Per Gessle

You might remember that Alexander Pärleros did a podcast interview with Per Gessle appr. 4 years ago and shared it in February 2018 on Framgångspodden. Now it was time for another round with Mr. G to ask him about success, creativity and the loss of Marie Fredriksson. You can listen to the podcast HERE (no. 540 is the interview with Per).

Alexander is very happy that Per is back on his podcast. He introduces PG as a living legend. Together with Roxette, he put Sweden on the map and as a front figure in Gyllene Tider he also created immortal hits. He is undeniably one of Sweden’s most successful artists and greatest music exports of all time. He is currently on an unplugged tour.

Per remembers that the first Framgångspodden episode with him came out in 2018. Alexander asks PG if he is good at remembering the years – what happened when. Per tells he is not really good at that, but when he thinks about a year, he thinks about what he was doing then. When he thinks about Gyllene Tider’s Dags att tänka på refrängen album, it was 2013, Roxette’s Have A Nice Day came out in 1999. Per also tells that if you ask his wife or his friends if he is good at remembering dates, they will for sure reply he isn’t.

Alexander tells that last time he asked Per about what he eats for breakfast and PG replied he always eats the same thing: coffee with milk and 2 sandwiches. One with apricot marmalade & cheese and one with ham & mustard & chives. Alexander is curious if anything has changed since then. Per laughs and tells he still eats the same, he only added tomato. He says there is a clash in the mouth between tomato and apricot marmalade if you eat them at the same time, but it’s fine if you have a little break between the two. Alexander laughs and says it’s nice to hear that even PG can develop his eating habits. Per tells it’s the same with lunch. If he is on tour or out in town, he won’t eat the same, but at home he likes it like that.

Alexander asks Per if there is any routine PG was doing during this year, anything he is doing for feeling good. Mr. G tells he thinks he is fine, he tries to walk 1 hour each day if the weather outside is not so scary, like in Stockholm today, drizzling all day. While walking, he is either on the phone or listening to music or just contemplating. It has become more than a routine, it’s rather a way to exist, which is important for him. But he likes routines – to eat dinner at a set time or watch TV almost always at the same time.

Alexander is doing the interview via Zoom and since he sees Per’s office, he asks what that picture of a cow is on the wall. Mr. G tells it’s an Andy Warhol painting that he has since the end of the 80’s.

Alexander tells Per goes on an unplugged tour and it seems to be quite sold out, he couldn’t really find tickets for that. Mr. G tells there are a few tickets left for Karlstad and Halmstad’s second gig and maybe a few for Linköping and Norrköping. [So the interview was done before 5th November 2021. /PP] The biggest venue they play is Filadelfia in Stockholm, for 1,400 people. The whole idea came from the pandemic, because there were very strict rules. He has a hotel in Tylösand and decided to play there 2 acoustic gigs for a smaller amount of people, 475 in the crowd. It went so fine that in the end they did 10 shows. It was much fun and intimate. Per has never played gigs like these and he says that you become naked in a way at such a concert. It’s very different to when you play a big production e.g. at Stockholm Globe Arena or in big soccer stadiums. Here it’s more silent, acoustic and there are anecdotes he tells in between the songs. It’s a very exciting concept for Per. Doing the same concept at theatres around Sweden is going to be much fun.

Alexander says it sounds like something Sweden needs at this time after the restrictions. Per thinks everyone in Sweden needs a party most of all. He says that’s why he will also play Gyllene Tider hits. The guys are laughing. Per says it’s gonna be nice and calm. The band will be sitting, the audience will be sitting. It fits the season and it’s going to be a lovely autumn for everyone.

