On 3rd June, Per Gessle shared an announcement in a video that he will perform on Hotel Tylösand’s small stage in Solgården this summer. He will dive into his huge song catalogue and do stripped down, relaxed, acoustic gigs. Part of his band, Helena Josefsson, Clarence Öfwerman, Magnus Börjeson and Christoffer Lundquist will join him on stage.
Oh, how I’ve longed to meet my audience again! Now that life is starting to open up after the pandemic, I take the opportunity to do some acoustic gigs at home in Halmstad, the best summer city in the world. Major and minor in different colours are promised.
The concerts start at 20.30. Admission is from 19.00. The first 4 shows sold out in no time when tickets went on sale at 10.00 on 4th June, so 4 extra gigs were added, for which the ticket sales starts at 12.00 CEST on 7th June.
Dates 7th July Wednesday – sold out!
8th July Thursday – sold out!
13th July Tuesday – sold out!
14th July Wednesday – sold out!
21st July Wednesday – sold out!
22nd July Thursday – only a very few places left, together with room booking
28th July Wednesday – sold out!
29th July Thursday – sold out!
2nd August Monday – only a very few places left, together with room booking
3rd August Tuesday – only a very few places left, together with room booking
UPDATE: After the rush for tickets for the second 4 July gigs, again the phone and website crashed on 7th June at the release of tickets. For the last 2 shows in August tickets will be released at 12.00 CEST on 8th June. So altogether it will be 10 unplugged shows in the end!
Wow! Totally amazing. I’m incredibly happy and proud that so many want to come to Hotel Tylösand and hear us play and sing. I’ll do everything I can to make those evenings to remember.
– says Per.
The current restriction rules will be followed. The availability of tickets is therefore very limited, appr. 500 per gig, as hotel manager Elisabeth Haglund says.
Of course, thousands would love to join from all over the world, but the travelling restrictions make it impossible for many fans from outside Sweden to attend these gigs. If not a live stream (for example of the last show? – fans would even be happy to pay for it!), then maybe recording a show and releasing it after all gigs are done would be fab!
Hallandsposten did an interview with Per where he says he is looking very much forward to these gigs. He doesn’t know yet what songs the setlist will contain, but he will do mainly Swedish songs from his Gyllene Tider and solo catalogue. He also talks about his upcoming English solo album that it is now planned to be released this autumn or winter.
Mix Megapol organized a charity event to be broadcast on the radio and their Facebook channel at 19.30 CET, 25th April. Due to the pandemic, the venue couldn’t be filled with listeners, but by donating 100 SEK, a listener helped to place a teddy bear in the audience. And wow, there were tons of bears in the crowd! Per Gessle, Lena Philipsson and Petra Marklund performed at “The Teddy Bear Concert” on Mix Megapol’s Guldscen this evening. The show was recorded yesterday, 24th April.
Lena Philipsson was first with 5 songs and she was followed by Petra Marklund with 4 of her hits. Last but not least, Mr. G appeared on stage together with Helena Josefsson, Clarence Öfwerman, Christoffer Lundquist and Magnus Börjeson and he chose to do an acoustic performance. They played 5 songs (3 PG solos and 2 Roxette hits). Petra Marklund joined them for the last one, Listen To Your Heart. We had a chance to experience Petra singing this song at the tribute event for Marie Fredriksson in January 2020.
It was lovely to hear these 5 songs in an acoustic arrangement again. Per’s vocals sounded very emotional and Helena was singing beautifully as usual. Clarence, Chris and Magnus also added to the intimacy of this little set with their playing.
After the Late Night Concert in December 2020 we all hoped for more acoustic appearances by Per. Even if we hoped for real live events, corona still doesn’t let us enjoy such happenings in real life, but fortunately, we had this opportunity to have Mr. G in our living rooms once again thanks to Mix Megapol.
Per Gessle setlist
På promenad genom stan
It Must Have Been Love
Ömhet
Tycker om när du tar på mej
Listen To Your Heart
After the concert, Per thanked for watching and listening. A private teddy bear was sitting in front of him while performing. Would be nice to know the story of that one. Maybe it’s from Per’s childhood? Who knows. Looked cool anyway. The teddy bear too. Haha.
All donations related to the event fully go to Barncancerfonden (Childhood Cancer Foundation). Collecting donations started on 29th March and the amount reached more than 1.3 million SEK the day before the concert and one could still donate during the event, so in the end the sum was: 1.614.110 SEK! The teddies will be donated as well.
In case you missed the concert, you can watch it HERE!
