TV4

Per Gessle on Efter fem on TV4

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Per Gessle appeared on Efter fem on TV4 today. Program leader Tilde de Paula Eby started with telling that many say ”Roxette is the soundtrack of my life”. Roxette has 4 US No. 1 hits, sold 80 million records, there is a new release with Roxette’s so far unreleased songs and a new solo album by Per Gessle. Many things are going on. Per says it fits him perfectly. Tilde asks her colleague to continue. Axel says it’s not too easy to summarize Per Gessle’s career in two minutes, but he tries to.

We go back 40 years in time and Axel shows a pic of Gyllene Tider as the first band Per broke through with. Then he started Roxette with Marie Fredriksson in 1986 and they broke through internationally in 1989. They reached No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 charts with 4 of their songs. Per’s most memorable solo album is Mazarin from 2003. Now he released a new solo album, Gammal kärlek rostar aldrig.

Per says he is very proud and happy about all of these. It’s a long career. Tilde says Per is the type of person who is always working on something new, but she is curious if Per looks back on his past experiences every now and then. Per says not intentionally, but when he e.g. hears Roxette songs at the airport or wherever, he is of course reminded of all what happened. But he doesn’t start reading books about himself.

Tilde asks Mr. G if he is excited when he hears his own song on the radio today. Per says he can’t listen to Sommartider. If it comes on the radio, he turns it down. Haha. He says of course, when he hears any of his songs on the radio he is proud.

Tilde asks Per to tell her about his new album. Mr. G says it was recorded thanks to the pandemic. He was isolated in Halmstad, he didn’t have much to do, so he went to the studio and he had the ambition to play as many instruments as possible himself and record an album. He didn’t have new songs though, so he started digging in his archives. He found stuff he liked from the 80’s and 90’s mainly. He found songs that were forgotten, songs that were recorded in quite clumsy versions and songs he gave to other artists. He tried to find 12-13 songs that still feel relevant. The album is very much acoustic and sparsely produced. He tried to play as many instruments as possible, so there was a little hey-ho in between. He also asked help from local musicians in Halmstad. He thinks it turned out to be nice.

Tilde asks Mr. G what he thinks about himself when he is listening to his songs from the 80’s and 90’s. He doesn’t know, but the songs get another meaning when he sings them now as a 60-year-old. So a love song he wrote when he was 23 gets another meaning. When he sings it now, it becomes sentimental, it feels like looking back on his youth. The text gets a different point of view and that’s exciting.

Tilde is curious if Per was nervous or if there was anticipation when he released this latest album with songs from the past. If the feelings were the same as his experience in the 80’s when he released them. She also asks if it feels safe for him. Per says he feels safe, otherwise he wouldn’t have dared to play those instruments himself. It feels different now than back then. Also it was different with their international career. Back then they were checking the positions on radio charts. Those times are over for him.

With Roxette he also releases almost 50 songs now. Per says those are mostly unreleased demos or songs that disappeared when streaming became popular. There is also an acoustic session from the 90’s from Abbey Road Studios. There was more material than he thought he would find. It will come out on 4 volumes.

Tilde asks Per how he feels when he goes through the Roxette archives or watches the pictures in the video of Let Your Heart Dance With Me. Per tells the clips in the video were recorded by his wife who travelled with them on tours. It’s great fun to see them. That was an incredible journey. They had their heydays between 1988 and 1995, then Marie had her second child so they took their first break.

Tilde says Marie passed away almost a year ago. She asks Per if he still feels the same grief. Per says there is emptiness, but he is reminded of Marie every day. Them two are Roxette. When he sees all the pictures of themselves or is checking the archives, he is happy. It’s a fantastic journey they did together and it’s only the two of them who could chat about it. He misses it, but he gets happy everytime he hears Marie singing. She was fantastic.

Per always has ongoing projects, but this Swedish album wouldn’t have been released if there was no pandemic. Tilde says it must have been a lot of work to go through the archives and rewrite songs. Per says it’s much fun. He has yet another project besides all the others. Mr. G is working on an English album. He is recording it now. It will be released when it’s ready and it’s ready soon. It might be out next spring. It’s an exciting project for Per. Tilde asks if there are Billboard songs on that album in the making. Per smiles and says he doesn’t know, no, but we will se… One more No. 1 wouldn’t be bad.

Stills are from Efter fem.

