The story of Roxette

Two careers in Halmstad

Gun-Marie Fredriksson was born on the thirtieth of May 1958, outside the small village of Össjö in southern Sweden. Her parents later sold their farm and moved to Östra Ljungby, where her father became a postman and her mother worked in a factory. When Marie was seven, her oldest sister Anna-Lisa was killed in a road accident, her car crushed by a tanker truck while she was on her way to buy a dress for her engagement party. Marie later said the grief tore the family apart and that from then on she had to fend for herself. Music became her escape. She learned to sing and read notation with help from siblings and friends, and she credited a kind local pastor and Sunday school songs with lighting the spark.[1]

As a teenager Marie fell for the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple. At seventeen she went to a music school in Svalöv, where she wrote music for student plays and ended up singing in a musical she had co-written. It toured Sweden and finished with a performance in Stockholm for Prime Minister Olof Palme. In 1977 she moved to the west coast town of Halmstad and threw herself into the local scene. In 1978 she formed a punk band called Strul, which means hassle, with her then boyfriend Stefan Dernbrant. The band even ran its own summer festival for three years. After Strul fell apart she formed a new group, MaMas Barn, which made one album in 1982 that sold only about a thousand copies.[1] [2]

Halmstad was also home to Per Gessle, born on the twelfth of January 1959, the youngest child of a plumber named Kurt. In 1976 Per and his friend Mats Persson started a group that became Gyllene Tider, meaning golden times, a nod to a Mott the Hoople song. Their first three albums all went to number one in Sweden, and songs like Sommartider made Per a household name before he was twenty five. The two scenes overlapped. MaMas Barn shared a rehearsal room with Gyllene Tider, and in 1981 Marie sang backing vocals on one of Per's songs. Per and Marie had been friends since 1978, and he became convinced that she was far too talented to hide behind a keyboard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1982 Per brought Marie to audition for Gyllene Tider's producer, Lasse Lindbom. Lindbom offered her a solo deal with EMI on the spot, but she turned it down, saying she was too nervous and lacked the confidence. Instead she toured Sweden as a singer in Lindbom's band. Meanwhile Gyllene Tider tried to break America with an English album, The Heartland Café. Capitol Records released six of its songs as a US mini album, and asked for a name Americans could pronounce. Per borrowed the title of a 1974 single by the British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood, written by guitarist Wilko Johnson. The name was Roxette. The record sold only a few thousand copies in America, and by 1985 Gyllene Tider had broken up.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A side project called Roxette

With Per's encouragement, Marie finally went solo. Her debut album Het vind came out in 1984, with Lasse Lindbom as producer, and her second, Den sjunde vågen, followed in February 1986. She was winning awards as Sweden's best female artist. Per's solo career, on the other hand, was struggling. His second Swedish album, Scener, sold fewer than twenty thousand copies, a painful drop from the hundreds of thousands Gyllene Tider had sold, and he later admitted that EMI came close to dropping him. It was EMI Sweden's boss, Rolf Nygren, who had the idea that changed everything. Why not translate one of Per's Swedish songs into English and record it as a duet with Marie?[1] [2] [3]

The song Per picked was Svarta glas, which means black glass. He had originally written it for the singer Pernilla Wahlgren, who passed on it. Translated and reworked, it became Neverending Love, released in July 1986 under the old name Roxette. Friends warned Marie that the project could hurt her solo career, and EMI at first planned to release it only outside Sweden. In the end it came out at home and reached number three. The pair quickly finished an album, Pearls of Passion, using songs Per had been saving for his next solo record. It went to number two in Sweden and sold over two hundred thousand copies there, but it made no impression abroad. Their real goal, Per said later, was simply a top twenty hit in Germany.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1987 Roxette released a remix album called Dance Passion and went on their first tour, a Swedish package called Rock runt riket with Eva Dahlgren and the band Ratata. Marie still treated her solo work as her main career, and that October her album Efter stormen went to number one in Sweden. Then EMI Germany made an odd request. They asked Per to come up with an intelligent Christmas single. He wrote a heartbroken ballad for Marie called It Must Have Been Love, subtitled Christmas for the Broken Hearted. It was a top five hit in Sweden in December 1987, but the German office, and the rest of EMI abroad, decided not to release it. For now, the song went back on the shelf.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Look and the exchange student

