Per Gessle

Per Gessle interview in Dagens industri

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Dagens industri magazine met Per Gessle at Hotel Tylösand and while Lars Jansson was taking some fabulous photos of Per, Göran Jonsson interviewed him about his career, successes, collections (vinyl, guitars and cars), as well as business.

Göran thinks that selling a few hundred thousand concert tickets for another Gyllene Tider reunion tour is a measure of success. Displaying your collection of Ferrari cars at your own Hotel Tylösand is another. The real success is based on the hit songs written by Per Gessle, a song catalogue that is not for sale.

Göran starts the article with some information about and description of Hotel Tylösand. Per bought it together with former TV4 manager Björn Nordstrand in 1995. Göran saw Marie’s portrait photo next to the reception. It was taken by photographer Mattias Edwall and it’s part of the Per & Åsa Gessle Collection.

Per invites Göran into The Look suite at the hotel. There they start talking. Per points out that the cover photo for his first solo album 40 years ago was taken at Tylösand beach, which they can see from the panoramic window of the suite. PG explains that his first two solo records were considered a flop and he didn’t get a new record contract. Gyllene Tider had ended by then and he felt a little lost. It took 18 years before he again released an album under his own name with Swedish lyrics, Mazarin (2003).

Per says:

I got a lot of requests to write songs for other artists, especially lyrics, including „Kärleken är evig” for Lena Philipsson. From that I learned that it suits me very badly. I have a hard time adapting when someone says ‘change that line’. Then I realized that it wasn’t my thing to write songs on order for others.

I was able to develop as a songwriter thanks to having Marie. Songs like „Listen To Your Heart” and „Queen Of Rain”, they were all written for her. When I think back, it feels like „Look Sharp!”, the „Joyride” era and „Tourism”… There are some songs on „Tourism”, „Queen Of Rain” for example, that I still think are very good. In this way, I was a bit of a ‘late bloomer’ compared to many others, who peak when they are around 25 years old. When Roxette broke through, I turned 30 and Marie was 31. And since then it’s been rolling.

Göran is curious if it is slower to write songs now and if it is harder to find inspiration.

No, not really. I have just finished a brand new Swedish solo record that will be released next year.

Göran is surprised, because he knows that a new Gyllene Tider album has just been released. Mr. G explains it was recorded last summer. When they reunite, he has to write a new record so they can hang out a bit, because they never meet otherwise. Then they get to hang out a bit, feel each other’s pulse, play together and be creative. It’s the best there is, he says to Dagens industri. It’s wonderful when they meet.

Göran wants to know if Per knows how many records he has sold during his career. He has no idea. He knows that Roxette has sold appr. 80 million albums, but there are a lot of streamings. He has no clue about how many albums GT sold, but he remembers that Mazarin sold 400,000-450,000 albums.

How much money he has earned, PG doesn’t know. His greatest asset is his extensive song catalogue. He has 862 works registered with the copyright organization Stim. For a long time, a single song was teasingly missing for the catalogue to be complete. Per wrote the music and Ingela “Pling” Forsman wrote the text for Skepp utan roder, which was submitted as a contribution to Melodifestivalen in 1986, but was not accepted. It was the only one Per Gessle wrote that he did not own the rights to. Later, Per became friends with a manager at Universal Music, which owned Skepp utan roder. PEr told him his story, that there was a single song that he didn’t own the rights to. Then all of a sudden one day, when Per celebrated his birthday, Universal’s Swedish manager came and rang the doorbell with a vinyl single that they had pressed with this particular song. Then PG got the rights back.

The real gems are of course all the hit songs he wrote for Roxette and for which there is an international market. Many great artists sold rights to their music for billions in recent years, e.g. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Sting. Per Gessle’s songs are owned by his own music publisher Jimmy Fun, which in recent years has had a steady turnover of between SEK 16 and 19 million and has reported a profit after net financials of SEK 12-13 million annually. Per has no plans to “cash in” and sell his song catalogue.

I can understand that you do it if you are Springsteen, he is 73 years old, and Dylan who is over 80. I’m a little too young for that. It’s like selling your babies and I’m not ready for that. I’m not quite done yet. But there are a lot of people who want to buy the rights. There are props almost every week, or at least every other week, from different places. But I don’t want that now. Maybe one day.