Per Gessle on Hellenius hörna

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Last time Per Gessle was on Hellenius hörna was almost exactly 3 years ago. That was a fun show and so I was looking very much forward to it this time again.

Yesterday’s program you can watch HERE, but only if you have Swedish access to it.

At the beginning of the program there is a teaser where Per is on the phone and imitates that he is talking to someone. His text is made up from his song titles. Host David Hellenius urges him to come, because they soon start, then goes out of Per’s dressing room and bumps into Laleh, the other guest ont he show. David asks her if she noticed anything strange with Per. She says no and her replies are made up from her song lyrics. Then Per appears with a fishing rod and tells them ”Jag går och fiskar!” (Gone fishing!). David runs after him.

Per is the first guest on the show. David introduces him as the one who put Swedish pop music on the world map with Roxette. He sold more than 100 million records and he is the only Swede who reached No. 1 on the US Billboard charts 4 times. There is footage from old shows where Per is playing with Gyllene Tider and Roxette, from his solo tours as well and we can also see award winning moments.

David welcomes Per and tells him it’s high time they celebrate Father’s Day together [it’s Father’s Day in Sweden on 8th November]. He asks Mr. G if he still gets present from his son. Per says no and he never got one. He thinks Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are for gathering the family. David understands one doesn’t have to give a lot of presents.

David tells Per released a new album recently, Gammal kärlek rostar aldrig. He is curious if it’s a self-experience record. Per tells he didn’t know what to do in summer, it was very quiet and he thought it would be fun to make an acoustic album on which he plays as many instruments as possible himself. He never did that before. Then he realized he doesn’t have songs. David says it’s difficult to make an album without songs. Per agrees, but says he realized that he has been writing songs for more than 40 years, so he got back to his songs from the 80’s and 90’s. David asks Per where he is keeping all his songs. Per laughs and says in a little drawer. He even demonstrates it. David asks what is written on the drawer. Per says: ”Ajajaj.” And they both laugh. David asks if Per sorted them out, but Per says on the contrary. These are songs that still mean a lot to him. David thinks one could say Per saved the best for last, but nah, he is not that old. Per says it’s a bit like that. Time flies and the songs he wrote in 1982-83 mean something different to him now than back then.

David asks Per about the songs Mamma and Pappa, if he wrote them a long time ago. Per says these two songs he actually wrote this year. He wrote Mamma for Mother’s Day and he thought he should write a father song too. He doesn’t know why, but that just happened. Then these two songs became the catalyst to the whole album. Mr. G says he did acoustic videos for his YouTube channel and he thought it was fun to play and sing. He played all the instruments except the difficult ones. David tells it’s smart and a good plan. He starts enumerating the instruments: guitar, bass, piano, but Per interrupts him and says bass is a difficult one. David says he thought it’s easy to play, there are only a few strings on a bass. Mr. G says a good bass is hard to play. He also doesn’t play the drums, but he plays almost everything else.

David tells Per has another special project he started in 2017, Mono Mind. At the beginning no one knew it was Per. He sounded like a robot. David asks him to explain it. Those who don’t know may think ”What happened to Per? Now he has stuck completely.” Per smiles and says it started earlier. In 2017 he reached No. 1 on the dance charts and stayed there for 6 weeks for everyone’s surprise. But he started that project in 2014. It was because he was tired of his own voice. They were sitting in the studio and tried to find effects. David asks if Per was tired of hearing himself. Mr. G says yes, because it was always the same. One intones in the same way. David says he understands it perfectly, that’s why he left ”Let’s Dance” [TV program]. He says he can’t say cha-cha-cha anymore. Mr. G says they started fiddling around on the computer and in the end he was singing one octave lower than usual. Then they fiddled with it. One can write the melody and add a little soul bounce to it. It was exciting and something he never did before. And it made him happy. They show a short part from the video to Save Me A Place. Then David informs Per called himself Dr. Robot. It’s almost like a children’s program, but it became mega huge. He asks Per how it felt to have a world hit without anyone knowing it was him. Per tells when someone is in the music business for as long as he is, it’s hard to enter the younger niche of pop music. There is a little age fascism in pop. David asks if Per feels it. He confirms he does. And since no one knew it was him behind Mono Mind, so he got in the fast lane. It was a little experiment. David says now it’s a little older man who is still there, everyone thought it’s a younger robot. David asks Per if he felt ”There you got it, all of you, who wanted to shoot us away”? Per says not really, but it was interesting. If he went out and said it’s a Per Gessle album, it would have been difficult to make it happen. This way he had American radio supporting him and it was a big hit in France too.