Live Nation and TV4 follow up the acclaimed TV format Late Night Concert with a second season. This time we get to see some of Sweden’s most beloved artists perform from Cirkus & Hasselbacken in Stockholm without an audience, with a completely new extra stage. The program is broadcast on Wednesdays and Thursdays in December with a final on Christmas Eve. All six episodes of the second season can be seen on TV4, TV4 Play and C More.
Late Night Concert is a collaboration between Live Nation and TV4, which premiered this spring and was recorded at an empty Gröna Lund. The format was born out of the current situation when live music has fallen silent when concerts have been forced to scale down and is based on the idea of spreading live music out into the country and home to the TV couches.
In the second season, which premieres on the second of December, artists such as Agnes, Miss Li, Jill Johnson, Per Gessle, Myra Granberg, Carola, Astrid S, Victor Leksell and others will appear. In addition to a strong line-up with some of Sweden’s most well-known and playing artists, the program will be broadcast from the classic concert arena Cirkus in Stockholm. New for the season is also the brand new stage “It’s Hits”, which summarizes the music year 2020 when some of the most appreciated artists and songs on Spotify in Sweden take the stage.
“After this summer’s success, we have been overwhelmed by tributes from viewers who appreciate the new concert format. It’s great that we have managed to deliver a high quality and innovative concert experience. TV4 loves music and it is a brilliant example of a unique program format born during this pandemic “, says Jonathan Nordin, Executive Producer at TV4.
“Late Night Concert has not only been extremely appreciated by viewers and artists, it has also created new hits. Zara Larsson’s and Carola’s duet “Säg Mig Var Du Står” which was born in the program has topped the lists on Spotify with over 10 million listens and is already a modern classic “, says Peter Björklund, Marketing Partnership Manager at Live Nation.
Late Night Concert is recorded at Cirkus without an audience and is broadcast on TV4. The program can also be seen on TV4 Play and C More. More artists are announced on an ongoing basis. Partners in the program are Coca-Cola, Karl Fazer, Mio, Polestar, Sonos and Spotify.
Broadcast times – Late Night Concert winter 2020
Wednesday 2/12 23:00, Late Night Concert Part1 – Carola, Mariette, Samuel Ljungbladh
Thursday 3/12 23:00, Late Night Concert Part 2 – Miss Li, Myra Granberg & Newkid
Wednesday 9/12 23:00, Late Night Concert Part 3 – Agnes, Madi Banja & Sandro Cavazza Wednesday 16/12 23:00, Late Night Concert Part 4 – Per Gessle, Astrid S & Victor Leksell
Thursday 17/12 23:00, Late Night Concert Part 5 – Jill Johnson, Robin Stjernberg, Smith & Thell
Christmas Eve 24/12 20:00, Christmas Concert – Late Night Christmas
Concerts are appr. 45 minutes long. The show will probably be available for watching in Sweden only.
It turned out already some days after Roxette’s very successful Warsaw gig in June that they would play in Poland’s capital once again in 2015. What also turned out quite fast is that the concert was announced as a corporate event, the 25th anniversary of Inter Cars. The company planned to celebrate with a huge party in the National Stadium in Warsaw, inviting their best clients. Besides other Polish artists, they thought Roxette is the band they should invite as well for such a milestone celebration in their history.
Pic by Patrícia Peres
The venue is quite huge. Approximately 60,000 people fit in the stadium, so we thought there would surely be enough space for some hardcore Roxers even if they are not clients of the company. We tried to move every stone to get invitations, contacted the headquarters in Warsaw, checked the possibilities with their affiliates in several cities in Poland, as well as the local Inter Cars affiliates in other countries. We even tried our best to contact clients of Inter Cars to find out if there are any invitations left to offer them for Roxers. Trying to contact the company as a fan or as RoxetteBlog, from Poland or from abroad didn’t help. They seemed to be strict and refused any queries, insisting on the fact that the gala was for their clients only. To cut a long story short, some Polish fans – Basia Konarzewska and our RoxBlog team mate Tomasz Wysocki among them – managed to obtain some client invitations, so a handful of Roxers could attend the party in the end. We’re all very grateful to those who helped. Some of us could even manage to change their seated tickets to standing ones, however, there was a golden circle, which was too big and only VIP people could enter it. So most of the hardcore fans ended up either in the front of the normal standing area or in the seats at different sectors more in the back of the stadium. Anyway, even Christoffer said they were not allowed to invite guests, so they were surprised we could manage to get tickets and hearing this we were proud of that.