Roxette's second album, Look Sharp!, came out on the twenty first of October 1988. The title borrowed from Joe Jackson, and the spine of the sleeve joked about two good friends, three great chords and twelve brilliant songs. Per and EMI Sweden planned to push Marie as the lead voice, so the first Swedish singles were Dressed for Success and Listen to Your Heart. The album sold over one hundred and forty thousand copies in ten days and sat at number one in Sweden for weeks. Outside Scandinavia, though, almost nobody noticed. The American arm of EMI had listened and decided Roxette were unsuitable for the US market. There was no American record deal at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third Swedish single was The Look. Per had written it almost as an exercise while learning a new synthesizer, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, building it on a repeating bass line with a rhythm inspired by ZZ Top. He meant it for Marie and called it He's Got the Look, but when he sang the demo himself it sounded right. He kept the nonsense placeholder lyrics he had scribbled down, because he could never find better ones. Guitarist Jonas Isacsson brought in the opening riff, which he had written a few days earlier, and the room went wild. Released in Sweden in January 1989, The Look reached number six. Per privately thought it was a throwaway.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the stroke of luck that made Roxette famous. Dean Cushman, an American exchange student from Minneapolis, had been living in Sweden and bought Look Sharp! When he went home, he dropped the CD at the local Top 40 station, KDWB. Program director Brian Phillips let it sit in his office for weeks. When Cushman came back asking for his CD, Phillips finally put it on. The first track was The Look, and he played it on air within the hour. The phones lit up. KDWB began sending hundreds of copies to sister stations around the country, and the song spread from city to city before a single record was on sale in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

EMI hurried to sign Roxette and get the single into shops. The Look entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number fifty in February 1989 on airplay alone, and Per, who had subscribed to Billboard since 1981, knew that was a big debut. On the eighth of April 1989 it reached number one in America, only the third Swedish number one there after Blue Swede and ABBA. It went on to top the charts in twenty five countries, including six weeks at number one in Australia. Per later joked that he loved teasing the ABBA men, who had only one American number one. Roxette were about to collect four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ballads and a Pretty Woman

America wanted more, so EMI released the older Swedish singles. Dressed for Success reached number fourteen. Then Listen to Your Heart, written by Per with his old bandmate Mats Persson, went all the way to number one in November 1989. Per called it the big bad ballad, a deliberate attempt to push overblown American radio rock almost to the point of absurdity. It was also a small piece of chart history, the first Hot 100 number one that was never sold as a seven inch vinyl single, only on cassette. The video was filmed at a live show in the ruins of Borgholm Castle on the island of Öland, and the director reportedly assumed the ruin had been built as a set.[1] [2] [3]

The next single, Dangerous, a real duet with Per and Marie trading lines, spent two weeks at number two early in 1990. Look Sharp! went platinum in the United States and eventually sold around nine million copies worldwide. Critics were often sniffy. Reviewers called the music disposable, and some said Marie's big voice was wasted on it. Per shrugged it off, saying they were used to hearing that their music sounded like rubbish. Interviewers kept asking whether the two were a couple, and in one 1990 interview Marie pretended their divorce had made working together awkward, before they both burst out laughing. They were, they insisted, simply old friends and business partners.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around this time Touchstone Pictures asked Roxette for a song for a romantic comedy starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. The band was touring and had no time to write something new, so the forgotten Christmas ballad from 1987 came back to life. The single Christmas line was changed to a winter one, the ending was trimmed, and the sound was polished for radio. Pretty Woman opened in March 1990 and became a huge hit, with the song playing over the scene where Roberts rides away in a limousine. In June 1990 It Must Have Been Love spent two weeks at number one in America. Billboard ranked it the second biggest single of the year, and it reached number three in Britain, their highest placing there.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Joyride and the top of the world

With three American number ones behind them, Roxette felt real pressure to follow up. EMI wanted them to move to Los Angeles and work with American producers. They refused and stayed home in Sweden with their usual team, producer and keyboard player Clarence Öfwerman. Per wrote around thirty songs, aiming for an album that sounded like a greatest hits record. The title came from an interview in which Paul McCartney described writing with John Lennon as a long joyride. The opening line came from a note Per's girlfriend Åsa left on his piano, saying hello you fool, I love you. Per whistled the solo himself after watching Monty Python's Life of Brian, overdubbing it twelve times.[1] [2] [3]

