scream as much and the guys are much happier these days. Haha.

Frode says what a tour it was in 1981. Micke says it was amazing and just think about that they went all the way without GPS or mobile phones and they set up and took down everything at the concerts themselves. He just watched a film 2 weeks ago when he was at home in Halmstad and did Christmas shows at Gessle’s hotel together with Tommy Ekman from Freestyle and Lili & Susie, Swedish eighties artists. So, a friend of his parents had filmed them in 1981 in a folkpark in Falkenberg which is another town in Halland where Micke Syd comes from and then he saw all the work and all the people. It was a lot of work. And it’s so funny because they did all that job during one year in 1981, then in 1996 they went to „only” 21-22 places and played for as many people. The ’80s were very different.

Frode says Gyllene Tider had 6 concerts before their incredible break-through with Flickorna på TV2. Micke says there was a TV program called Måndagsbörsen, which was huge in Sweden at the time because there were only two TV channels. If you had the chance to be on Måndagsbörsen then there was a big chance to break through. Gyllene Tider appeared on the program as a replacement of an English band, because they couldn’t come. Micke can’t remember who they were. They had Flickorna på TV2 with the lyrics „tänk att få sätta på flickorna på TV2”, but „sätta på” (turn on) has this double meaning, although that was not what it was about. It’s about turning the TV on. Per is good at those formulations. And to appear on the TV was enough for them to make it happen. It’s only them five who sound like them, they had a unique sound already back then. So what Frode said regarding the gigs is true. They had booked some gigs because they had a record deal and were going out to play. They were paid very little, but that was a few years before they were on TV. And then they got paid more after TV, because then everyone wanted to book them. Micke Syd has a friend he has known all his life who was 16 at the time. He organized a gig up in Rottneros which is outside Karlstad in Värmland and he had booked GT for 2500 SEK before the TV program. 2000 people came. There was big chaos and it was overcrowded, because everyone wanted to see GT. Micke’s friend said he has never had such a good evening.

Frode asks Micke about their ambitions outside Sweden, in Norway, for example. Micke says it’s been so long ago and to remember anything from the ’80s they have to be together all 5 of them. Haha. But he is pretty sure their record label EMI had an office in Norway. The music industry was completely different back then. The ambition was to come over to Norway as well, because Swedish music existed there after all. Ledin and lots of others before GT existed and became popular in Norway, so it’s clear that they also wanted to go there. They wanted to be as big as possible. That’s why they did The Heartland Café album. So yes, that was definitely the intention, Norway, Finland. Denmark is a bit more difficult because the languages differ. Some Swedish artists work in Denmark and GT also did some TV in Denmark, but that doesn’t happen much anymore. Norway has always taken Swedes with open arms. Micke is in Norway a lot with Tommy Ekman from Freestyle, doing corporate gigs and other stuff. They appreciate Norway a lot and Norway appreciates them too. Also that’s why Gyllene Tider played in Fredrikstad and then in Oslo, on the roof of the Opera in 2019. Micke tells how the opera gig was. They were on the stage that was above the water and played for people on the opera terrace and it started raining cats and dogs. Micke says they are coming back to Fredrikstad again this summer. Gonna be fun.

Frode asks Micke about the concert film, Parkliv! and is joking if he had a stylist. Micke thinks he looked too terrible. His mom was a hairdresser and had permed his hair. Micke didn’t like it, so he was wearing a cap the entire film and shorts and a T-shirt that he got in a rock club in Southern Sweden. So it wasn’t anything he thought about. The others looked quite nice, he says. It’s as usual with the drummers… So they didn’t have a stylist. If you compare it with the band Freestyle, the old Freestyle, it’s a completely different thing. They have really thought well about the clothes and everything. But that’s Micke’s personality, it’s the way he was. He wanted to play and didn’t think too much about other things. He thinks it’s also part of their success that they are quite ordinary. Now it has become different and Per also had his career with Roxette, but they are from the countryside, they all grew up in small towns and have been close to it all the time throughout their career. Micke thinks maybe that’s what makes people like them too, besides making really good music together of course. And they are good at it. They are good at working. They are very good at what Gyllene Tider is and they stood the test of time. Those songs stay with us. You hear this and that song and think about your teenage years when you were in love or anything else. Micke says he can see it when they play that there are a lot of young people too. When he did those Christmas shows in Halmstad, there were many tables with guests who were 20-25 or so. They weren’t even born when GT broke through. Their parents were teenagers then. But they are just as happy as those who are 60 now, because it means the same thing. Micke thinks it’s cool. It still feels a bit unique that you can get the same feelings when you hear these songs now. They are 40-year-old songs, but still they fit into life in a way. That it would be like this they didn’t know. After all, they just did what they wanted to do, it kind of worked and then it turned out well.

