Editorial

The making of “Roxette 2011” – the story so far

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It all started around 18 months ago. It was almost like a little miracle. First the big comeback news, then a tour with an orchestra, a summer tour and now a world tour starting in a few months. But probably the most interesting thing is the brand new album, the first one since “Room Service” in 2001. Now the waiting is almost over. So here are some highlights from this 18 months long journey of making the (yet unnamed) new “Roxette 2011” album.

2009-05-05 Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson announce on a press conference in Antwerp that Roxette is back for real and will participate on the Night Of The Proms tour this autumn.

2009-05-28 Per says that they plan to go back to the studio this summer and want to release a new song until Christmas.

2009-07-17 Per writes on Twitter that he just recorded the first two new demos at the Aerosol Grey Machine studio in Vallarum.

2009-08-07 Per is back at the Tits’n’Ass studio in Halmstad with Mats MP Persson, working on new demos.

2009-09-23 Per says in an interview that some new demos are finished. Only acoustic versions, no arrangements, no intros, no solos, no backing vocals. The start of recording a brand new album.

2009-10-23 The plan is to continue with recording during Night Of The Proms. A hotel room will be used as a mobile recording studio. Marie is eager to record a whole new album.

2009-10-26 Per says in an interview that an additional room is booked for Antwerp and Rotterdam.

2009-11-15 Per says that he has around 13 songs written and now 2 of them are almost finished. The plan is to continue with recordings in professional studios after the Night Of The Proms tour finishes.

2009-11-28 Roxette have some 14 demos ready for full recording. Marie says that they sound fantastic and when she heard Per’s demos for the first time, she was really enthusiastic. Now it sounds very roxettish, but the plan is to update the sound a little bit.

2009-12-06 Per says that Roxette booked Atlantis studio for recording session in the spring. But recordings will start in January at Christoffer’s Aerosol Grey Machine in Vallarum. Marie will try to sing several vocals to each song to pick up the best one. The new songs sound like a modern version of their “Look Sharp!” so far.

2009-12-10 Antwerp, Rotterdam and now also Munich are places where Roxette are recording for the new album.

2009-12-15 And Bremen.

2009-12-17 And also Hannover.

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Fans Gather at Leifs & Make The Front Page of Hallandsposten

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On Friday evening about 90 fans gathered at Leif’s Lounge to warm up before the concert in Halmstad. What started out as a ‘small gathering’ of fans and an idea of ‘shall we meet for drinks and a chat’ turned into something rather quite special.

One of the highlights of the evening was when Hallandsposten came along to talk to some of the fans and take a fabulous group picture of those of us who attended the meet and greet!

When Hallandsposten arrived around 8pm – 9pm there were around 50 people on the scene but an hour or so later we had around 90 people in Leif’s, most people enjoying food from the Roxette Menu and drinking Leif’s Beer! (Just how cool are those bottles!)

The next morning on the front of Hallandsposten a picture taken outside Leif’s appeared on the front page, which you can see on Hallandsposten (or all the other websites/FB photo galleries which used it as well). Of course, some of us took the chance to take a group picture, like  Kirsten did. We would be happy if those who took a private photo of the fan-group would send it to us to post it here! I know there were some, cannot remember WHO.


We’re hoping we didn’t keep the band and Mrs F awake to long with the late night partying!
I’ll add some more pictures from the evening when I am home tomorrow, and I am sure one of the other Roxetteblog editors will shortly write about the fabulous contest that was held at Leif’s that evening!

A translation of the article is no longer available since we were requested by Hallandsposten to remove it.

Roxetteblog.com turns one year old

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April 2009. All of a sudden, many things were going on in the Roxette world.

Per was on his Party Crasher Tour, rumours that Marie was to join Per in one of his shows, rumours about “Night of the Proms”, information was posted here and there, it was hard to keep up with all informations and then this crazy idea just came to our minds.

A website which would (try to) gather all news and  more and less relevant information about Roxette and anything related.  The idea was to simply collect information from newspapers, forums, Facebook and who knows where else from in one place and make it easier for everybody to keep up with it.

A year has passed by. First thought that comes to my mind, “what? one year already?”. And then I can only think back and smile and feel proud of what we’ve reached so far. To put it in numbers:

334,653 total views
8,620 views on our busiest day (October 24th!)
2,176 comments
ca 1,000 views per day
515 followers on Facebook
500 articles
254 users on the website
217 on Twitter

If I had to pick up a highlight during the past year,  it definitely has to be Roxette’s comeback on May 6th in Amsterdam, also one year ago. And then Night of the Proms. And the interviews with Jonas, Christoffer and Clarence.

Of course, we wouldn’t be here without your daily support and we appreciate your comments, emails, reporting of news, that help this website making better and better. Thanks also to tomos85, Kiwein, Sascha and Abysmo for all your hard work and keeping up with everything which is going on around Per and Marie.

And talking about birthdays, Planet Roxette, the Roxette website in German, turns 10 this year. Congratulations!

No fishing in the snow..

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The following text is a personal blog entry, done by me and me only. Since we’re a blog and not a news page, there’s some editorial going on from time to time. This text is not necessarily the opinion of my fellow Roxettebloggers. So if you want to bash us for getting a life, a new hobby or stop complaining and whining: address your comment to me, and me only, please.

MySpace is dead, long live MySpace. I never liked that platform very much. Much too messy, too many designs which make you close the site before you had a close look at the content, comments everywhere, images without further comments in all sizes and forms everywhere on the page and at the top of the page on the right a small box with audio or video files. This was the only reason to visit a MySpace page in my opinion: to get to know an artist by listening to his songs or watching his clips and afterwards to decide if it’s worth to buy a whole CD or just a song or nothing. The only problem for the artist was that he didn’t earn anything with having a MySpace site. All he got was the chance to provide his music and stuff and to find more fans – but still: no money.

Now we got a fish in the snow and this fish wants to change that. The concept is called “Snowfish” and comes from Sweden. It’s actually a bit like MySpace, artists, musicians and every fan can register a site, upload images, include a Twitter feed and offer videos to watch. This site isn’t as messy as MySpace, but still it’s everything you would file in “chaos”. There’s a beta version online already since last year’s summer and still there are so many bugs on this page, that you don’t feel a second like visiting this page. Ok, I must admit – the structure of this page is slightly better than it was on MySpace and yet there’s another reason this site is different to MySpace: the artists can earn money with it. The more traffic you have on your page the more money you earn. So it’s said on the Snowfish homepage:

At Snowfish, every single view, listen or read of your content earns you payment (50% of advertising income received from your traffic!). These payments may be small at first (pennies) but ultimately pennies add up!

So it’s obvious that it can’t be much the artists actually get, but for those, who are not famous, not rich or just too bad and need every Cent, Dollar or Euro it’s a concept which can be profitable as time goes by. The more traffic, the more money.

But now it really would be nice, if the creators of this page would work on it which means: make it less messy, make it more user-friendly. So far this is not the case. Best example for this is Per Gessle’s new Snowfish page. He’s uploading videos and pictures from the recording sessions of the new Roxette album these days. And when we take a close look at the front page of his site it looks like there’s 22 videos to watch so far:

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