Joyride was released on the twenty fifth of March 1991 and became the biggest album of their career, eventually selling around eleven million copies. EMI spent almost two million dollars promoting it. The title track gave Roxette their fourth and final American number one in May 1991, and oddly, it was also their very first number one single at home in Sweden. It spent eight weeks at the top in Germany, where the album stayed at number one for thirteen weeks. The ballad Fading Like a Flower reached number two in America and Canada, held off only by Bryan Adams. In Sweden the duo were even honoured with their own postage stamp.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1991 Roxette opened the Join the Joyride tour in Helsinki. It became their biggest ever, playing about a hundred shows across Europe, Australia and North and South America to well over a million and a half people. South America went wild. Thirteen shows there drew around three hundred and forty seven thousand fans, and album sales in the region jumped. North American reviews were harsher. The Los Angeles Times said Marie was clearly better than the material she sang, and the New York Times mocked the show as an imitation of MTV. On the Australian leg, in December 1991, Marie met a keyboard player named Mikael Bolyos, who would become her husband.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the smiles, touring was hard on Marie. She later said that before she met Mikael she had been hanging out in bars and drinking too much, feeling sad and lost, worn down by the constant need to smile for the press. She wondered whether she could have continued in Roxette at all without him. In America, the luck ran out. At the end of 1991 EMI merged with SBK and Chrysalis in North America, and more than a hundred staff lost their jobs. Per believed the people who had worked on Roxette were among them. The next singles, Spending My Time and Church of Your Heart, stalled in the thirties. And a new sound was arriving from Seattle.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tourism, China and a long break

Instead of a new studio album, Roxette made Tourism, released in August 1992, a tour album pieced together from studios, stages and hotel rooms. Two songs were recorded in room six hundred and three of a Buenos Aires hotel, another in an empty São Paulo nightclub, and a country version of It Must Have Been Love was cut in Los Angeles. It barely registered in America, peaking at one hundred and seventeen, but it went to number one in Germany and Sweden and sold about six million copies. In early 1993 Roxette became the first act whose native language was not English to play MTV Unplugged, though the set was never released as an Unplugged album.[1] [2]

Then came a strange Hollywood detour. Disney asked Per for a theme song for the witch comedy Hocus Pocus. He wrote Almost Unreal, but Disney gave the Hocus Pocus job to En Vogue, and the song moved to the Super Mario Bros. movie instead, still containing the words hocus pocus. Marie recorded her vocals in March 1993 when she was nine months pregnant. Both of them later dismissed it. Marie called it not one of their most inspired moments, and Per said that if you wanted to parody Roxette, it would sound something like this. In 1994 Crash! Boom! Bang! brought a rougher sound. Its lead single, Sleeping in My Car, was written in under an hour and went to number one in Sweden.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In America, Crash! Boom! Bang! was never properly released. Instead a shortened version was sold for a limited time through McDonald's, with proceeds going to children's charities. It sold over a million copies but was barred from the album chart, and angry record stores said it cheapened music. Relations with EMI's American branch collapsed. The world tour skipped North America but made history elsewhere. In 1995 Roxette played Beijing's Workers Indoor Arena, the first Western band allowed to perform in China since Wham! a decade earlier. Getting permission took over a year. Years later the tour came back to bite them, when in 2008 a Swedish court ordered them to pay four and a half million kronor in unpaid tax on earnings from its German leg.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 1995 came the first greatest hits album, with a title borrowed from Motown boss Berry Gordy, Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus! It sold around six million copies and included You Don't Understand Me, co-written with the American hitmaker Desmond Child. In 1996 Roxette re-sang their ballads in Spanish for Baladas en Español, which went double platinum in Spain. Then they stepped back. Per reunited with Gyllene Tider, and both released solo albums. Marie had married Mikael Bolyos in a private ceremony in May 1994, and she did not invite Per and his wife. She later admitted that hurt them. She gave birth to a daughter, Inez Josefin, and a son, Oscar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Comeback and cracks

Roxette returned in February 1999 with Have a Nice Day, recorded over eighteen months in Sweden and Spain. It was Marie's album more than any before. She sang lead on most tracks and wrote Waiting for the Rain, the first Roxette song composed entirely by her. The duo also signed a new deal with EMI that gave them control of the rights to their whole catalogue. The lead single, Wish I Could Fly, began as Per's experiment to see if a drum loop could sit alongside a big orchestra. It became the most played song on European radio in 1999, and it was their last top forty hit in Britain. The album went to number one in Sweden and number two in Germany.[1] [2]

The recording had been painful for Marie. She later described co-producer Michael Ilbert as a bully who only talked to Per and Clarence, told everyone her voice was weak and her songs not good enough, and criticised her until she cried. She said she lost all her confidence and stopped feeling happy in Roxette. The second single, the Phil Spector style ballad Anyone, ran into trouble of its own. Its video, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, ended with Marie walking into the sea in a scene depicting a suicide attempt. MTV Europe banned it, the single flopped, and EMI in Britain cancelled its release even after sending promo copies to radio.[1] [2] [3]