Göran from Dagens industri says that those who invest in song catalogues speculate on the longevity of the songs, that they will get back what they invested and more through ongoing copyright payments. The question is how long the lifespan of Per Gessle’s songs is.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but the big hit songs will certainly work for a few more generations.

PG says that music is made in a different way these days. You hear a lot of old music in commercials, in HBO films, Netflix series and so on, because no such music is written anymore.

I understand that rights are worth their weight in gold, because suddenly a song appears in a TV series and then it rattles.

Göran writes about Pretty Woman and It Must Have Been Love, the song from 1987 that got a second life and became number one in the US in 1990.

Göran Jonsson shares some financial details about Hotel Tylösand too. It turned out to be a successful investment, he thinks. The turnover increased in 2021 to SEK 199 million with a result after net financial items of SEK 46 million. Per owns 50 percent of the shares in the hotel through his company Elevator Entertainment, which last year received SEK 20 million in share dividends.

It has gone very well for the hotel. Björn and I were, at least during the first ten years, not particularly dependent on the hotel’s income, so we reinvested the profits.

To Göran’s question regarding how involved he is in management, Per replies that he sits on the board and in the past ten years he has taken up more space than in the beginning, when he was very much the ‘silent partner’.

Göran Jonsson says that the hotel walls are covered in art, mostly photographs. Some are for sale through the gallery Tres Hombres Art, of which Per Gessle is a co-owner, but many belong to the Per & Åsa Gessle Collection. Not even Per can tell exactly which works of art are the family’s and which are the gallery’s.

During the interview, the guys are sitting in front of the photo that is on the cover of David Bowie’s album Pin Ups (1973). Per has a few prints of it, even a huge one at home in Halmstad. David Bowie is undoubtedly one of his favourites. To Göran’s question regarding which was the best concert he had been to, Gessle replies it’s impossible to answer, but he remembers being completely enchanted by the Station to Station tour with David Bowie at Scandinavium in Gothenburg in 1976. It was absolutely magical to see him. Everyone in the audience came in platform shoes, but he himself suddenly looked like Frank Sinatra.

The Beatles are at least as strong and it was photos of John Lennon’s psychedelic painted Rolls-Royce that sparked Per’s interest in cars. It was the 1960s and in his room in Halmstad there were toy cars from Corgi Toys and a car track from Scalextrix.

Now Per has collected his cars in The Joyride Car Collection: twelve Ferraris, a McLaren and two Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Most are on display at Hotel Tylösand. The exhibition hall with glass walls in all directions is located on the ground floor of a newly built hotel part with 39 rooms and a conference room that was inaugurated in May.

It was my and my wife Åsa’s idea to build a garage there. It was actually only intended for six to seven cars, but there was room for eleven and now there are ten there, nine of which are Ferraris.

The idea is that I will rotate them. They must be serviced once a year and must therefore come in and out here. Then maybe I’ll take one home and put another one here.

Göran is curious what the car collection is worth. Per says he doesn’t know, Göran should google it. Göran has done that. It said SEK 100 million on some site. PG thinks it’s probably a very low estimation. There are some real gems here. The Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta is one that cannot be bought, there are none for sale. One was sold at some charity auction and it went for SEK 80 million. So such a car is worth maybe SEK 40-50 million.

Göran says that the exhibition catalogue has the info that together the cars on display are driven less than 100 miles per year. He wants to know if the collection is to be considered an investment in the first place. Per finds it difficult to call his interests investments. It doesn’t sound much fun.

I played at Ferrari’s 50th anniversary party in 1997 in Italy and got to know them and their representatives in Sweden. That was before it became a hysterical business of collector cars like this. It is only in the last 5-10 years that it has become so.

First he just liked the cars. But in 2001 he had the opportunity to buy a limited edition car, a 550 Barchetta Pininfarina, of which 448 were produced. It’s a car that Per has home. After that things got tougher.