David says Per turned 60 last year and asks what he thinks about getting old. Whether he accepts it or tries to apply a brake. Per thinks it’s OK. You feel that you are getting older. David asks what’s good in it. Experience, Per replies. And that he doesn’t take his job as seriously anymore. He doesn’t need to do everything to become No. 1. David asks what is the worst in getting old. Grey hair and the body gets older, Per replies. David says Per is on stage a lot and that physically strains his body. He asks if Per feels any difference, if he can do the same things as before. Mr. G says he can and he even thinks he became better. David says ”Per Gessle, 60, more vigorous than ever”. David asks if he is training. Per says no, training is the most boring thing. David asks if he tried it. Per says he tried, but it doesn’t work for him. David starts asking if he tried yoga, Per continues pilates, personal trainer…, but it doesn’t work. He is rather walking.

David thinks when you are getting older, you can end up at a crossroads and one way is to become an angry man, the other is to become a cuddly man. He asks Mr. G if he had ever stood at that crossing and if so, which way he chose. He also asks if he gets slightly irritated by anything. Per says he recognized that. You get a little short-tempered as you get older. So he warns David that this is what is waiting for him. Haha. David says he would ask Per some questions and is curious what Per thinks about those things. Mr. G gets a sign which has ANGRY written on one side and GRUMPY on the other. He has to hold up the sign he finds relevant, so it will turn out if Per is an angry man who is purely pissed or a charming cuddly man who is just cursing a little.  Per says he sets it to the ANGRY side immediately.

  1. Bad language and spacing between words – GRUMPY
  2. Electric scooter – ANGRY – Here Per’s facial expression says it all, but David asks why angry. He is angry about the fact that people leave it all around. One has to climb over them on the sidewalks in Stockholm. David is curious if Per is so angry that he told this to anyone. Mr. G says he was thinking about throwing one into Nybroviken. David says it’s nice, there wouldn’t be any headlines about it. David says Per could say ”it wasn’t me. It was Dr. Robot.” Per says he could also say ”it was David”. Haha.
  3. This one David heard that Per gets damn mad at: telephone queues – ANGRY – Per says the worst is when you call a company or authority and you have to push 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 and you eventually push 4 and they say that you are No. 31 in the queue. It feels like your whole life is on hold. David agrees, but he says if you are lucky, you can have a Per Gessle song playing in the background. He asks if it has ever happened. Mr. G says it never happened. David says: ”You are No. 127. Sommartider, hej hej… Then you get even happier.” Per tells they have such PG songs at Hotel Tylösand, so you can listen to Gå & fiska! for example. A bit awkward. David says it’s perfect, so one can just ring them if they want to listen to some songs.
  4. Tabloid headlines – ANGRY – Per says if he has to choose from these two options he picks ANGRY, because it’s bad journalism in a way. David asks if he bothers to click on them sometimes. Those headlines are for more clicks – e.g. ”Per Gessle – bathing-trunks disappered”. Per says he stopped reading them, because he gets irritated. It’s the decay of mankind. It’s so ridiculous.

The game ends with this and David says Per is rather a charming cuddly guy, he is not so dangerous.

Before the break, the live band plays Gå & fiska!, but with a rewritten text about the break.

After the break, a tough topic is coming. This part you can watch on YouTube. David tells it’s almost a year ago that Marie Fredriksson, Per’s close friend passed away. He asks Per how this past year was for him. Mr. G says it was terrbile what happened, but at the same time, they were prepared for that. Marie was sick for a long time, so it was more of an end in a way. David says they had known each other since more than 30 years. He asks what was that special thing about them. Per says he doesn’t know. He gets this question often. They both came from a small town, they shared the rehearsal studio in the 70’s, they came from the same roots and had this dream together and completed each other perfectly. She was a fantastic artist and singer and a leader in Roxette on stage, while Per was OK at writing songs. So there was a very good balance. He is missing that of course. David asks if they already had those big dreams when everything started and they stood there on the stage. Mr. G says they didn’t dream about what exactly happened, but when they started Roxette they wanted to succeed abroad. But back then they only thought it would be cool to go to the Netherlands, Germany or Denmark. Then it was actually the US where they broke through, so it became a bit bigger than they thought. David asks if there was a monent when they understood that now something happens, something that they couldn’t even dream about. Per says it was when they started talking about the fact that Roxette entered the US radio charts and then it went so fast with The Look. You can’t enter the Billboard Hot 100 if your song is not commercially released, but they were on a lot of radio charts, so they rush-released The Look as a single and sent it out to record shops. Then in 8 weeks they reached No. 1. It happened so fast.