The third single, Stars, was a techno track with a children's choir, filmed by Anton Corbijn with Marie serenaded by ducks. It became a solid European hit. Room Service followed in April 2001. A US release fell apart when their American label, Edel, collapsed weeks before. Marie wrote only two songs for it and later said she had lost all desire to continue Roxette. She came to the studio as little as possible, and once told her taxi to wait outside while she sang her part. Per later said she had clearly not been very interested in Roxette in the years before she fell ill. The European tour went ahead, but shows planned for South Africa were cancelled after the September eleventh attacks.[1] [2] [3]

After the tour, Marie called a meeting and proposed ending Roxette, and Per agreed. The plan was a dignified farewell. Two compilations, The Ballad Hits and The Pop Hits, were lined up, along with appearances at the Night of the Proms concert series. A press conference presenting it as Roxette's swan song was booked in the Netherlands for the twelfth of September 2002. In February 2002 the duo received an honorary award from the Swedish government at the Grammis, Sweden's equivalent of the Grammys. Nobody could know that the goodbye they had planned would be replaced by something far more frightening.[1] [2]

The brain tumour

On the eleventh of September 2002, the day before that press conference, Marie felt unwell after exercising with her husband. She collapsed, and the fall fractured her skull. She then had an epileptic seizure. Scans showed a tumour at the back of her brain. The Night of the Proms shows were cancelled. Doctors waited several weeks for the fracture and concussion to heal, then operated. The tumour was malignant, and she went through months of chemotherapy and radiation. For a long time afterwards she could not speak. She was left blind in one eye, with limited hearing and mobility, and for the rest of her life she was unable to read or write.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2003 King Carl the sixteenth Gustaf awarded Roxette the royal medal Litteris et Artibus. It was Marie's first public appearance after her operation, and one of very few she made over the next two years. The compilation The Ballad Hits sold over a million copies within a year. Slowly, Marie turned back to music as therapy. With Mikael she recorded The Change in their home studio, her first English language solo album, which went to number one in Sweden in 2004. Unable to read, she rediscovered drawing and made charcoal pictures, including the album cover. At her first exhibition in Stockholm in 2005, every work sold by the end of the second day.[1] [2] [3]

In October 2005 Marie told the Swedish paper Aftonbladet that the past three years had been very hard, but that she was healthy and no longer in treatment. In 2008 she scored her first ever solo number one in Sweden, Där du andas, the theme from a film about the knight Arn. Per, meanwhile, had the most successful solo run of his life. His Swedish album Mazarin in 2003 went five times platinum, beginning a long partnership with producer Christoffer Lundquist and singer Helena Josefsson, and Gyllene Tider reunited in 2004 to play to nearly half a million fans. In 2006 Per and Marie did record two new Roxette songs, One Wish and Reveal, for a twentieth anniversary box set.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In a 2009 BBC interview Per said he would love to make more Roxette records, but that he did not want to push Marie. It was entirely up to her, he said. If she called and said she was ready, he would say let's go. He also looked back on why the American hits had dried up. He had loved grunge the moment he heard Nirvana, having started out in a punk band himself, but he knew it marked the end of an era. He added that the break had also come because Marie started a family. Pop has its heyday, he said, and then if you are lucky the songs survive and come back into fashion.[1] [2]

The neverending comeback

In May 2009 Per was playing a club in Amsterdam on his Party Crasher tour when Marie joined him on stage. She had told him she had no confidence and could no longer sing. She walked up anyway and sang The Look and It Must Have Been Love, and Per said people in the crowd of about twelve hundred were crying all around. Afterwards she seemed like a changed person, and about two weeks later she called to ask if he wanted to write another Roxette album. Per immediately told Aftonbladet that Roxette would play Night of the Proms that autumn, forty two orchestral shows in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The shows proved the fans had never left. In June 2010 Roxette performed The Look at a gala in Stockholm for Crown Princess Victoria on the eve of her wedding, and the audience rose to its feet. That August, in Halmstad, Gyllene Tider appeared as a surprise encore at a Roxette concert, with Marie joining them for the last song. In February 2011 came Charm School, their first studio album in a decade, written entirely by Per. Its single, She's Got Nothing On But the Radio, borrowed its title from a famous Marilyn Monroe line and became their biggest German hit since 1992. It also made Roxette the only duo to appear on Billboard's adult contemporary chart in four straight decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Neverending World Tour began in 2011 and kept going, on and off, until 2016. Roxette played Wembley Arena to twelve and a half thousand people and sold a hundred thousand tickets in Australia, while their new album barely sold in either place. Marie's illness had damaged her short term memory, so learning new lyrics was hard, but the old hits were firmly lodged in her mind. Per described touring as a kind of rehab for her, saying she drew enormous strength from the crowds. Along the way they recorded Travelling, released in March 2012, a sequel to Tourism. They wanted to call it Tourism 2, but the record company refused, and Per gave up arguing.[1] [2] [3]