Micke says that when you work with music, it’s not like a regular job. He works with different bands and sings a lot and then he doesn’t play the drums. People in those bands can be much younger than he is. They are working with Gyllene Tider songs too and then Micke sings them. He says you forget age then. He doesn’t think about how old he is. He thinks it’s just as fun now. Micke explains they sat and watched Parkliv! on Youtube in 2013. He tells the listeners to watch it if they want to see him in terrible stage clothes. Then they sat and looked at themselves. They were 20 years old on that film. When he sees it now, he realizes that his youngest son Eddie, who turns 30 now, he was the same age in 2013 as Micke was on that film. And a second later he thought „wait, where am I sitting now”. He is as old now as his father was on the film. It was huge and when you still do it what you were doing back then, it’s just as fun. You can carry something like this with you for the rest of your life. Now there comes another tour, they have finished a brand new record, which they all think will be great. They feel that they make relevant music. Those who like Gyllene Tider will like the record, because it doesn’t sound like they are 62 to 64, but it sounds like they are 20. That’s how they sound together and the best part is to be on this journey together and to share it with people.

Frode shows an autograph card and Micke says he appreciates completely different things now than when he was 20. Then he wanted to be a pop idol and wanted the girls to scream. Then he was kind of satisfied. It’s not quite like that now. But sharing this experience of what they went through together with the others and to talk about that means something to others too. Not so much for Tore in 1981 maybe. Haha. For Micke it’s cool, because it feels like they have done something good with their lives and Per has done even more, because it’s absolutely unique to succeed in having 2-3 different careers at an even bigger level. There isn’t that many artists who have done it the way he did. Micke thinks Per has a great career as a Swedish solo artist and also with Roxette. And Gyllene Tider to begin with. Without that, the other things had not happened and that they are still around is amazing. They reunite every few years and they all have the same attitude as they had when they were 20. They think they should do their absolute best.

The guys talk about 2019, the farewell tour. Micke says it was his idea. He pushed the guys for it to be the last tour, because it was 40 years since they started. He thought anything can happen anywhere at any time in life, but the older you get, the greater the risk is that something happens to you and you wouldn’t be able to give your 100% to, for example, playing in Gyllene Tider. They have some kind of long marriage with their audience that actually the audience has taken care of. They broke up in 1985, but in 1995 they realized how popular they still were, because they sold a lot of compilation albums. So they did a gig at home in Halmstad in 1995. A lot of people came and they didn’t understand it. Then they went on the Återtåget tour, which became the biggest tour in Scandinavia. A band that doesn’t exist. So it’s the audience’s credit. And it was because GT made the songs that you listen to. GT and the audience need each other. They don’t exist without each other. So Micke thought in 2019 they end with the flag at the top, because he saw so many bands and artists that he looked up to and they don’t have the force anymore. Then how to play if someone might pass away, so it’s not all 5 of them? The whole thing about them is that it should be the 5 of them playing, because it’s the 5 of them who can make that Gyllene Tider sound. So he felt they should stop and wanted to honor it. They were doing this because Micke’s feeling was that if they go on stage with that attitude, that this is the last thing they do, then they will have another gear when they do it and those who will see them will understand that. It was so important for Micke, because what he appreciates about all of this is that they and the audience have had this long marriage. They still perform the songs in different forms, Per is out on his solo tour, Micke is out as well playing them. But the 5 of them, they played together then and Micke kind of wanted to say thank you very much to the audience. This is how he wanted the audience to remember them, having a lot of fun instead of saying „yes, it was good when I saw them in 1996, but shit, now it wasn’t fun because they don’t have the power anymore”. So then they decided to make a record in France and that it would be a fantastic tour. But then Covid happened and it was terrible. Sitting for 2 years and not being allowed to do anything. Micke was lucky, because he had a buffer to live on. But he has a lot of musician friends in Norway and in Sweden who didn’t get any money. They didn’t know how to survive. For 2 years, it’s completely unacceptable. Not getting to work, not getting out and do what they think is the most fun. Micke thinks his mental health affects him a lot and it was like that for the others too. If you’re also struggling with mental health issues, don’t hesitate to seek help from a psychologist.