When the gig was announced we thought the band would play 2-3 songs or maybe 5-6, because they were announced as “the icing on the cake”. Then there were rumours it might be a complete concert, so we started hoping for the festival setlist. The agenda Inter Cars shared some days before the event confirmed there should be a 1.5-hour-long Rox show.
Before the gala started, Per went up on stage to check it at around 18:45 for 1 minute. While he was going backstage, some staff members or Inter Cars employees stopped him to ask for autographs. He of course signed what they wanted.
Pic by Patrícia Peres
Not long before the celebration started at 20:00, a bat flied in and tried to find his way out desperately. We hope he managed. Before Roxette we saw 7-8 other Polish artists (bands and dancers), as well as some company-related interviews and we heard company speeches, too. The stage set looked awesome and for a 25th anniversary it was a very impressive gala. Actually, the stage was so high that in the VIP golden circle you couldn’t see all parts of it very well, but all other standing and seated spots were too far from the stage. So I couldn’t say there was a perfect spot in the stadium.
What we realized already during the other acts was that there were many cameras filming the crowd and the stage from different angles. There were also huge screens, so at least everyone could see what was happening on the stage.
Each perfomer had the time they had left shown on a monitor in front of them, but several artists didn’t finish their little gig (the plan was 15 minute per performer) in time. Because of that Roxette got on stage 20-25 minutes later than planned, some minutes after 23:00 (instead of the planned 22:40). We started worrying about the setlist being cut shorter. The Roxette crew got 20 minutes to rearrange the stage and they did a good job, as usual. During these 20 minutes all countries’ representatives where Inter Cars is present were called up to the stage. We would have loved to see the crew doing their job instead though.
Our time had come and Marie, Per and the band kicked off their performance with Sleeping In My Car. Despite the huge Inter Cars stage set with all the screens they used their own stage set, the one from the XXX tour, keeping only the 2 huge screens on the 2 sides of the stage. They used 3 blinds from the 5, which was a bit strange, because the stage was really huge, so 5 would have fitted more. But it still looked OK.
There was a 1-month-long break between the last show and yesterday’s appearance, so Marie had her time to rest and you could see it did her good. She was in a very good mood, smiling all the time, walking quite good with BoJo up and down the stage. Her voice was the most powerful during Listen To Your Heart. The ending of the song sounded fantastic again.
We discussed it’s maybe because of the huge stage or because of the fact that we saw the whole thing from a larger distance, but Per wasn’t as active as usual. He was of course bouncing from one part of the stage to the other and animating the crowd, doing his circles during Joyride for example, but even the guitar fights with Chris seemed to be less than we got used to.
Pic by Patrícia Peres
What we missed very much by standing / sitting further away from the stage is definitely seeing their faces, their facial expressions from a closer distance, because watching them on the screens is not the same. Being far away from the stage you might think you can’t miss a thing, because you see the whole stage at once, but actually, you seem to miss more by looking at the screen on the left, then realizing something else what’s not on the screen is happening on the stage, so you look there, but the faces are tiny, so you try to check the screens again if they show Marie or Per with a close-up… Oh well… This distance is not really for the hardcore fans. You totally miss the emotional part, not mentioning the eye contacts.
The sound of the stadium wasn’t the best of all. Roxette sounded good, but sometimes the sound echoed, which was quite strange. Another crappy thing was that the crowd couldn’t be heard at all. Even if we were singing along Spending My Time, no one could hear it. The band didn’t hear us, so they got confused how to move on with the song. After the usual singing along part was over, Per didn’t really know if he should say anything to the mic if it was fantastic or what, because he didn’t hear anything. Marie got also confused and didn’t start singing again. Per realized something wasn’t OK, so he walked back to Marie, miming her how the song goes on and then she got it and SMT was continued after long seconds of silence. It was a bit better at faster songs, but our It Must Have Been Love sing-along was the same silent and Per again wasn’t sure about telling anything about it and our nanananas during The Look or ”She rox you like a baby” during Joyride wasn’t the same powerful as at any other shows. Have to mention the balloon thing. We had some with us, but it took like 3-5 seconds for them to disappear after we released them. The wider crowd didn’t have a clue what to do with them.