Alexander asks Per about Marie, telling that PG lost his mother, sister and brother in a short period and then Marie in 2019. Mr. G says it was of course a difficult period. Marie was ill for a long time and mentally you were prepared in a way that one day she will no longer be with us. It was the same with his mother, who died at the age of 88. His sister had cancer and his brother had lung cancer. His brother was only 62 when he died. It happened very suddenly, so it was tough. But life goes on, however, there is no day you don’t think of them. He is reminded of Marie all the time. He learned to live with that. The older you get, the more people disappear from your life. Also your idols. E.g. Charlie Watts from The Rolling Stones passed away a couple of weeks ago. All Per’s super favourite artists, e.g. David Bowie or Tom Petty have left us. You get older, so it will go on like this.

Alexander tells Per grew up in Furet district of Halmstad and he is curious if Per remembers when he got his first guitar. Mr. G tells they had an unplayable guitar at home, which had only two strings. So all you could do with that was striking tough poses. He also remembers that at school they had to do some woodwork and he sawed out an electric guitar. It had no strings though, it just looked like a guitar. He thinks his brother had a guitar, but that was crap too. The first real guitar that could also be played was bought by Per’s mother. Per got it quite late, in 1975 if he remembers right, when he was 16. It was a nylon-string guitar, a Bjärton Estrella made in Sweden. He learned fingerpicking on it, playing Leonard Cohen songs. It wasn’t too rocky, he says. Per bought his first real electric guitar when they started with Gyllene Tider. Some of them travelled to London to buy guitars and amplifiers. He had a summer job at Fammarps mushrooms and weighed mushrooms. All the money he earned he spent on a wine-red Gibson Les Paul Custom. Dave Davies in The Kinks had one like that, so PG wanted to have the same. The only difference was that Per’s was a 2-pickup, while Dave Davies’ was a 3-pickup. It was stupid enough that they had no money to pay the VAT, so they smuggled the guitars. They got caught and came home empty-handed. Per then wrote a long letter of apology to the customs. He wrote that it wasn’t their intention to break the law and they didn’t know they should have paid VAT. They got a fine of 2,000 crowns, which was a fortune back then, but got their instruments back. True story, he says. Per still has that guitar and played it on GT’s first album, on Flickorna på TV2, for example.

Per tells the first setup of Gyllene Tider was Micke Syd, MP, PG and Janne Carlsson, but after Janne left the band, Anders Herrlin and Göran Fritzon joined them. It must have been January 1979. They got a record deal with EMI the same year and recorded their first album. There were a couple of years when they tried to find their sound. They came from nowhere when they met and they spent all their time rehearsing and learning the craft. They had to learn how to write a song, how the bass works, how a band works at all. They started sending their recordings to all record labels in spring and they got their EMI contract in autumn, so all went quite fast anyway. 3 years after he got his first nylon-string guitar. GT played 6 gigs in front of an audience before they became No. 1 with Flickorna på TV2.

Alexander asks how Flickorna på TV2 came about. Per says MP and he were influenced by Elvis Costello’s Watching The Detectives. It has a strange reggae beat. They wanted to record Flickorna på TV2 that way. It didn’t go so well, but that was the song’s identity, pretending to be reggae. It wasn’t until they sat in the studio to record their first album to figure out how to simplify the beat. The song really stood out. The lyric idea came from Hasse & Tage (a Swedish comedian duo). Their word play of the only thing they get to turn on when they get home is the TV was the base. There was also a lot of talk on TV2 back then, Catrin Jacobs was on. It was in Per’s teenage years. Alexander asks if the guys met the girls on TV2 and if the girls thanked for the song, because even more people started watching the TV. PG says he can’t remember, but there weren’t too many channels in that era anyway.

The single was released right before Christmas 1979 and the album was released in February 1980. It wasn’t hysterical yet, but in autumn 1980 when they released När vi två blir en as a single it started to become very big. The song was No. 1 in Sweden for months and that led them to their second album, Moderna Tider. Then came an explosion: record in sales and a huge indoor tour in Sweden. He lived at his mother back then and all what was movable, disappeared. Even the laundry on dry in the garden. Fans stole everything. Haha. When he turned 22 in January 1981, he got appr. 3,000 letters. There were 3 big sacks full of letters in front of his mother’s house. Then came 100 letters each day or so.