The Joyride Car Collection

Ferrari 250 GTE 2+2 (1962)
Ferrari Dino 246 GT (1971)
Ferrari 550 Barchetta Pininfarina (2001)
Ferrari 430 Scuderia (2007)
Ferrari 599 GTO (2010)
Ferrari 458 Speciale Aperta (2015)
Ferrari F12 TDF (2016)
Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta (2017)
McLaren Senna (2018)
Ferrari 488 Pista Spider (2020)
Ferrari Monza SP2 (2020)
Ferrari Daytona SP3 (2023)
Ferrari 812 Competizione Aperta (2023)
Harley-Davidson XLH 1200 Sportster (1992)
Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail Nostalgia (1993)

Göran thinks Per must have made a good deal, since he started buying Ferraris before the real boom took off.

Yes, but you don’t make money until you sell.

Göran refers to the stock exchange. Per says shares are greedy and he thinks it’s super boring. He is totally uninterested in that kind of investment. But these cars are fun and really beautiful.

It’s the same with art and photography. I bought a lot of amazing photographs in the 1990s. It cost nothing then compared to now – Terry O’Neill, Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe – just because I liked it. I have got to know many photographers. Anton Corbijn is a very good friend of ours in the family. I have worked with him since 1999. When Gabriel, our son, was little, Anton was at our house every year and took family photos of us. We have lots of photos from Gabriel’s upbringing. It’s really fun. I love his work and he is a damn nice guy.

Göran asks Per if he has a record collection.

Yes, of course I have a record collection. Otherwise you are naked. I’ve purged stuff that I got for free from record companies over the years and never listened to, but I still have the records that have followed me through life, about 2,000 LPs.

He also has a guitar collection of a little over 100 guitars. As rarities he has some old Martins, acoustic guitars from the 1930s and ’40s. And Rickenbackers. Per points out that the retro logo for The Joyride Car Collection is a Rickenbacker attached to a gas pump.

So-called memorabilia from his career adorns Leif’s Lounge, one of the restaurants at Hotel Tylösand. There hang, for example, six framed rejection letters, addressed to Hamiltons väg 8 in Halmstad before Per moved away from home. Among those who had a demo cassette with Gyllene Tider’s music sent to them, but who declined and returned it, were Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson at Polar Music. The rejection letter from Electra is signed by Ingela Forsman, with whom Per Gessle later came to write a song together, the one that was missing from his catalogue for a long time.

Göran writes that Per is a big music fan and has encyclopedic knowledge of rock and pop music. He has always loved the aesthetics of music. For him, it was important that Gyllene Tider’s records came out on EMI’s Parlophone label, the same one on which The Beatles’ music was released.

He misses album covers, pictures, magazines and everything else around music itself, which is anonymized when practically all music is streamed.

I’ve got used to it like everyone else, but I think it’s super boring. When I was growing up, there was an absolutely huge pop culture, which was teen-affirming. The role of pop music has completely changed since then, but our whole society has changed, so it’s not so strange.

Per thinks album covers make the music so much clearer. He looks up at David Bowie’s Pin Ups on the wall where they are sitting. That record is the album cover, after all. The Abbey Road record of The Beatles is the crossing point. Dark Side of the Moon, Sticky Fingers and all the others. Per thinks that without those covers and that song order, these albums would have meant something else. He thinks it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there then.

When I sit and talk to my 25-year-old son about this, he just thinks I’m weird. He doesn’t understand anything. And he is absolutely right about that. And I can’t understand how music can mean so little. If you talk about today’s pop music, I don’t understand the purpose of it. It seems like everyone is trying to make the same songs that everyone else is making. Everything follows the same formula. Everyone works with the same plugins and the same type of sound. Everything sounds very good, but it also sounds very boring.

Göran says there are many indications that we are at the end of the era that began in the mid 1950s with the breakthrough of rock music. The golden age of that music style is definitely over. In an interview in the New York Times last fall, Jann S. Wenner, founder of the influential music magazine Rolling Stone, said this about rock and pop music: “I’m sorry to see it go, it’s not coming back, it’ll end up like jazz.”

Per thinks he is right.

There will soon be no more rock music. Being able to play and sing has lost its value a little because you can do everything with computers. That was knocked off when the EDM music thing happened. Rock music as we know it will only become a small niche. Once upon a time starting a band was fantastic!

The article on Dagnes industri is for subscriers only. It includes some fab photos of Per and a video reportage. The video can be watched without subscription HERE.

