Patrícia Peres

Tack för musiken, Marie Fredriksson

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

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

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

MF_Tack_för_musiken_01  MF_Tack_för_musiken_02

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

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

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

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Gyllene Tider sommaren 2013

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

micke_syd_cocktail

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

GT_sommaren_2013_01  GT_sommaren_2013_03

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

 

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

GT_sommaren_2013_02

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

 

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

 

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

 

Exclusive photos from the recordings of the radio docu

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

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

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

Enjoy and tune in on 31st December!

 

RXB_02_Per  RXB_02_Marie

RXB_03_Per  RXB_03_Marie

RXB_01_Per  RXB_00_Per

RXB_06_M_Dimberg  RXB_04_Marie

RXB_04_Clarence_Anders  RXB_05_Clarence_Anders

Alla tiders Gyllene Tider – a fab book!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long interview with Per Gessle in Livets Goda

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As Per already informed us some time ago, Livets Goda did a very long and veeery nice interview with Mr G. The December issue contains 16 pages of Per Gessle: awesome interview, 20 important songs, some wine tasting and hot photos of Per. Interview by Anders Enquist, photos by Erik Dahlström.

The magazine is available in Sweden at the newsstands from 10th December, but you can also have your own copy even if you don’t live in Sweden. Here you can buy the pdf version online for 50 SEK. (You can pay even via PayPal.) It is really worth it!

The interview is mainly about Per’s career in the music business, stories about how Gyllene Tider and Roxette started out, his solo projects, the 80’s when he met Åsa (he says it was the best thing that happened back then), The Look, the US, It Must Have Been Love, the Billboard, EMI, later years, Roxette comeback, GT comeback, how he became interested in wines, so briefly, kind of the whole story of his life so far. There are not too many real news in the interview, but it’s always nice to read Per Gessle’s thoughts and what he is saying about different songs, for example.

Per_Gessle_Livets_Goda_2013

THERE IS SOMETHING NEW: Per would like to record an acoustic album with some of his old songs.

Great news! 😉

You surely remember Mr Gessle was talking about the Top20 songs he was setting up for this article in Livets Goda. These are not his all time fave songs, but the ones meaning a lot to him. Here is the list:

1. Nina Simone: Wild Is The Wind
2. Heart: Love Alive
3. Air: Le Femme D’argent
4. Caitlin Rose: For The Rabbits
5. Big Star: September Gurls
6. The Young Rascals: How Can I Be Sure
7. Fleetwood Mac: That’s Alright
8. John Holm: Den Öde Stranden
9. The Beatles: Hey Jude
10. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Refugee
11. David Bowie: Lady Grinning Soul
12. Lorde: Royals
13. The Tornados: Telstar
14. Docent Död: Solglasögon
15. Divinyls: Pleasure And Pain
16. Joni Mitchell: Rainy Night House
17. Kenny Rogers: Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town
18. Frank Sinatra: It Was A Very Good Year
19. Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra: Summer Wine
20. The Buzzcocks: Ever Fallen In Love

 

Some probably think that I’m a super-capitalist who is just sitting there and earns a lot of money on nothing, while others think I’m a talented pop craftsman who knows far too much about pop music, a nerd … I don’t know …

There are many things I’m not talented in, but I’m good at melodies and writing songs. That’s what I can do, so I need people who are doing all the other stuff I can’t.

 

He also mentions in the interview that he always thought Marie is the world’s best singer since they met for the first time.

Per’s 5 favourite Roxette songs which are lesser-known (with his comments):
1. I’m Sorry – Great chorus, a hit in Brazil.
2. My World, My Love My Life – A damn good song.
3. It Takes You No Time To Get Here – Some country text and feeling.
4. Opportunity Nox – Our best pop wallop.
5. Sleeping Single – Marie sings amazing. She makes the album.

 

I have no idea why Roxette is still so big. Maybe it’s because of the songs, maybe there is a certain timelessness in many of the songs’ melodies. But why exactly us? Maybe it’s my Swedish poor self-confidence that makes me unable to respond to it …

Regarding the next Roxette tour he says that first Marie goes on tour, but sooner or later there will probably be a major Roxette tour. Bring it on!