Per did a seated acoustic session when it wasn’t allowed to be so many people in the audience and they had to sit. He sang GT songs as well. That session at Hotel Tylösand was a huge success, because people got to see music and we got to go out. Then he was visited by 4 girls who have a film production company. They said they want to make a film about the ’80s from when GT started until they finished in 1985. There should be actors and it should be a feel good drama. So the guys had a meeting with them and were surprised the girls would want to make a movie about them. The girls thought GT has a fantastic story. So there will be a movie. Then Per had bought a new guitar and started writing songs. He is always writing songs, Micke says. So PG wrote 2 songs and said they sound like Gyllene Tider. He asked if they could just test them. Micke was very doubtful, but they did it. Just for fun. The guys recorded those songs and they turned out great. So Micke was more in doubt. He was thinking and also talked to his wife about all his doubts. He thought they fulfilled the criteria, he felt the album is great. They are still doing their best when it comes to GT. Obviously, people would be happy if they go on tour. We are living in pretty tough times now so maybe they can contribute to better times with a little joy out there. And they get the joy back form the audience. So he felt OK, let’s do this. That wasn’t the plan, but no one said that he would be locked up for 2 years either. Haha. So if life is stupid to him, then he can enjoy life instead. So they decided to do this and they did it so good. They can do even better than what they did before and that’s right.

Since it’s a video interview, Micke tells Frode that he can see his drums behind, his digital drums. He thinks they are very good. Micke says this room is his mancave where all the gold records and everything from the ’80s and on can be found. He thinks it’s great fun that nowadays, how the two of them are now sitting and talking to each other via the computer or that thanks to Facebook and Instagram you have contact with so many people who have seen them on stage over the years. He is in contact with 2 or 3 girls in Stockholm who were outside the studio when GT recorded their first album. Micke knows they are very happy and as Frode said, he also bought a ticket to Ullevi. For Micke, this is what makes him think it’s worth it. If people are happy, he is happy. Micke says maybe Frode should bring Tore with him to Ullevi. Let’s see if he still thinks the same as in 1981. If nothing else, then at least it’s a nice ending to everything that he gets to come and check on GT again. Micke says he loves such things. It’s great fun to have reviews from a young person who didn’t think it was fun and here we are again.

Frode says he was there in Karlstad in 1996 with his brother and had much fun and it will be fun again. Micke says the same thing again, we have grown older, but the memories also grow in us. He can see from the stage when someone remembers what it was like when they fell in love with the one standing next to them, things like that. And it’s so cool to see and it’s so much fun. We are older and he is not that little guy in shorts anymore. Haha. He says it might be stupid for a middle-aged man, but when he can see a girl who was in love with him in the ’80s looking at him with the same eyes now, then he knows it’s just an illusion, because it is the memory that she is in love with. It’s so nice to see that music has that power. All music has that, but Micke can only talk about their own songs.

Micke says that he is the type of guy who if once said something, he sticks to that. So he really thought the last tour was the last tour. It wasn’t the case that they wanted to get the most money out of it. Some people think that it was the case, but not at all. He thought it doesn’t work for him, once he said that was the last one, then that was the last one. But then he was thinking a lot and it was exactly as Per said that with Covid and everything that happened during that time, they needed to do something to feel good. He thinks it’s fun and, after all, that’s the way it is. The 5 of them have done it all their lives. He has done a lot of other things too, but without GT none of the other things would have happened. And when life goes in a way that didn’t turn out as you had imagined and you sit at home for 2 years, then you just feel that. They still have very high demands on themselves, both how they deliver the music but also with songs and everything. Micke says no one thought Per would have the motivation to write songs for GT again. They recorded the album a little differently. MP has his own studio where he and Per have made demos since long. Mats has been a very, very important person in Per’s life because he has been involved and done Roxette songs and other projects of Per over the years and so they have done a lot together. They had done rough sketches of songs for GT and done a lot of vocals and guitars so the guys got to listen to them. Micke and Anders come from a small community outside Halmstad called Harplinge and 1 km from Micke’s parents’ home there is now a fantastic studio. It didn’t exist back then, but now it’s there and they recorded in that studio for a week. Micke went home and slept in his boy room at his parents each day after the recordings. The room looks the same as it did when he was 16. He was the last to move away from his parents, so everything remained in the room. It’s hard to understand for those who are not making music, but even if he has played with so many great musicians, them 5 have something together that he couldn’t find anywhere else. The sound and everything. That’s what makes it sound like Gyllene Tider and it doesn’t go away. It’s there even though the years go by and once they are at it again, it’s just there. They were going to do soundcheck in the studio, that’s how it should work, but everything sounded good. They haven’t played together in 3 years, so they tested the drums and bass and MP tested the guitar. Staffan, the technician sat there and recorded. They were all sitting in the same room, tested a song the first day. They would just do soundcheck to see if everything worked well to record the next day. So they tested a song and half an hour later another one. And then all the others. Staffan told Micke a month ago that he was completely shocked. He wasn’t prepared for the guys to start recording right away. Micke says it was like they kind of knew what they were going to do. It’s so cool that it works like that for them. He wants to honor what they have done all the way as long as they exist. Now it seems they got another chance to go on. The album release date is not decided yet. They have just signed a record deal in their fifth decade. How nice, Micke thinks.