Per Gessle on Nordic Rox – July 2023

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In the July episode of Nordic Rox, Per Gessle and Sven Lindström welcome listeners on the show from Per’s beautiful garden on the Swedish West Coast, waiting for the summer to kick in. Sven says it looks good after having a prolonged winter for 12 months or something. Per says it feels like that indeed.

Today’s featured artist is Amanda Jenssen. Per thinks she is amazing. She started out in 2007. She participated in this talent show called Idol and wound up in 2nd place. Sven thinks it’s quite symptomatic that she didn’t win. How good of an artist you really are, coming from a talent show? Sven asks Per about it. PG says you can’t really judge everyone, but he thinks it might be good not to win to have your own career and go from there. He guesses it’s a big and very good experience to be part of it. But still, it’s really hard to judge. The whole idea is sort of strange to begin with. But that’s another discussion, Per says. Sven says Amanda survived the eventual talent show trap and carved out a nice career for herself. Short though, it’s like she has taken a slight break in the last few years. The guys focus on the three albums she did from 2008 to 2012, and they picked 4 great songs. But before that, here comes an intro that Per might recognize, haha. Dangerous by Roxette from Sweden. Sven says the song was a US No.1 if he is not misinformed. Per says he is, because it was No.2. Sven says yeah, it was indeed. PG says they were like Amanda Jenssen, they were runner-up. But it was close, Sven says, haha.

The next song played is Kaleidoscope Dream by The Northern Belle, a wonderful band from Norway. Good Morning Midnight by Backyard Babies is next, then Sarah Klang’s new single, Mercedes is on. It’s a great song, Per thinks. It sounds really special. Sarah loves to drown in echo. To echo her voice and it creates this sort of hypnotic sound, which Per really likes a lot. She has a wonderful voice as well. The guys also play Electric by Melody Club. Both of them think it’s a good one. Hang With Me by the mighty Robyn is next from the album Body Talk Pt. 2.

The Amanda Jenssen Special begins here. The year after she was No.2 on Idol in 2007, she produced her first single and debut album, Killing My Darlings. And the first single was Do You Love Me? Per thinks it’s a great track. An instant hit for PG. There is something about her voice that Sven totally loves. He says it’s a bit… not hoarse, but… Per helps Sven out: „sexy”. Sven says it’s probably the word he was looking for. Per says he could see it on Sven’s face. Haha. Amanda wrote songs herself and she wrote in partnership with Pär Wiksten, who Per recognized from The Wannadies. This track is written by Vincent Pontare, who is an artist in his own right and the guys played him a lot of times before. He is a great writer as well and producer, PG says.

Coming up next is Dry My Soul, a track from Amanda’s third album, Hymns For The Haunted released in 2012. Sven loves this track. Per thinks it’s a good one. She’s got this very special voice and it just hits you as soon as you listen to it. Sven informs that she actually got pneumonia as a child on both lungs and that unfortunately left her with only 30% of lung capacity. Which is impossible to tell when you hear her sing. She sounds really powerful, PG thinks.

The guys slow things down a bit after this. They play a song by Amanda herself. Per thinks she is a great writer as well. She did this song called Illusionist, also from the Hymns For The Haunted album in 2012. It’s produced by Pär Wiksten. He was probably in another room when she recorded this, because there are no guitars in the beginning at least. They are a good team, Sven thinks. He loves The Wannadies, their attitude, pop-rock with great melodies. For Per, Illusionist is the stand-out track on that album.

In 2009, Amanda recorded her second album, Happyland and again partnered up with Pär Wiksten and they wrote the title track together. Pär produced most of the album. Happyland is a song the guys have been playing here on Nordic Rox quite a lot. Sven says there is a strange, wonderful atmosphere to this song. Per also thinks it’s very cool. Great production.

The Amanda Jenssen special is over. The guys go down to Malmö and play Gloria by Follin. Then comes The Sweetest Tune by Darling West. Ola & The Janglers is next with Not In My Life. A lovely sound from the ’60s. Per thinks this song was pretty influenced by The Zombies. Sven agrees. They must have listened to She’s Not There. PG thought about Time Of The Season. This song is from an album called Patterns, which Per had when he was a little kid. He still loves that album. It sounds really cool.