Pic by Patrícia Peres
Regarding the setlist, they skipped 3 songs from the latest wider setlist: Crash! Boom! Bang!, The Heart Shaped Sea and Watercolours In The Rain / Paint. Fortunately, they kept Crush On You in. Woohoo! It was funny enough that we didn’t realize CBB was left out until we had a nice chat with Jakob (Christoffer’s technician) after the show. We insisted on they left out only THSS and WITR/Paint when he said there was one more song. We looked at each other… the hardcores… it can’t be, then he said CBB and we face-palmed ourselves… Haha. Well, we were happy about hearing the more powerful songs, skipping some slower ballads.
There were some funny moments when for example Marie asked the crowd before It Must Have Been Love: ”Are you feeling good?” There was a little crowd reaction confirming we felt good, but certainly it wasn’t too powerful. Marie anyway said into the mic: ”Good!” Then Per started with his usual talk before IMHBL (hairdos, shoulder pads etc.), but this time out of the blue he added Samantha Fox after Milli Vanilli and Modern Talking as ’80s bands. The cutest was when before Marie started singing the song, they held each other’s hands. Too lovely. You can watch the talking and the hand-holding moment in THIS video.
The catwalk wasn’t used very often, but Per and Chris went there doing their guitar fights sometimes. One of those ”fights” you can watch in THIS video, the ending of She’s Got Nothing On (But The Radio). Dea and Magnus went to the catwalk only at the end of The Look, while Chris went off the stage to play the guitar down there at the golden circle part of the stadium.
The catwalk was also a ”pick catcher”… Most of the plectrums Per was throwing landed on the catwalk ground, so they never reached anyone. 1-2 picks flew to the VIP crowd, not too many.
By the way, we tried to go to the golden circle part of the crowd area, but the security team didn’t let us go, not even for the last 2 songs. The strange thing was that the show being a corporate gig and that all other acts didn’t come back after they left the stage, a huge part of the crowd wasn’t prepared for Roxette coming back, so they started leaving the stadium. When Marie, Per and the band came back, we looked behind us and there were only ”a few” people left in the standing area and the seats were almost all empty in the back… Oh my… It was an interesting experience. Never mind, we enjoyed the last 2 songs very much regardless.
At the end Marie thanked twice saying: ”Thank you!” ”Thank you very much to all of you!” and Per said they hope to meet us somewhere down the road and take care of each other. By this time there was much smoke in the air, because the organizers were already being prepared for the laser show, so we couldn’t see Marie and Per for the last goodbye wave very well… The laser show was useless anyway, because only a few hundreds of people stayed until the very end of the show.
Per says there were 25-30,000 people, but the organizers said there were appr. 45,000 in the arena and seeing the crowd, knowing the max. capacity is appr. 60k, we thought 45k fitted indeed.
Åsa was there filming and she mostly filmed at the VIP area. Micke Lindström came to film to the normal standing area, but filmed the stage only as we could see. Looking forward to some videos to appear on Roxette’s Facebook page. There might be some dancing to Rox songs vids, because many in the VIP area were dancing with each other. Nice, but this way they totally missed what was happening on the stage.
WARSAW UPDATE: Oh yeah! Very late gig in front of approx 40.000* beautiful people at the National Stadium in Warsaw. We certainly had a blast. Great vibe and most folks knew all the songs. Thanx Warsaw, thanx Poland. We love to play here! Hope to see y’all soon again. RoxAir back to Sweden. /P
PS. Pic by Micke N-S
*Per wrote “approx 25-30.000 beautiful people” first, but some hours later (after he shared this article) he edited the text of his post and the number became 40.000. /PP
The next stop is… Who knows? In a post sharing this company event Per teased us with a comment that there might be something else announced for this year:
Yep, could be the last Rox concert this year. Might pop up something else as well. Will let you know, folks! /P.
What’s that? A New Year’s Eve party maybe? No clue, but it would be awesome! We just hope the location will be easy to reach and tickets will be easy to obtain. Soooo, Per, share the date and place with us asap, please! 😉
Setlist
Sleeping In My Car
The Big L.
Stars
Spending My Time
Crush On You
She’s Got Nothing On (But The Radio)
Fading Like A Flower
How Do You Do!
It Must Have Been Love
Dressed For Success
Dangerous
Joyride (intro: Maya The Bee theme song – same as on the June gig)
As we mentioned it in our latest review, Sandra Knospe celebrated her 200th gig in Amsterdam 2 days ago. 200! What an impressive number! Hard to beat it except if you are member of the band or at least the crew. 😉 It’s not only Roxette, but also Marie and Per solo, as well as Gyllene Tider, but most of the shows she attended were Roxette gigs. She followed the band from South America to Australia, but being a German girl, she of course went to the most shows in Europe. And why I use past tense here I have no clue… she followed the band from here to there and she’ll never stop. Well, she was truly born to follow.