David asks if Per has a best memory. He knows there are many, but he is curious if there is one special memory from those times. Per says there are tons of such memories, but he tells one. When they recorded Dressed For Success, Marie and Per quarreled for some reason. Per complained about Marie’s singing and Marie became so angry with Per that she went in to the studio and sang the song in one single take. From anger. Then he also thinks of the concerts. She was fantastic there. In all those huge football stadiums in the 90’s. A short clip is shown on the screen from Johannesburg. David says it’s incredible, what a career! Per adds: what a blonde hairdo! David asks Mr. G what he is missing the most when he sees this clip. Per says he is missing that part of his life when Roxette became big. All that romance that you have always lived with in pop culture. He lived in that since he was a kid. He misses those stages where there were 60.000 people in front of them. He misses being involved in it. He is still partly in it, but not in the same way. David asks Per if he is the kind of person who can enjoy things when they happen or rather only when he looks back at them. If he could understand it when they stood there in front of thousands of people. Per says he enjoyed the whole circus back then, but they worked a lot. It was tough during those 8 years. They toured, they recorded an album and then again, without a break. It’s a long time, so when you are in it, you don’t really realize what you are doing, but then there is a break and you look back and ask what happened. It was fun back then and it’s also fantastic to look back on it.

David asked Per if he still had his first guitar and Mr. G brought it to the studio. Per’s mother bought it for him in 1976 when Per was 17. David asks Mr. G whether he started playing it then or he took some guitar lessons before. Mr. G says he never went to a guitar school. He learned some piano playing for a week or so, but he learned to play the guitar by himself. David sees that something is hanging on the guitar. Per says it belongs to it. It’s a cat crocheted by his mother. David says how cute is that and it has held up well. A nice memory from Per’s mother. Mr. G says it’s cool that his mother bought the guitar. It’s a Swedish one, a Bjärton. It cost 1500-2000 SEK at the time. It’s a lot of money for a guitar for someone who can’t play it. David laughs but says it paid off. Per says once you give an instrument to someone, it has to be played. It was easy to tune and it has the right string distance as well. David asks Per if he remembers the time he started playing the guitar. Per says he was lucky because after school he was unemployed like anyone else at the time. Then he and another guy got a job as troubadours employed by the city council. They were playing at nursing homes for old people. David asks if they were payed for it. Per says they were. It was a temporary job for 3 months. They played Drömmen om Elin and Svarte Rudolf. It was a good school for him, to play in front of those few poeple. It was then when he started writing songs. He thinks he tested one of them on 108-year-olds at the nursing home. David asks how they reacted. Per says they never really reacted. They laugh and David says: ”Then you decided, I’ll be an artist!”. Haha. Per says the fun thing was that they got a schedule about when to go where. Once the schedule changed and they had to go to the long-term care at the hospital in Halmstad. They had never been there and when they got in, there was no one there. So they just entered a hall, put two chairs in the middle, sat down and started playing. It was quite a big hall with two beds and two patients on the two sides. Suddenly a nurse came in and wondered what they were doing there. They said that they were sent to play there. The nurse said there must be some misunderstanding and she threw them out. Just then, one of the two guys woke up. It was a young guy who had an accident and had been in coma. They played Proud Mary or something and so he woke up from the coma. Then many doctors and nurses rushed in. David jokes and tells: ”And you held up your hand and said it was me playing.” Per says they were sent out so he doesn’t know what happened after. David says he should try it again, to play and wake people up from coma.

David asks if there is any classic song Per wrote on this guitar. Per starts playing and says it was one of the first songs he wrote. It’s När alla vännerna gått hem. He is singing 2 verses and the audience cheers him. David says his mother is not there anymore, but it’s one hell of a luck that she bought this guitar and crocheted that cat.

Here the part with Per ends, but he stays in the studio until the next break. Laleh is the other guest on the show.

All stills are from Hellenius hörna.

