The Look Roxette.pdf

ROXETTE THE BOOK

Acknoledgements

Thanks so much to all who had the courage to collect facts for this book. Most of all to Tina

and Ulla-Britt, Elisabeth Bengt and Gunilla, Åsa, Martin, Stefan, Lasse L., Marie D., MP,

Anders, Clarence, Jonas, Pelle, Vicki, Staffan, Thomas, Tosse, Mats O., Julius, Lasse N.,

Wirack, Micke, Göran, Janne P., Janne C., Laila, PC and to Annelie and Kicki, that they

endured it.

Thanks so much too to Kal Kindvall, Jan-Eric Sundquist, Robert Thorne, Ann Palsson from

the publishing firm and all who must felt forgotten.

Most of all to Marie and Per! It was a joy to rummage around in their past - in ten years, part

II will come out then.

Content

Prologue - The Swedish Liverpool - The life in the country – Youth years - The children from

Bullerbü - Detected by customs - Music as liberation - The heartbreakers - The band Strul -

The girls from TV2 - MaMas Barn - The golden hysteria - Behind the scenes - Departure - A

step to the front - Per in the offside - Neverending Love - Pearls of Passion - Roxette’s live

premiere - It goes ahead - The Look - The unbelievable radio story - Number one -

Sommartider - Listen to your heart - Another life - It must have been love - The hit factory -

The magic of the music - Dangerously ill at the video’s making - Join the Joyride - The world

premiere - The Joyride goes on - Adventures in South America - Den Ständiga Resan,

Marie’s solo trip - Tourism - Epilogue - ...

Per’s letter to Marie

Marie!

Here are the song and the lyrics. You're welcome to add a second voice to it.

In addition, I can also add a kind of "wailing"-inging (oooh) in G and a Hul-part in the middle

(during the harmonica solo).

On the 1.12.81 we record the song in studio 38. If there are any problems, please ask Mr.

Mats Persson. He comes back on the 11.11.81. I’m only back on the 28.11.81.

Take care! Per Gessle

Small talk (some words from the translator…)

When the book came out in Germany in 1994, I decided to translate it from German into

English. Because neither were my mother tongue, I bought a German – English dictionary,

and started to translate this biography. Some weeks later it was done, saved on a floppy disk

et voilà !

Some years later, an English friend of mine re-read everything and corrected my many

mistakes. Thanks a lot Klair, I hope you'll recognise yourself…

And today, the translation can finally be "published", thanks to Blanka, to Michi and

www.littlemarie.net , and also thanks to Larz Lundgren who gave his permission to put the

translation online.

I just hope that all the English people will forgive me for my English, which sometimes may

not be the best one.

And last but not least, thanks a lot to Marie and Per, without whom I wouldn't have done

something like that, I certainly wouldn't be able to speak foreign languages, and I wouldn't

have met such great friends around the world. Thanks for everything, for your fantastic music

and for just being you.

Muriel

Prologue

It was one day at the beginning of November 1981.

She immediately saw the paper as she came in the MaMas Barn rehearsal studio. It was on

her electronic piano. First she was astonished but when she read it, she understood. He

wanted her to take part and sing the duo ″Ingenting av vad du behöver″ (Nothing of what you

needed) by Gyllene Tider with him. The lyrics were written on the back of the paper ; and

with it he begged her to sing the second vocal.

She couldn’t help being amused ; his inquiry was written so formally. But at the same time,

she was proud and happy. Who knew what such a co-operation could lead to.

1992, eleven years after the paper, the couple from Halmstad on the Swedish west-coast has

sold 37 million records. They became the biggest and the most successful rock duo in the

world.

She: Gun-Marie Fredriksson, born under the Gemini sign on the 30th of May 1958.

He: Per-Håkan Gessle, born under the Capricorn sign on the 12th of January 1959.

This is the Roxette story.

The Swedish Liverpool

Halmstad didn’t have, superficially considered, the smallest similarity with a British

big city. In Halmstad, there weren’t grey, sad slum quarters and no retrenched workers

because of the bad economical situation, who hoped for better times. There weren’t industrial

firms threatened by closures, and the air wasn’t polluted with the black soot from the large

firms’ chimneys. If you wanted to go out to a pub after work to drink a beer and talk shop

about football, you had to search for a long time. What looked most like an English pub, was

Halmkärven, a small beer café in the middle of the city, or the small cellar café Makrillen in

the station quarter. There was nothing else. In short : nothing in the contemplative small city

on the Swedish coast resembled a British big city.

Nevertheless, some Swedish journalists already started to call Halmstad the ″Swedish

Liverpool″ in the seventies. They referred to themselves by a unique thing : the living music

scene, which made the city famous in the whole of Sweden in a few years. There were many

promising bands in Halmstad but of course, no one was nearly as famous as the Beatles, the

four from Liverpool, who in the middle of the sixties conquered the world. At that time,

Halmstad was an economically wealthy small city in the middle of a rural idyll, which had the

luck to lie on the best bathing coast in the country. Each summer thousands of tourists came

from the whole of Scandinavia. They spent their holidays photographing the sights like Norre

Port or the sculpture ″Europa och Tjuren″ (Europe and the bull) in Stora Torg and lying in the

good weather on the bathing coasts from Tylösand to Östra-Strand. The locals of Halmstad

mostly stayed at home during the summer and crowed together with the tourists on the

kilometres of sand coasts, because there was no better holiday place for them.

During the winter, the city died out. The teenagers waited, longing for the cafés, the

mini-golf places and the game halls, which were closed from October until March, to open

again for the season. Or for the two favourite football clubs HBK and Halmia to begin their

spring training at the Örjans Vall. Because of this, the summer couldn’t be so far off. There

was no ice hockey, but handball : HBP and Drott always fought, to defeat the other and to

become the best team in the city.

In the evenings the ″Raggar″- cars (old US cars) from the Lucy Devils and the

Smashers made their round trip across Storgatan (Big Street), Stora Torg (Big Place),

Köpmannsgatan (Shopkeeper’s Garden), Lilla Torg (Small Place), to Hamngatan (Harbour

Street). Sometimes, the cars drove to a long building, Gustaf’s Sausage Snack in Brogatan

(Bridges Street), to eat a ″Special″ (sausage with mashed potatoes). At Gustaf's you always

met somebody who you knew and who you could talk to.

In Halmstad there were seven cinemas: the Saga was the most comfortable, the China

the oldest, the Röda Kvarn (Red Mill) the most elegant, the Royal the biggest, the Paladium

the smallest, Skandia the most impersonal and the newest was called Figaro. These cinemas

were the free-time pleasure for everybody who didn’t have enough money to amuse

themselves in dance cafés like the Grand, the Norre Kavaljeren or the Martenssons with dance

music and strong cocktails. There were also cafés everywhere where you could sit. The Tre

Hjärtan (Three Hearts) and the Café Centrum were a meeting place for the pupils after the end

of the school. And of course there was the Volkspark. The Westcoasters played there each

Saturday. The whole autumn and winter the bold well-trained girls and their boyfriends

danced to their cool sound.

There were a lot of dance orchestras in the city. Gus Einertz, Randers, Sören

Wilhelmsson and some others. They always played the newest hits.

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