To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Joyride reaching No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 11th May 1991, Warner Music Sweden organized a video Q&A with Per Gessle. Fans could send their questions in video format in advance and Per answered them today at 3 pm CET. It was a 15-minute-long session, but we wouldn’t have been bored even after an hour of listening to Mr. G’s great answers to fan Qs.
Right after the Q&A, the anniversary version of the Joyride video premiered in 4K! What a wonderful remake it is! So sharp and there are new details in them! No monkey though. Haha.
As the press release says, the beginning of the 90’s was the peak of the MTV era and a powerful – and expensive – video was of course a must for anyone aiming for the top of the charts.
The Joyride video became a really playful and spectacular video, where Marie and Per, among other things, sat on a Ferrari while a driver laying down, being invisible to the camera took care of the gas and brake.
Those 30 years undoubtedly had left its mark on the original video and it was time for restoring it. As part of the celebration, therefore, here comes a 30-year-old version of the Joyride video with sparkling colours and maximum sharpness in 4K resolution.
Per Gessle smiles and says:
The MTV era was a fun period, because everything was so big and you bought all the crazy ideas that came up. There were very few barriers – not even to make a video where you sit in headwind half the time.
Director Doug Freel had done a solid job. In total, he had recorded 186 minutes of raw material for a song that is just under four minutes. After the recordings, 18 rolls of 35 mm film were shipped from Los Angeles to Swedish EMI, where they spent their time on a shelf in the darkness of the basement until the 30th anniversary began to approach.
But the original master of the approximately 4-minute-long Joyride video was not among the materials. So to update the video, there was only one thing to do: start from the beginning and go through all the materials to recreate the video from scratch.
Said and done, box after box of 18 rolls of film was sent to mastering and restoration expert Thomas Ahlén at Filmtech in Stockholm. He immediately noticed that the materials were in unexpectedly good condition and started the work of removing dirt and sharpening colours and details.
Thomas Ahlén tells:
Since the film reels haven’t been used in all these years, they were very well preserved. It’s been a time-consuming job, but at the same time much fun to be able to present a 30-year-old video in the best possible way. The fact that all the raw materials were silent films and then they had to be matched to the single version was just one of the challenges.
In this project of Joyride – the 30th anniversary version, a piece of Swedish pop history meets the enormous technological development that has taken place in moving media since 1991. The result is a version that follows the original video to 75%.
Per tells:
Some so-called “green screen” scenes have been removed, because they were very difficult to recreate. Instead, we’ve found other goodies in the raw material. In the long run, however, we plan to restore the video completely – and perhaps also other Roxette videos – in 4K resolution.
Joyride’s 30th anniversary is celebrated this autumn with a vinyl box that will consist of 4 LP’s and a 3-CD set, which in addition to the original edition will contain lots of unreleased or hard-to-find materials that paints a larger picture of a piece of Swedish music history.
The 4K video is available on YouTube, as well as the Q&A with Per. Stills are from these videos.