Thanks for the technical support, János Tóth!

Per Gessle on Nyhetsmorgon

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Per Gessle appeared on Nyhetsmorgon, TV4 this morning. You can watch the program HERE! He talked about his success on Billboard, his new solo album, as well as Marie and Bag of Trix.

Program leader Anna Brolin welcomes Per and introduces him as one of the biggest hitmakers of all time. She asks Per how he is doing. Mr. G says he is fine, a bit croaky, but it’s not the program leader’s fault, he jokes.

Anna asks Per if he follows the elections in the US since he has many friends and colleagues there. They shortly discuss a lot is going on in the US now and the corona situation is worrying. Anna mentions that Per got on a unique list in the US. He is one of 18 sole songwriters who had more than two No. 1 songs on Billboard Hot 100. They check the list of all the great songwriters on the screen and Anna is surprised that the number next to Per’s name is 3, because they had four No. 1 songs. Per tells Listen To Your Heart was also No. 1, but there he wasn’t a sole songwriter. He wrote it together with Mats MP Persson. Per is impressed that Anna can enumerate the other 3 songs. They laugh. Anna asks Mr. G which is his favourite from these 3 No. 1 hits. Per picks The Look, because it’s a crazy pop song that is still special and unique in a way. The song’s construction and half nonsense text is contagious in some way. But he loves It Must Have Been Love too, of course. It’s a magnificent song thanks to Marie and she turned it into a firework of film music with her voice. They watch a part of the IMHBL video and Anna says it’s a big song and it’s special to see Marie. She asks Per how it is for him. Mr. G says it’s almost a year ago that Marie passed away. There is emptiness. They had a very long friendship, they met at the end of the 70’s. They played in separate bands, but they shared the rehearsal studio outside Halmstad. Then they lived ”together” during whole their adult life. They had an awesome journey together.

They get back to the list of 18 and Anna asks if there is anyone on the list who inspires Per. Mr. G says all others are rubbish on the list. They laugh and of course he jokes. He says just look at those names: Paul Simon (Jesus Christ!), Paul McCartney (he grew up with The Beatles), Michael Jackson… It’s a fantastic list. Per says the one who inspired him and Gyllene Tider the most was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Tom Petty’s songwriting style and his band made them want to be Halmstad’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They’ve been trying for 40 years, he laughs. He was very much inspired by The Beatles as well and by singer songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. He likes their music too.

Then Anna asks Per about his new album. Mr. G says it’s a Swedish solo album, Gammal kärlek rostar aldrig. It came to life due to the pandemic. He was isolated in Halmstad this summer and thought he would go to the studio and record something. He had the ambition to play most of the instruments himself. Anna asks if it went fine. PG says it was OK, but he realized he needs some help, so he invited some local musicians to help him with bass, drums and saxophone. It became a cool album. The material on it is his old songs. He went back to the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s and found many Swedish songs he never recorded before or gave them to other artists. Songs he still felt are relevant. Per mentions Tända en sticka till which was released on his first solo album and says it has a warm love text, but he was 23-24 years old when he wrote it. Now that he sings it at the age of 61 it gives another angle to the text. One looks back at that young age and becomes melancholic and sentimental, which is not there in the 1983 version. And some songs change their identity while time goes by.

They watch a short part of the lyric video to Du kommer så nära (du blir alldeles suddig), a duet with Uno Svenningsson. Per says Helena Josefsson also sings on this one, as well as on other songs. She often sings with Per and that’s very lovely. Per thinks Uno has a fantastic voice. Anna asks why he chose Uno and Per says because he is a lovely person. He called Per this summer and asked if they could meet and have dinner together. Per said of course, but first he should come and sing on a song in the studio. He did it and it turned out to be very nice. Uno greets Per via a video message shown on the screen. He sends sunny greetings from the West coast. He thanks Per for the cooperation and says it was cool to be at MP’s studio in Halmstad and sing a little on one of Per’s nice songs. He says he is looking very much forward to Per’s new album and wishes him god luck and that he takes care of himself. Uno has a very special voice and Per says he has a special voice too, so it’s a little strange when they are singing together.

Per tells he started writing songs at the age of 15-16, so of course there are a lot of songs in his archives, the tree is growing. He doesn’t know how many songs he wrote, but someone said it’s 800 or 900 of them are registered at STIM.