Per also talks about the accident in Kristianopel that happened before a GT concert in 1981. 3 fans died because of stampede at the entrance. It was tough, they couldn’t imagine such things could happen.

Another hysterical era in Per’s career was the beginning of the 90’s when Roxette toured South America. Appr. 1,000 fans were waiting in front of their hotel, singing songs at night. PG tells all the Formula 1 teams were at the same hotel and they were complaining. When Per was down in the hall and the F1 guys realized he is from Roxette, they said: „Oh you, you fucker, you kept us up all night!” Haha.

Alexander is curious how Roxette came about. Per says it came step by step. He met Marie at the end of the 70’s at the rehearsal studio they shared, Gyllene Tider and Marie’s band, Strul. She was singing fantastically and played the keyboards. She had a kind of musicality Per had never seen before. They simply became friends. Gyllene Tider broke through, but Marie’s band didn’t have as much success then. They shared a dream to succeed with their music abroad. It was a natural way of development for Gyllene Tider to try their luck abroad and they recorded their fourth album, The Heartlan Café in English. It was released in the US, but nothing really happened with that. Marie’s primary goal was to get a record deal in Sweden. Her career went uphill, while Per’s went downhill. GT broke up and PG’s solo stuff didn’t go too well either. Per was asked to write a song for Pernilla Wahlgren. He wrote Svarta glas, which he thought was perfect for Pernilla, but she never recorded it. Per’s demo was circulating at EMI and the boss, Rolf Nygren suggested PG to write English lyrics to it and record it with Marie. Rolf thought then they would have the perfect song to succeed with abroad. Per thought it was a brilliant idea and Marie was also in, however, her producer and her own record label thought she shouldn’t work together with Per, but rather focus on her solo career. Nevertheless, Marie wanted to work with Per and they recorded Neverending Love. It didn’t become a hit abroad, but a big hit in Sweden and that led to the chance they could record the first Roxette album. Everything went so fast and Per had no songs in English. However, he had songs in Swedish he wrote for his never-released upcoming solo album and quickly translated the texts to English. There were a lot of coincidences that led to Roxette. After the first Roxette album, Marie went back to her Swedish solo stuff, while Per, triggered by Roxette’s success in Sweden, started writing songs for the album that became Look Sharp!

Mr. G talks about the story of It Must Have Been Love ending up in Pretty Woman and tells that the movie’s title first was 3,000. Per talks about Germany, which was the biggest market in Europe back then, but nothing really happened with Roxette outside Sweden. Their German record label told them they should write a Christmas song, because then it might be easier for them to be played on the radio. So in 1987 Per wrote a Christmas song, It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted). They released it in Sweden and it became a gold record, but Germans didn’t like it. The record label in Germany didn’t release it. Marie went back to her Swedish solo, Per started writing songs for the next Roxette album, so IMHBL was kind of forgotten. After they broke through, they were sitting in Los Angeles, having lunch with their US record label and they were asked to be part of the soundtrack to Pretty Woman. They told David Bowie was in, Robert Palmer and several other EMI artists as well. Per couldn’t go home and write a new song for the movie, because they were constantly on the road doing promotions. They were heading to New Zealand then. He said, „but we have a damn good Christmas song!” They updated the intro a bit, took away the Christmas reference, Marie sang a bit and they were ready and gave the recording to their US label. Roxette was recording their next album, Joyride in 1990 and at the old EMI studio in Skärmarbrink Per got a call from the director of Pretty Woman, Garry Marshall. Per didn’t know who he was, they never met. Garry just wanted to tell that he loved the song so much he had given it a great place in the movie and there is no dialogue over it. Per hadn’t seen the movie, so he didn’t know what Garry was talking about, but thanked for it. Marie and Per were invited for the screening of the movie. Mr. G remembers that they were watching it in a theatre and there was an earthquake and someone told them „don’t worry, this is an earthquake-safe building!” Per thinks it’s cool they could be part of the movie, because it became a huge success, one of the biggest movies of all time and IMHBL became a huge song as well. Still one of their biggest songs. Anytime Per hears it he thinks of Marie, how amazing she was, what a fantastic singer she was. PG tells you can find hundreds of covers of IMHBL on YouTube, but there is no version that comes close to Marie’s capacity of singing it.

