Stella Event, promoter of the last 3 unplugged gigs up in the north of Sweden did an interview with Mr. G.
SE: – Do you have any dream collaboration? Either as a dream that already came true or as something you still hope for?
PG: – No, all my heroes in music have already died. Or about to die. I’m so old so all my heroes are even older, like The Beatles and Tom Petty and Joni Mitchell. So there is like no one. I’ve had the chance to meet many, like Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Springsteen and it obviously feels super big but it would feel uncomfortable to sit in a studio with one of them.
And when it comes to modern musicians, they work in a completely different way, where you make electronic music separately and then you send the material to each other. And I have had the opportunity to do that, I have worked with David Guetta and a bit with others, but that’s a different thing. I feel that I have grown old in that way, that I like it the way I can do it. When I talk about music with my son, who is 24, we don’t understand each other at all because we hear so many different things. But it was the same when I grew up, so my parents didn’t understand why I wanted to listen to T-Rex.
SE: – As organizers, we often take care of the artists’ requests. Do you have something specific that you always want in the dressing room? And when you toured the world with Roxette, did you have any crazier rock star requests then? Just because you could like…
PG: – Nowadays, my tour guide always asks if I want the same as usual in the dressing room and I never know what it is, but I usually want flakes, in case I don’t have time to chew. It can be irregular times so then it’s good to have some energy. And then I want fresh ginger for the throat. And then we usually ask for a little champagne, but we drink it after the concert and only if we in the band think we have earned it. Type of stuff like that…
In the past, it was maybe a little more extravagant stuff and on a tour I kept asking for Mouton Rotschild, such a very expensive wine, and it was mostly to see if anyone could provide us with it. And there was ONE guy, his name was Andre – you see I remember his name – in Zurich who pounded a bottle of Mouton in my dressing room. Otherwise you were disappointed every time. But this was a long time ago, so it’s statute barred.
SE: – Is there anything you always do before stepping on stage? Either as a warm-up or for more superstitious reasons for it to go well?
PG: – I actually never sing up. Marie always sang up, on the last tour she could sing up for two hours. But I usually never do it, I do sound check and then it must be good. I probably have no such fuzz for me but I always want to go last on stage. I kind of want to gather the band and feel that everyone is on the same wavelength and like to look everyone in the eye. So I’m a bit of a guide dog. And I’m so addicted to this friendship in the group.
That’s a bit what made me so scared at the thought of this tour because it felt so naked. I have always played in front of a large audience and with a large band and so on. Now I’m the only guitarist so it becomes obvious if a mistake happens. But I got the question from the management at Hotel Tylösand and since the max. audience was 500, I thought that if it fails miserably, there wouldn’t be so many witnesses. So we did two gigs there and then it became an acoustic tour.
SE: – This tour is described as “dipping your toes in your song catalogue”. Is there any song in your song catalogue that you yourself thought would be a real hit but didn’t really break through?
PG: – It’s a difficult question. I myself am the world’s worst at hearing what can be a single and what cannot. In addition, there are so many factors that are needed for a song to become a hit, especially internationally. But we can say this, “Spending My Time” of Roxette was on the “Joyride” album in 1991. And then there were three songs that our record company said would be hits, it was “Joyride”, “Fading Like A Flower” and “Spending My Time”. And it was the last one they thought would be the biggest. It was during the MTV era that it got the biggest video budget, four million or something like that. But then when it was to be released and become our fifth America number one, our record company collapsed. So all of a sudden no one worked with Roxette and our record was almost forgotten in the US, which led to “Spending My Time” not really being the big song that everyone had thought.
Get your tickets for the PG Unplugged Tour HERE!