Anna asks Per about the Roxette release as well. Mr. G tells he started digging in the vaults in spring and found many Roxette songs that disappeared because they were released e.g. only on CD or maybe on LP as well. Now in the times of streaming services they are not there anymore. He also found acoustic songs, a lot of demos from the 80’s when Marie and he started working on their first Roxette album. He also found unreleased songs from different albums and a Spanish song that wasn’t released before. Per says they were very big in South America and Spain.

Anna asks Per what is on his agenda. Per says artists can’t play concerts like before and technicians and crews are also affected by this. It’s a very strange time in the music business. Mr. G shares that he is working on a new English album and says he always tries to have an ongoing project.

Stills are from Nyhetsmorgon.

Interview with Per Gessle in Nyhetsmorgon on TV4

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There was a pre-recorded interview with Per Gessle this morning in Nyhetsmorgon on TV4. While program leader Jenny Alversjö introduced the interview Anders Pihlblad did with Mr. G, there were several Roxette photos shown in the background. Jenny says Marie passed away almost 3 months ago, way too early. She mentions Per was devastated and the day after he gathered his thoughts and finished a song, a comfort song, how he calls it.

 

 

 

In the interview you can hear and see snippets from Per’s new song, Around The Corner (The Comfort Song) and its lyric video.

Per says this song was lying around for a while and he finished it the day after. His mother-in-law also died a couple of days after Marie. It was a really hard time and he finished the song actually for himself. He wanted to get it out of the system. That’s how he works. One needs to get rid of things. He expresses himself through his music and lyrics.

It became a comfort song in a way. Per realized it’s a really strong song when he recorded it with Helena and Mats. He doesn’t mean it’s an especially good song, maybe it is, he doesn’t know, but he saw it touched Helena and Mats deeply. So they thought it should be released. He knows there are a lot of people in the Roxette gang, all the fans, all the friends, the whole world were affected by what happened. Almost all people go through this when they lose someone close to them sometime in life. Everyone needs this comfort. Per’s way to get through this was writing.

 

Anders says there are 2 Roxettes. One before Marie’s illness and the one after it. 2 totally different challenges. He asks Per what he was thinking when Marie got ill, how to go on with his career and if he thought they could go on with Roxette. Per explained he didn’t think they could, because it felt that Marie was in really bad shape, so it wasn’t in the cards to continue with Roxette. The first thing he did after Marie got ill was Mazarin, then Gyllene Tider in 2004, then Son of a Plumber, then En händig man, so all his other stuff. So it was really surprising that Marie wanted to make a comeback. Per thinks even Marie didn’t count on it, that she would come back. She came to visit him in Amsterdam where Per played on his European tour. Anders says he talked to a Dutch girl who was there at the concert and said there was a surprise. Per laughs and says Marie and her husband, Micke came to visit him and he asked Marie if she wanted to come up on stage so they would play an old Roxette song. She hadn’t been on stage for 7 years and she said she doesn’t want to do that. But Per knew she was easy to convince if they give it some more time, so the question remained hanging in the air and in the end Marie said OK, let’s rehearse and see how it feels. One could see she really wanted to do it. So they rehearsed and Marie said let’s try it. For the first extra song Per invited Marie up on stage and there was only Marie and Per on stage. Mr. G thinks they played Listen to Your Heart and maybe It Must Have Been Love too, he can’t remember. Per says the audience died of course and he had never seen so many people crying. It was incredible. It was the first thing Marie did and then a few weeks later she called Per if he could write a new Roxette album. That’s what eventually became Charm School. Then there were 2 big tours, maybe with 300 concerts.

 

Anders asks Per how important he thinks it was for Marie to realize that she managed to do it and that it became such a success. Per thinks it was super important for Marie, because she loved music more than anything else. She loved being on stage and she enormously missed the communication with her fans, with their fans. So she wanted to do it at all costs. Her doctor advised she shouldn’t do that, because touring is exhausting with all the travelling, the waiting, the flying, the time zones and so on. But she wanted to do that. Per told her whatever they do, they do it based on Marie’s conditions. If she wants three days between the gigs, that’s how they will do it. Per thought it was amazing that Marie wanted to do it and that they could go on.