Per tells again that Marie and he had this common ambition to try to succeed abroad. They loved the romanticism in old pop and rock culture. It was very different vs. what it is today. They wanted to go outside Sweden and play pop and rock music. It was a dream they shared. They also recognized very early that they were good at different things. Marie was an unbeatable singer and Per’s job was rather being the director. Writing songs, planning and networking. Per was always triggered by success, then he became double as good next time. Other people become stressed by success and take a step back, but Per has always been the opposite. The more they worked, the more Per wanted to work. That was also a difference between Per and Marie. The bigger they became, the less Marie wanted to work, Per laughs. They were a very good team.

Alexander asks PG about the creative process. He had written a lot of big hits during that period. Per tells he has never found a formula. There is a big difference between him and today’s pop music. He wrote almost everything himself, text and music. Nowadays artists work a lot in teams of 6-8 different people. One writes the melody, the other finds the groove etc. and that makes it less personal. Roxette’s success is based on several things: they decided to stay in Stockholm, not to record in Los Angeles or London or New York, to work with Swedish musicians and a Swedish producer, Clarence Öfwerman; Per’s songs and Marie’s fantastic voice that sounded like no one else. ABBA did the same and no one else sounds like ABBA. The problem nowadays is that there are too many songs that sound exactly the same. Everyone works with the same computer program, all have the same plugin and same sound. It’s very hard to stand out. When you work the old, organic way, you play real piano, real saxophone, real guitar or real drums, there is a unique sound. If you think about Charlie Watts for example, no one else sounds like him. If you look at the premiere video of their current tour, it sounds OK, but it doesn’t sound like The Rolling Stones now. Charlie’s style affected the whole band. It’s the same with Roxette. Jonas Isacsson’s fantastic guitar playing style put a stamp on Roxette’s early recordings. Per’s songwriting style and how he builds a song also affects the sound, Marie’s singing style and the choice of keys as well. Clarence’s fantastic arrangement and sound choice too. All this makes it special. But Per has no special way of writing a song. He was writing songs constantly. He thinks this comes from the fact that he grew up with the music of the 60’s and 70’s, which is very melodic. Everything he works with is adjusted to melodies. He listens to melodies and harmonies in a different way. It’s hard for him to listen to hip hop music, because there is almost no melody. It’s more grooves and sounds than real melody.

Alexander asks Per to tell an example how a hit of Per’s was written, if he had a phrase first. PG tells he always has his antennas out. It can be an expression or anything to start with. For Joyride it was e.g. a note his then girlfriend, now wife left on the piano, „Hej din tok, jag älskar dig!” and that became „Hello, you fool, I love you!” It sounds like a super lovely chorus. Then he read an interview with Paul McCartney where he said writing songs with John Lennon was like being on a long joyride. So it became „Hello, you fool, I love you! C’mon join the joyride!” It’s a damn good slogan, it’s positive and exciting and colorful. There were a lot of associations and a world came alive in Per’s head, so it went very fast to write this song. He wrote Spending My Time the same day in the afternoon. It was a great Saturday, he laughs.

The Look was written when he bought a new synth and tried to learn how to program it. He used chords A, G and D. It was extremely simple and then he started singing the first thing that came out of his head, „walking like a man, hitting like a hammer, she’s a juvenile scam”. It didn’t sound wise, it meant nothing, it was more about the rhythm and sound. Per’s idea was that Marie should sing it, that’s why it was „he’s got the look” first, but she didn’t want to sing it, because she thought it was too strange and didn’t fit her style. It’s like rap in a way. She was just singing the chorus and that also made the song special.