This wraps up the July episode of Nordic Rox. The guys thank everyone for listening, then Cigarettes by Anita Lindblom closes the show.

Still is from the Bag of Trix comment videos recorded by Anders Roos.

Thanks for your support, Sven!

Per Gessle on Nordic Rox – June 2023

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In May it was only Sven Lindström on Nordic Rox, but for the June episode, Per Gessle got back on track and joined him.

The guys focus on one of the biggest legends in Swedish rock history, Pugh Rogefeldt, who unfortunately passed away a couple of weeks ago. Sven says he left a mark on Swedish music and changed it more or less forever. Per agrees. Pugh was probably the first Swedish rock act to sing in Swedish. Nobody did that. Everyone in Europe thought that they had to write in English. Except in France, PG adds. Haha. In Sweden, in the ’60s, all those bands that were big, were either singing Middle of the Road songs in Swedish or they were doing rock and pop music based on Brit pop from the ’60s. Pugh Rogefeldt was the one in 1969 who did an album in Swedish. It took everyone by surprise and it earned him a Grammy. The first three or four albums he did were truly amazing, Mr. G says. Pugh actually influenced him a lot and lots of his peers too. Sven says Pugh made a massive impression on the scene. The guys will play 4 Rogefeldt songs and talk about them in a little while, but before that, they play some fasten-your-seatbelts songs.

Our Own Revolution by Brainpool is the opener. Per says it’s a sadly missed band. Sven adds they were discovered and signed by Per. Mr. G says oh yeah, he forgot about that. It happened once upon a time in the ’90s when he had a publishing company. Per says they were great writers and a great band. He thinks they did three or four albums. Christoffer Lundquist is on bass guitar here. Later he became Per’s producer and also lead guitar player in Roxette. He started out as a bass player. A very cool guy according to Sven.

Driving One Of Your Cars by Lisa Miskovsky is next. A great track according to Sven and Per. Then comes Just Kids by Lowland Circus.

The next song is (Do You Get) Excited? by Roxette. It’s one of the tracks from the massively successful Joyride album from 1991. Those were the days, the guys say. PG says Sven had hair those days. They are laughing. (Do You Get) Excited? is one of Per’s favourite songs from the album. He loves the sound of it. There are great guitar parts by Jonas Isacsson and Marie, of course, is singing the shit out of this song. Sven is curious if Per remembers writing and recording it. PG can’t really remember, but he says they had a big argument, because there is lots of modulations in this song. Per was really into modulations at the time and so he tried to use that in the arrangement of the song a lot. It’s got a little Led Zeppelin riffs, combined with a little drum machine here and there, it’s pretty special.

Broder Daniel’s Underground comes next. A lovely song, Mr. G thinks. Then it’s the Darkest Hour’s turn by Astrid S.

The guys get down to the Pugh Rogefeldt session. Sven says he was 22 years old when he made his debut album. He came from a small town and he was the father of two children. He didn’t expect anything, he didn’t really think anyone would listen to the album. PG says Pugh was lucky in a way, because there was a Swedish producer, Anders Burman, who had a record label called Metronome and he discovered him and put him together with two guys, Janne Carlsson on drums, who came from Hansson & Karlsson. Sven states that Hansson & Karlsson made the song Tax Free that Jimi Hendrix found about and recorded as well. To continue the story, Per says then there was this bass and guitar player called Georg Wadenius, who eventually became a member of Blood, Sweat & Tears three years later. So there is a slight American connection there, Sven says. PG says that Janne Carlsson on drums, Georg Wadenius on guitar and bass and Pugh on everything else, it was a great trio and great songs, unique songs. Like Per said earlier, Pugh was the first one to write in Swedish and he even created his own language on the second album. So three or four songs on that album are in his own language. Weird but nice, Mr. G says. Sven says Pugh was a very creative guy. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but as the months passed in 1969, more and more influential people in the radio and in the newspapers started to discover him. Then suddenly he became declared a complete genius. He said that it took him half a year to come down from that. He was elevated up to the stratosphere. Here the guys play the first Pugh song and it’s from his debut album. Här kommer natten was his breakthrough song. Per thinks it’s very good.