Frode asks Micke about his parents whether they supported him in being a pop star or they were skeptical and wanted him to have a regular job. Micke says all five of them wanted to do just this, music. They actually all had regular jobs in principle. But they didn’t care. They recorded their first album and went on with that. That’s how it’s been all the time since then. Micke is turning 62 this year and the only permanent job he had as an employee was for 4 years in the early and mid ’80s. Since then he has always been a freelancer. He is coping with his own life and no one believed it would work. He doesn’t know what his parents thought back then, but it’s clear they were worried and that’s right. But it went well and he can see how happy they were for him over the years. Especially after 1996 when GT reunited again and that they have been allowed to participate. It’s only Micke’s and Göran’s parents who are still alive. Micke’s parents are probably the ones who have been at the most gigs from all the GT guys’ parents. For Micke personally, it is also another highlight, to be able to share this with his parents. They sat and listened when Micke was practicing drums in a sauna in the basement with regular drums for whatever number of years and they never said anything. As he said, his mother was a hairdresser and the saloon was in their house. So the clients always asked about Micke and lot of fans, especially after Roxette, came to see where they lived. Fans have travelled from all over the world and sometimes people knocked on the door at home and said „hello, we are from Germany. Are you Micke’s parents?” Then they tried to talk to them in English and they were very proud and even showed Micke’s room to the fans. Haha. Micke is happy to share all this experience with his family, wife and children now. In the video of Småstad by Pers Garage there is a quick cut of a baby. It was recorded in 1989. It’s Micke’s oldest son who turns 34 this year. He was a newborn then. Micke’s father is also in the video in the car repair shop. His dad was 58 in that clip, Micke was 28. Both his mom and dad are very proud of him. His mother had a lot of contact with people who came to their house. In Parkliv! there is this scene where they say a phone number. That was the number of Micke’s mom’s saloon. Even if they beeped it out, it wasn’t the best of ideas, because it wasn’t that difficult to read the lips what number it was. This was in 1981. There were so many people calling. It was Per’s fault, he was the one who said the number. Haha. Now that’s fun, but it wasn’t back then.

The guys talk about Tuff tuff tuff (Som ett lokomotiv) in Parkliv!, how Micke played the drums there. Micke says it’s called youth and testosterone. It’s fun to see himself there and think „damn, is that me?” Micke says that in the movie it’s not visible, but there was someone who threw a coke bottle on stage. He thinks it was during the first song even. So a glass bottle landed on stage and it might as well hit him. There was some guy who wasn’t completely satisfied, so he threw a coke bottle and it landed between Micke’s legs. He was sitting and playing. They have gotten eggs on them too and things like that sometimes from guys who were mad at them. But that’s what makes it so fun to see themselves there in that film.

Micke says it’s a completely different musical world today than it was back then. But that’s what he thinks is so fun about them that they keep going. They make music the way they have always done it. They can do it in a different way now, but what drives them is that they play together. That’s where their sound comes from. That they are 5 souls, 5 hearts that contribute their part to this delicious cake that becomes Gyllene Tider. That mix has only been refined over the years. They are still doing the same thing. Although, they have a little more screens now, but it’s more for the experience for the audience. It’s all about the connection between the band and the audience.

Frode is curious if it has ever happened that Per presented a song that later became a hit, but when he presented it they thought it wouldn’t work. Micke says they had hits in every decade from the ’80s to the ’90s to the 2000s. And it might happen this time too. There are some songs that can be hits, Micke thinks, because they are spreading Gyllene joy. But to be honest, he can’t remember if they ever said to a song that later became a hit that it wouldn’t work. They must have had it, but it’s been so long and he, for some reason, have gained the ability to remember events. He can remember feelings and stuff, but especially when the GT guys all talk. He always says it’s full on the hard drive. There is no space left up in the hub, things happen all the time. He says he remembers that Per wrote Sommartider while all other four guys went for a lunch break. EMI, their record company said there was no single among their materials when they recorded Puls. So Per got pissed off and he sat down and wrote Sommartider. There is a song, Mony, Mony by Billy Idol. They got inspiration from the groove of it and then it was done.