Per says sometimes it’s like solving a puzzle when you write songs, other times it can be that you write a long lyric and you find a melody half year later and you edit the text to match it. Spending My Time’s lyrics was written before there was music to it. There are a lot of examples. No song is like the other.

Alexander asks Per when he is in his most creative status, maybe in the evening or at weekends or when drinking a good wine. PG says he tries to work as little as possible. He is not the type who goes to the studio and plays the instruments 5-6 hours a day. He only writes when he has something on his mind. There has to be a project or a purpose to write. Mr. G usually writes during the day and not really after drinking wine at brunch, he laughs. He says he must be focused. Per works very intensively when he is working, in his own bubble. His wife leaves him in his bubble until he is ready. PG doesn’t know where his creativity comes from. He likes to write and it’s the way of expressing himself.

Alexander is curious about how it was when Roxette was huge in the US. Per tells it came in different stages. When they broke through with The Look, no one knew who they were. They were from Sweden, which was very strange and most people thought they would have a mayfly’s life. When they released their second single, Dressed For Success in the US it peaked at No. 14 on Billboard. Radios didn’t want to play DFS, it was only The Look that existed from Roxette. Then the third single was Listen To Your Heart and the radios started playing it and it became No. 1. So it happened in different stages. It was overwhelming to have success there and Per thinks they should have focused more on the US. But they had success everywhere else too: in Australia, Japan, South America, Europe etc. The US became only one of the markets. If they focused more on it, they should have stayed there for a year and block everything else, because the US is so huge from New York to Los Angeles. They decided to go everywhere else instead. They had to pay the price for that in the US. Their American record label was bought up and then they kind of lost that market.

Per is thankful for the journey they could do with Roxette. Before they broke through with The Look, they had been working in Sweden for 10 years as professional musicians and they knew it very well that it’s very difficult to succeed internationally. When it happened at the same time everywhere, they were happy: „oh, we have to travel to Sydney, we have to travel to Tokyo, we have to travel to Moscow”. They were thankful that people were interested in them all around the world. When they travelled to South America, there was an economic crisis in the world and a lot of artists cancelled their tours in South America, because you could earn nothing there. Marie and Per still wanted to go, because they thought it would be fun to play their songs in there. Everything exploded then. Theatres of the capacity of 4,000 became soccer stadiums instead and it became a gigantic tour for Roxette. Their experience there was incomparable. That was the greatest memory on the Joyride tour. They never played soccer stadiums before. It’s like Ullevi with 50-60 thousand people. Everyone was singing along. When they arrived to Cordoba, there was a long line of people from the airport to the hotel waving to them. It was magical to be on that whole journey. The first night they played in Buenos Aires there were 50,000 people and they had to add an extra show the next day and sold the rights to broadcast it on Argentina TV1 and the other existing channel broadcast Roxette live in Zurich from half a year ago.

To the question how they succeeded Per replies they were at the right place at the right time and they could deliver. They were of course ambitious and determined. Mr. G says when you work with your own art and own creativity, it’s actually not like a job, it’s more like your hobby, your personality. His whole existence is his work in a way. There is not other art like music, he thinks. You can be on any content, play to different nations with different religions or cultural backgrounds, speaking different languages, there is nothing in common among them, but they all sing along the same songs. It’s amazing to be part of it and hear your songs being sung by fans all around the world. You have to pinch your arms all the time. And those songs are still huge. New generations are coming and they also like them. It’s fantastic.