Sven says what happened after this album came out was that Pugh basically opened the door single-handedly for rock artists to express themselves in Swedish. And suddenly, from having been deemed impossible, everyone started to discover that Swedish was not that bad. PG thinks it’s cool. He did a couple of albums after this first one of course, which were very successful as well, and the second one was called Pughish. Pugh sort of invented his own language and that was the first album Per heard from him. It was the same for Sven. Per says he was about ten or eleven years old back then, maybe twelve. It’s a tremendous album. Then Pugh did an album called Hollywood, which was probably his bigger success up until the Bolla och Rulla album came in 1974. Sven says that was more of a straight ahead rock album and it was really successful. After that a couple of Swedish artists went on tour and recorded a Pugh song called Vandrar i ett regn (walking in the rain). The backing vocals on this are half crazy. It’s typically Pugh as well. Mr. G says it’s an homage to the Doo Wop ’50s style of music. This live recording is really special for Per, because he was at the show where they recorded it. They played in Per’s hometown and Pugh was a superstar at the time. PG was in the 8th row and just mesmerized by this concert. He really loves this double LP, Ett steg till.

After this live recording from 1974 is played, Sven says he and Per are celebrating Pugh Rogefeldt, the father of rock music with Swedish lyrics in Sweden. Per thinks that the most famous of Pugh’s songs is coming up next. Små lätta moln is also taken from the 1969 debut album. It has been covered by a lot of people, even though it’s a pretty strange song, but it’s beautiful. Sven agrees. He says Pugh is singing it with this original twist. Nobody sounded like him before that. Playful and inventive he was. PG says Pugh has got this very high-pitched voice, using falsettos and he is just doing his own thing. It’s a trademark sound, Mr. G thinks. Sven wants to know if there is anything Per as a songwriter picked up from Pugh that he is aware of. Mr. G says Pugh is a pretty unorthodox writer. He is not following any rules at all. Per was more rooted in the classic songwriting style when he started out, but he was influenced by Pugh for sure. Especially when it came to writing lyrics. Per started writing lyrics in Swedish and Pugh was definitely one guy to look up to. So if Per should say he was influenced by Pugh, it’s more about the lyrics than the music. Små lätta moln is translating into tiny light clouds, the guys say.

The last Pugh song Sven and Per play is from 1974. Per says it’s from a very raw album called Bolla och Rulla, which is a sloppy Swedish translation of rock ‘n’ roll. Sven says it’s also the typical Pugh attitude, twisting the words. By this time he had a good band. Both Per and Sven saw this tour in the summer of 1974. Per adds that Pugh toured Sweden all the time. He remembers going to this show as well and it was really good. The lead guitar player was actually his younger brother, Ingemar. He had a great Les Paul Special and it sounded amazing. Sven says to top it all off, the bassist was Roger Pettersson. He performed this show that Sven saw in a denim skirt. Per says he had that in Halmstad too. Sven says he always thought that Roger lost a bet or something, so he had to perform in that. But then he realized that it was a stage outfit. Per says he looked cool. At the time, it was the glam rock days, anything went. So it was cool. The song the guys play is the opening track on this album, and it’s called Hog farm. It’s about a hippie commune from the States that came to Sweden. Per says it was lots of scandals and drugs and minors and this and that.

Lambretta’s Bimbo is played. Ifrån mej själv by Dundertåget is the next one. Such a great one, Per loves it.

The guys thank everyone for listening, then as usual, Cigarettes by Anita Lindblom is closing the show.

Still is from the Bag of Trix comment videos recorded by Anders Roos.

Thanks for your support, Sven!

Observations by Fredrik Etoall – Roxette, Marie Fredriksson, Per Gessle, Gyllene Tider

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An art book including photos of Roxette, Marie Fredriksson, Per Gessle and Gyllene Tider taken by the amazing photographer Fredrik Etoall will be published on 30th June. Observations by Fredrik Etoall – Roxette, Marie Fredriksson, Per Gessle, Gyllene Tider comes in two versions, one standard textile bound book with 176 pages. The second version is the same book delivered in a nice box including a signed art print by both Fredrik Etoall and Per Gessle. The signed and numbered box set is a limited edition of 500 copies, covered with Fancy Linen.