When Sandra enjoyed her 100th show she surely didn’t expect she would have such a special treatment 100 concerts later. The crew offered her to see the venue from a different perspective and showed her around the stage. Then on the concert the band mentioned her anniversary. What a night!
Here are Sandra’s thoughts about her 200th gig:
A Rox gig with a different perspective
Pic by Sandra Knospe
Another day another concert. After Rox had played in the famous L’Olympia just the other night it was Amsterdam’s turn now. Approaching the venue at around 5pm I have to say I was surprised to see way less people queuing in front of it than usually. There were two entries, one for people who had bought the expensive Early Entrance tix and one for the remaining concert visitors. I expected to see more “hardcores” in any of the queues, but I guess some just decided to come late since it didn’t make sense to queue the whole day with a normal ticket and no big chances of front row anymore. And other Roxers probably have decided to skip the concert completely and boycott the EE ticket policy from Live Nation. So maybe one doesn’t need to wonder that it felt a bit different outside this time. And in a way it continued inside.
The entrance for EE ticket owners was around 6.15pm and the others followed shortly afterwards. I can’t really tell how the entry was outside, because a friend of mine and I were lucky enough to get to see the stage from the other side of the fence while the doors opened. That evening I celebrated my anniversary of 200 concerts including Rox, P&M solo and GT and a very kind person suggested that maybe it would be interesting for me to see the things from a different perspective. And it was!! I am very happy and extremely thankful that we got this little special treatment!!
After that my friend and I found our places in the front and we were eager to see the show. Some chit chat with people around us and then Eskobar started to play. As a fan who has seen a few shows you can already sense during the supporting act what mood the crowd is in and if they will get infected by the vibe and atmosphere on stage. At least to 90% you can guess that already before Rox enter the stage. And this time it felt as if it would be a bit of a tough job to get the crowd into it. And it turned out to be like that. Of course Rox got a warm welcome when they finally entered the stage and people surely clapped and sang along to the choruses of the oh so well known hits, but in between it felt a bit quiet and the enthusiasm was, well, let’s say limited compared to all other shows of this leg so far. But that only goes for the audience. On stage the glorious 7 had a top night. Marie delivering a great performance, Per bouncing, spinning and dancing around. Lyrics where they belonged. Only Per with a cock-eyed brain once, when singing this line twice in a row during “Crush on You”. And speaking of Per I have to take the opportunity to mention here that there is a noticeable change since this leg in the way Per interacts with the audience. There is much more contact with the people in the front rows than before. Keeping eye contact for more than just a millisecond and checking out the first few rows quite often is not that usual for him. It feels nice to see him being so relaxed and acting and reacting to the crowd in a more open way on stage. And it’s not just me who has noticed it. So whatever has happened that made him change this I hope he keeps it and I am sure all other Roxers hope that, too. Because it adds some extra kix to every gig.
The band was in top shape as well. What I really like a lot is that meanwhile the short dialogues on stage are alternating. It’s not always the same every night and it looks and sounds more spontaneous and not that practiced anymore. Really funny. They should keep that. It adds a lot to the atmosphere. And if not for the normal concert visitors then for sure for the hardcore Roxers. OK, I have to admit I am probably not very objective now since I got a little extra mentioning on stage that night. And THAT surely made my anniversary even more special!! So unexpected and freaking amazing. You simply have to love them all. Not only for the music. But before going into raptures now I’ll rather stick to the review.
I enjoyed the concert to the full and the energy and mood on stage made it exciting for me. So after the gig I was all smiles. The only question I’ve asked myself was “Would it have been different audience wise without EE tix?” I tend to say yes, because I think more hardcores would have shown up and been in front row, partying and jumping all the time. But with 150,-€ per ticket one simply has to cross out some shows when you have planned to see them more than just once during their tour. So I really hope that EE ticket policy won’t become a regular thing. But that’s just my personal impression. And even if most of the visitors weren’t physically active, the general opinion of the people who were standing next to me was positive. They all enjoyed the concert. The only thing some mentioned was the feeling that the concert was too short. Well, what can I say? Surely, I agree on that and all of us would love to get more than 17 songs on a gig, but nevertheless, we enjoyed what we’ve got to the max. So thanks for playing and cheers to the next 200!!
The audience could have been more active, but anyway, even if there is a standing still crowd, you can always be sure there is at least one person jumping in the front during the complete show. And it’s Sandra Knospe. Indeed, to the next 200, Sandra!