Alexander asks Per if there is anything he wishes he would have known when he was 20-25 what he knows now. Per thinks there is one thing that is better when you are getting older and it’s the experience that most of the things can be sorted out. When you are young you are more stressed and you are rather on the edge all the time. When you get older you realize that not everything is so important. The unplugged tour, where his music is so much in focus in that intimate atmosphere, he feels like he couldn’t have done 25 years ago. Now he dares to do it and it feels more natural now to take such a step. Mr. G says it wasn’t a real answer to Alexander’s question, but it’s difficult to answer that, because each part of your life is so different. You are in different situations, e.g. when you are 20-25 years old, you build things, you might find your partner and raise a family, then when you are 30 there is another stage and when you are 40 it’s again a different thing. Per says experience and routine help a lot. Go and play each night for an audience and that becomes an everyday routine. Then you have this feeling you want to leave your comfort zone a bit in between. Per thinks when you work with your creativity it’s important to try new things. If you change one key figure in the team before each major project to bring new blood, the others will stand a little on their toes to prove themselves in front of that new member and everyone can be influenced by him. You become a bit different when new people come into your circle. Per thinks it’s good to think about such things.

Alexander asks Per about the worst setbacks in his career. Mr. G tells he didn’t have too many. The worst was when GT broke up in 1984 and he released his second solo album in 1985. Those were very weird times. After his second solo album he had no record deal anymore and started writing songs for other artists. It didn’t suit him to be a hired gun. He always wanted to write for himself. Actually, before Roxette there were appr. 2 years like that.

Alexander asks how it affected Per privately when he was tired or a little lost in his career. Per says he tries to avoid boredom by having many branches on his tree. He had Roxette, Gyllene Tider, his solo stuff, Mono Mind. When he gets tired of one thing, he starts dealing with another. It helped him a lot even when Roxette was huge, to e.g. go back to Gyllene Tider a bit, because it was different and it was in Swedish. That’s how he tries to fool himself. He has never had a mental collapse or anything like that. He tells he can be confused how the music industry has changed during the past decade with streaming and all that. How the pop romanticism disappeared with its album sleeves and videos. We live in a different time now. Pop music’s sole purpose is to reflect its own era. If you look at pop music of the 60’s and 70’s, it reflects very well that era. Fashion, music, movies, all went hand in hand. If you look at today’s pop music, it’s efficient and based on formulas, everything has to be in a certain way. Radio channels play the same type of music all the time. For Gyllene Tider from 1979 from Halmstad it would be very diffult to make it today. They were rather outsiders and then managed to become mainstream in a strange way. Roxette was outsider since they came from Sweden. When they were to release The Look in England, their English record label said in their press release tat Roxette was an Amercian band. Today it’s difficult to succeed when you are an outsider. If you look at all the Netflix movies or HBO series, they follow the same formulas to be efficient. It makes it cheaper to produce that way. When they worked on Joyride, they had no budget. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Alexander agrees that nowadays everyone wants to earn on what they do as soon as possible. Per can understand that it’s like this in the hardcore business, but this way there is a compromise between the artistic expression and earning money.

There comes the section of the last three questions. The first is if Per has any Netflix or HBO series to recommend. Mr. G thinks The Undoing is very good, he watched Midnight Mass too – Åsa likes horror movies, Per says.

The next question is what Per suggests those who want to go outside the box. The only hint Per can tell is that you have to follow your gut feeling all the time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will become extremely rich or successful, but you will feel good doing that. At the same time, he has to tell that his personality and his way of thinking wouldn’t have worked today, because he is not the one who wants to compromise. It’s always sad to hear when nowadays a record label doesn’t want to sign artists who play real instruments, because it takes more time for them to become good. It’s easier to work on computers. That’s how it works today, but it’s good to know how it is to play in a band, when everyone plays the same song. It feels fantastic to be a part of that. Mr. G has no secret recipe, he suggests to do your thing at full throttle, pedal to the metal.

The last question is what Per will be doing in the coming years. PG says he is touring in autumn (2021), then in spring (2022) he releases a new English album and hopes he will be able to tour with it around the world. He thinks it’s a lovely album and he is very satisfied with it. He has no other plans yet. Throw in the towel, he laughs.

Alexander thanks Per for being there and they say goodbye to each other.