Mr. G says:

I first met Fredrik during a photo session with Roxette at the Scandic Grand Central in Stockholm in January 2012. Marie understandably was very tired and impatient, but that didn’t stop Fredrik from taking some of the finest and most personal pictures ever taken of our band.

I’ve had the privilege to continue working with him on various projects, and nowadays regard him as a good friend. He’s the kind of guy who’s fun to bounce ideas with. And he always speaks his mind. A good quality.

During our two-day session to nail the visual identity for the PG Roxette album ”Pop-Up Dynamo!”, the idea of a photo book with Fredrik’s fabulous images of Roxette, Marie, Gyllene Tider, and myself took shape. I loved it immediately. Fredrik’s craftmanship, artistry, and sensibility hits you on every page. If I could only use two words to describe his work, it would be “timeless quality”. I’m pretty sure you’ll agree.

You can pre-order the book at Bengans. HERE you can see details of the standard book and HERE the box set. The weight is appr. 1 kg. Dimensions: 230 x 320 mm.

The book is published by Tres Hombres Art that will also organize an exhibition of Fredrik Etoall’s photos at Hotel Tylösand from 30th June.

Roxette, Per Gessle and Gyllene Tider are now represented by Monza Music Entertainment

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Monza Music Entertainment is now being launched – a merger of several of the Nordics’ leading management companies. Some of the Nordics’ top management joins the new music company Monza Music Entertainment. In its own three-storey farmhouse in Vasastan, Stockholm, the newly started company aims to help artists and producers in their careers – with long-termism as the main watchword. Behind the initiative are Andreas Håkansson (former A&R Director, Warner Music) and Tomas Jernberg (former partner, Dimberg Jernberg Management), a strong team and a number of external partners.

Monza Music Entertainment is a merger of the management companies Autonom Management, Dimberg Jernberg Management, Tiny Monsters and Monza Music Management, which will run publishing and management activities with the whole world as a market.

With both offices, social spaces and music studios under the same roof, Monza hopes to minimize the distance between the creative and operational work – and in that way create a more efficient collaboration model.

Tomas Jernberg, Managing Director says:

Monza wants to be the company that provides the conditions for artists, songwriters and producers to fulfill their visions all the way from creation to meeting their audience. We are a team consisting of management, A&R/Creative, Brand Partnerships, Digital Content Creation and project management. Our ambition is to establish a really strong alternative in the Nordic music industry, with the world as a market.

Niklas ‘Pankan’ Bergson, Manager & Partner says:

I started Autonom together with Per Hägglund 13 years ago because we felt that we wanted to be an independent management entirely on the artist’s terms. When Per decided to write and produce music full-time, I felt that I wanted to find a new context to take it further. When I met Andreas and Tomas, I felt that we had the same view on how to develop and build an interesting and modern management, where we can meet the challenges of the new era and have the opportunity to take advantage of and develop our artists without losing our basic idea.

Marie Dimberg, Manager & Partner says:

In an industry that has undergone enormous changes during the almost 40 years I have spent in it, the management role has been established, grown and greatly changed in recent years. The need for strong and professional management has never been greater as more and more artists and music creators become their own small labels and brands. To be able to grow and offer competence in all areas and bring in new people with new ideas, the idea of a management house like Monza felt obvious both to Tomas Jernberg and me. ‘Develop or die’, as it is called. Together with a number of competent people with varying experience, we see the future and intend to stick to the first mentioned – develop!

Monza Music Entertainment currently represents the following artists, songwriters and producers:

Management: Love Antell, Christopher (Dk), Peder Elias (No), Florence Valentin, Per Gessle, Gyllene Tider, Molly Hammar, Hederos & Hellberg, Maia Hirasawa, Hurula, Peter Jöback, Elias Kapari, Loney Dear, Nause, Roxette, Nicole Sabouné, Sakarias, Thåström, Titiyo, Bruno K. Öijer.

Publishing: John Alexis, A36, Cherrie, Harm Brothers, KJ, Pontus Persson, Ricky Rich & Dani M

More names are expected to be added shortly.

Photos by Fredrik Etoall.

Read the press release in Swedish HERE!