The Per Gessle Archives – Vol. 2 available on Spotify

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SpotifyTPGA_Vol.2 didn’t let us wait too long and made The Per Gessle Archives – Demos & Other Fun Stuff!, Vol. 2 available at midnight again. What can I say? Yet another sleepless night. But I could really spend all my Thursday nights like this until the box-set is out in September.

Besides 1-2 well-known demos and demos of well-known songs you can find more real gems on this album, too. There is even a demo from almost 30 years ago and oh yeah, that’s a hilarious one! Mannen med gitarr, which is my all time fave PG demo (as some of you also commented on an earlier post, I can see it’s your fave, too) well deserved its place in this set of Mr. G’s pearls. This way it will surely get more plays than it gets on the Tycker om när du tar på mej single. Now we get to know who to blame for it has never been recorded for an album.

Interesting to hear the first version of the Being with You demo. Decide yourself if you like this one or the other version you can find on Vol. 1 more. I definitely vote for the 2004 version, but it’s really great to hear different demos of the same song.

I have to mention that the variety of how Per can sing / say / pronounce the word ”beautiful” is too cool. Here we can find a totally new & hot version in Beautiful Girl.

This you can’t hear in the conversations, but Per shared it on Roxette Official earlier and you can find it in the PG about songs section, so I think it’s worth adding this background info to Stay (At Home, At Work, At Play):

Hahaha! Stay! At home, at work, at play! That last phrase came from a Sparks-song. I always loved that! This demo was recorded at Tits&Ass in the summer of 1995 with Micke Syd on drums, MP on bass guitar and me fooling around with loads of guitars. I love that solo!!! It took off with the lyrics and then I wrote the music together with MP, I think most of the chorus came from him actually. There are some chords in there I wouldn’t have used myself…. This was just after the CBB-tour had ended and I geared up for the first Gyllene Tider-comeback in 1996. Neither Rox nor myself recorded it “properly”, this is the only version that exists that I’m involved in. However, a Danish girl, Ann-Louise did a version of it. You’ll probably find it on YouTube.

 

The conversations are again fab. I love that Sven knows so much about Per’s music that he can always ask the right questions and this way we get to know loads of information not only related to the demos that are on this album, but also about other songs or albums. Great job, Sven and hats off, Mr. G! September seems to be too far away now…

 

The ultimate song poll! Which Roxette songs would you like to hear live? #1

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Roxette_tp_white_bgRoxette’s new world tour is around the corner, at least it feels like that with all the ticket-buying-stress for the countries that are already known. Per explained in an interview with one of the Australian newspapers that Marie has been calling him regarding songs to play live and that they will start rehearsing in September.

As some of you may know, we already run a poll back in 2010. “Silver Blue” was the winner and Roxette listened to the fans and played this song for all of us during the previous tour.

So we decided to start a set of polls and ask you to choose two non-single songs from each album that you would like to hear live. Each poll will last for a week, from Thursday to Thursday.  We will then present all the results to Marie and Per and see what happens, maybe some of the songs end up in the set list! We are sure this will at least bring back some memories and maybe you’ll even re-discover some favourite songs again.

So let’s start with “Pearls of Passion”. In this case we listed all the songs since probably many of us have never heard any of the songs live, besides “Soul Deep”. When was the last time you listened to this album?

Note you can choose up to 2 songs.

[yop_poll id=”4″]

Thanks for participating!
RXB Team

Per Gessle’s Sommartider wines get promoted

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Vinkompassen has just shared an advertisement of Sommartider wines from The Per Gessle Selection. More than that, if you are in Sweden and you are among the first 200 who order a case of 12 bottles from the deliciously refreshing Sommartider rosé or the summery Sommartider white, you get a personal greeting from Per himself. If anyone of you is getting that personal greeting, let us know what it is – if it’s not too personal. 😉

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjGldtRbB_E

New EP or full-scale album by Roxette

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Roxette_tp_white_bgAs you could hear it with your own ears in the Australian radio interview with Per, he started writing new songs for Roxette a couple of months ago and they will go to studio in August to record new material before they start rehearsing for the tour in September.

Now Per reveals in an interview with The New Zealand Herald that they are planning to do an EP with 4-5 songs. However, being the hit machine he is, there might be a new studio album coming! That’s what he says:

We’re talking about doing an EP, four or five songs. At the same time, knowing me, I write a lot and if everything goes well, it might as well be a full-scale album.

Fingers crossed for a full album!

 

Besides this, he tells what the secret behind one of pop’s most enduring relationships is:

It helps that we never had a romance. We’ve known each other all our lives and it’s like a brother-sister relationship. When Marie got ill in 2002, it was a nightmare for all of us. I’m so pleased that she’s still alive. To be able to do these tours again is just amazing.

We are all so pleased, too! Bring on the new album and the tour!

 

Australian media about Roxette’s tour: TV, radio and contest

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10172738_10152044402680178_3736147522337777958_nTour dates for Australia and New Zealand were announced this week and it seems Australians are very happy about the news! So here is a collection of what’s been going on this week on Australian media.

Newspapers have covered the news extensively, and are currently running a contest to win 10 double passes for each of the five Roxette concerts in Australia. You can find more details about the contest on News Corp Australia newspapers (state links: Daily Telegraph, The Advertiser, Herald Sun, Perth Now, Courier Mail).

And there were a few radio interviews with Per, like the one on KOFM 102.9 (see embedded audio below) radio or or Gold104.3 where Per revealed that he started writing new songs for Roxette some months ago and that they will get into the studio in August to record some new material and will start rehearsing in September. Per also explains he spends about 15-20 minutes a day updating Roxette’s Facebook page, and that he likes this kind of communication, “in the old days there was such a huge gap between you and the audience, nowadays you can interact with your fans in a total different way.” He also tells that he likes to know what fans think about this and that, “for me it’s pretty cool to find out what people are interested in, sometimes I ask people questions what they want to hear, and you get like 2000 answers, it’s fun to read.” Regarding Eurovision Song Contest 2014, Per thinks the winner song by Conchita Wurst’s “Rise Like a Phoenix” is a nice song, but he thinks the show is very long. Besides that, he wrote some songs for the Song Contest many years ago (without any big success).

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/149624368″ params=”color=0066cc&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Australian TV also reported about the come back of Marie and Per to down under:

 

The Today Show