Frode mentions that when the EP with Gå & fiska! came out in 1996, there was a new, modern, fresh Gyllene Tider sound. Michael Ilbert was the producer. Micke says they worked with Ilbert already before Gå & fiska! in 1995 when Kung av sand and Det är över nu came out. Ilbert had worked with Per and Ilbert had quite a special way of working. And somehow it fitted them and also how Per wrote the songs. So it became a completely different Gyllene Tider that fit with the times and how they played then. How you play also becomes different with the years. You play differently when you are 20 or 25. It worked so well with Ilbert that Per made an English solo album with him and if you listen to June Afternoon and She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Roxette, it’s MP, Micke and Anders who are playing there too. Micke liked that era too. It was Roxette, but sounded like Gyllene Tider, just without Fritzon. Now GT is back to something else that’s more where they come from. Now it’s a poppier album than their last record was. Don’t bore us, get to the chorus. Micke says they really felt like 20 and somehow they got the energy. It was like when they did the Sven-Ingvars song on their previous album. That was the last song they recorded, they had 4 hours until their flight departed. They thought they try it and an hour later, it was all done. Micke says it’s nice to have this extra chance to do it again and say that age ain’t nothing but a number. He says they are lucky that they became musicians instead of sportsmen, because then it would have been over. If you take care of yourself as best as you can and you think it’s fun what you are doing, then you can actually maintain a divine level as you get older. Age has nothing to do with it really. It’s more about the attitude. Tommy Körberg is still out there, for example. He plays shows in Sweden. He sings so well and his presence on stage is amazing. Micke says he went to see Paul McCartney at Tele2 and besides the songs that are amazing themselves, it was great to hear McCartney being able to sing that way. And he still has that energy. Music is like that. It works. The joy of it. And the audience will be just as happy.

Frode asks Micke about Ullevi. Micke says it will be the fourth time they play there and he hopes that there will be a lot of people. That will be the last gig in Sweden on the tour. They played Ullevi for the first time in 2004. They were the first real Swedish band to play at Ullevi. When you keep going as Gyllene Tider have, you always have dreams, Micke says. When they started, they wanted to be on a big stage in Halmstad. They made it in 1981. Then there were some other places, 1996 was Stockholms Stadion. There were a lot of people. There were probably no Swedish bands that had been there before, so they have constantly moved the goals. Micke remembers he was at Ullevi when Springsteen was there in 1982 or so. He was also there when the Stones played there. You think you would want to do that too and you thought it would never happen, then it does. They got there and they broke crowd records and it was 26 degrees and a perfect day. It was summertime as much as possible and everyone who was in town was excited. 15 minutes before they started playing Micke’s wife said this is completely crazy with so many people there. Everyone was very happy. And then they went out on stage, started with En sten vid en sjö i en skog and it starts with the drums. They have never played for this many people, they were the first ones. The only ones who did it until then. It was a great day. Micke’s whole family was there. He says first you are nervous, but then it falls and then it’s just outpouring love. He couldn’t manage to sing at the top of his lungs. It was overwhelming. It’s the same thing for the audience, so the band and the audience take each other to new levels. All those who were there they knew that they were part of something unique. Then it happened with a lot of other Swedish artists after that, but right then they were the only ones. Foreign artists came and they did a gig, but GT did more than 20 shows and had almost thirty thousand people at each gig in Sweden except for Ullevi, where the number of people in the audience was double. So that tour was completely crazy in itself, because there were half a million people attending that tour. Micke will never forget that.

Frode asks Micke what he would suggest someone who has never listened to Gyllene Tider and know nothing about them. Micke says they should just put on a compilation album and start there and see if there is something that makes them happy. Everyone finds their thing, or if they don’t find anything, they listen to something else. But there is surely a song they will like.

Frode says or they just have to see Min tjej och jag in Parkliv! Micke says that’s exactly what he thought about. It’s the first song in the encore. When you watch it, you can see why Göran climbed a lot on Micke’s back in that film. Watching a GT film now, you can see why Göran wouldn’t climb on Micke’s back these days. Haha. He says it with all love. He thinks it’s funny how they have changed as people, both in size and in everything else. Although they are the same in spirit.

Pic by Patrícia Peres, GT40 Tour, Halmstad 2019