Anders says he saw an interview with Marie that was done by Niklas Strömstedt and there she said Per was a big support to her during that period. He asks Per what he thinks about it. Per smiles, drinks a little water and says he doesn’t know. He hopes so, but it’s hard to answer this question. When someone gets ill, you want to help as much as you can, but it’s always hard to help someone without stepping too much into their private lives. People have families and you don’t know how to behave. This is how he felt about his family too. Sometimes you feel that you go one step too close and they want you to leave them alone. They want to take care of their illness in their own private way. So it’s hard to know. But Per also saw that interview in Niklas’ show and he was of course happy to hear that Marie thought so.

 

Anders says Marie and Per had many common memories from Roxette times. He is curious about the greatest ones that Per will remember forever. Mr. G says there are too many. He thinks it’s kind of a fairy tale what they have been through. The possibilities, the chances, the odds for them to succeed, coming from Sweden those days and in this industry were less than minimal. It’s fantastic, all the success they have achieved. But if he skips all the golden records, chart positions and such things, he remembers those days when they were on stage in front of 50,000 people in Chile, in Sydney or wherever and looked into each other’s eyes. And then Per knows Marie thinks ”how the hell did this happen, Per?” and he thinks the same. You see the rolling ocean of people in front of you and they all love what you are doing. Such things are fantastic. But of course there are many more.

 

Anders realized Roxette has extremely loyal fans. He read what they were writing and asks Per how much of that has reached him. Per says he was of course devastated when Marie passed away, but he was also happy to see the response she got from all around the world. From many other artists, producers, radio people and fans, all the people. There are hundreds of thousands of greetings coming in and it’s awesome that Marie gets that appreciation. Per says they definitely have the best fans in the world. They have always been super loyal and followed them in all times. It’s been a long journey.

And here the interview ends with the flame of the candle going out in the lyric video. All in all it was a very touching interview. One can see it’s still hard to talk about what happened and it needs time to find comfort. Per says they have the best fans in the world. What I must add: and we have chosen the best idols in the world. Undoubtedly.

Stills are from the interview.

Roxette received Honorary Award at the Swedish Grammis

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Roxette received the Honorary Award at Grammisgalan in Sweden last night. The justification was:

“Brilliant timeless pop songs with effective angelic choruses and puns that have crossed all borders of the world. This year’s Honorary Award Winners have had all this. They therefore succeeded with the journey from a Swedish small town to the whole world’s pop heart again and again and again for three decades. With credits like 75 million records sold, 4 US No. 1’s – unique for a Swedish act! – 6 singles in the top 10 in England, and hundreds of concerts in all parts of the world, this year the Honorary Award goes to: Roxette! ”

Per Gessle wasn’t present at the gala, but we could see Åsa in the audience. While manager Marie Dimberg walked up on stage, the whole audience stood up to applaud Roxette.

Marie Dimberg held a touching speech while accepting the award in the name of Roxette. She talked about the first time she met Per and Marie. She met Per at Café Opera in 1984, when she was new at EMI. She met Marie Fredriksson later in the same year at the reception of EMI. Ms Dimberg told that Marie and Per met in the late ’70s when they shared a rehearsal studio. 2 successful Swedish artists, they established Roxette in 1986. Their dream, ”Today Sweden – tomorrow the world” came true. ”2 good friends, 3 great chords and 12 brilliant songs” was the slogan of their break-through album, Look Sharp!. The rest is history. Marie Dimberg told about Roxette’s journey, their US No. 1’s, their concerts all around the world filling football stadiums and playing for millions of people, selling more than 75 million albums, doing thousands of interviews and TV programs. Per and Marie were the ultimate combo, where 1 + 1 makes at least 3. Per’s fantastic songwriting complemented Marie’s unique voice and strong stage presence. The better Marie was singing, the better songs Per was writing. Their songs are loved all around the world. Their international greatness could be seen also now when Marie sadly passed away on 9th December 2019. She and Roxette were honoured all around the world. They meant a lot to many generations over so many years. Now a voice went silent, but the music and songs live on.

When Marie Dimberg finished her speech, everyone stood up again to give a huge applause.

During the night, Tro was also performed by a boy, Love Bjurman and Marie’s picture was shown on the screens. At the end of the song everyone stood up and raised their glasses to Marie. The program leader told Marie is a legend who touched so many people all around the world not only as an artist, but also as a person and will never be forgotten.

Watch Marie Dimberg’s speech HERE and Tro HERE. You can watch the complete broadcast HERE.

 

 

Stills are from TV4’s broadcast.