In 2015 Roxette re-recorded The Look for a Swedish fashion campaign, making the new version in two days in the same Stockholm studio where the original was cut in 1988. In early 2016 Jonas Åkerlund's documentary Roxette Diaries came out, and their tenth and final studio album, Good Karma, followed in June. Marie called it their best ever. But by then her health was failing. In April 2016 doctors advised her to stop touring, and the thirtieth anniversary tour was cancelled. She thanked the fans for following them on a long and winding road. Per called her the Amazon of the holy voice and said the joyride on the road was over. By then the reunion tour had reached some two and a half million people.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Losing Marie, and what came after

Marie kept singing in private, releasing a few quiet solo songs, including Sing Me a Song in 2018. Her last recording, made in 2017, was inspired by the peaceful gatherings in Stockholm after that year's truck attack. On the ninth of December 2019, Marie Fredriksson died at the age of sixty one, following a recurrence of the cancer she had fought for seventeen years. Her funeral was private. Per called her the most wonderful friend for over forty years, thanked her for painting his black and white songs in the most beautiful colours, and said things would never be the same. King Carl Gustaf said her music was bound up with important moments for many Swedes, his own family included.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A year later, grief struck again. On the twentieth of December 2020 Pelle Alsing, the drummer who had helped create the Roxette sound from day one, died at sixty. Per remembered him as the funniest person to be around and the one who supported you most when you were in doubt. That same month the band released Bag of Trix, a box of demos and outtakes dedicated to Marie, including one of the last songs she sang, Let Your Heart Dance with Me. Per kept working. In 2021 he formed PG Roxette with singers Helena Josefsson and Dea Norberg and longtime players, covering Metallica's Nothing Else Matters and releasing the album Pop-Up Dynamo! in 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 2024 Malmö Opera premiered Joyride, a jukebox musical built on Roxette songs and Jane Fallon's comic revenge novel Got You Back, sung in English with Swedish dialogue. Per said earlier scripts had all been too dark, and he wanted something happy. It sold out almost immediately. Earlier that year, in May 2024, he announced that Roxette would perform live again with Lena Philipsson, the Swedish star who had once sung his song Kärleken är evig at Melodifestivalen in 1986. He told the Guardian he had only two options after Marie's death, close everything down or find someone to help him sing the songs. He hired Lena to sing Roxette, he said, not to create a new success, with dates planned for South Africa and Australia in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roxette remain Sweden's second best selling act after ABBA, with estimates of seventy five to eighty million records sold. They scored four American number ones, The Look, Listen to Your Heart, It Must Have Been Love and Joyride, three written by Per alone, and nineteen UK top forty hits. In the United States It Must Have Been Love and Listen to Your Heart have each been played on radio more than five million times, and It Must Have Been Love passed six million plays in 2021. Critics once dismissed them as fluff, but the view has softened, much as it did for ABBA. As of 2026 Per Gessle carries on, and Marie's voice is still all over the radio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Roxette

Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson. Friends since 1978 in Halmstad, they built Roxette as a partnership of songwriter and voice. Per wrote nearly all the songs and Marie gave them their power. There were strains, including Marie's private 1994 wedding that left Per and his wife hurt, and her unhappiness during Have a Nice Day and Room Service. Yet Per stood by her through illness, and at her death thanked her for painting his black and white songs in colour.[1] [2] [3]

Marie Fredriksson and Mikael Bolyos. Marie met keyboard player Mikael Bolyos on the Australian leg of the Joyride tour in December 1991 and married him privately in May 1994. She said meeting him probably saved her from burning out on tour. They made music together in their home studio in Djursholm, including The Change after her cancer, and raised two children, Inez Josefin and Oscar.[1] [2] [3]

Per Gessle and Åsa Nordin. Åsa Nordin was Per's longtime girlfriend before they married in 1993 at a church in Eslöv. A note she left on his piano, saying hello you fool, I love you, became the opening line of Joyride. Their son Gabriel was born in 1997, and Per filmed a brief moment with him for the Wish I Could Fly video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Roxette and Clarence Öfwerman. Clarence Öfwerman produced every Roxette studio album from Pearls of Passion in 1986 to Good Karma in 2016, and played keyboards on stage and record. He backed the duo when they refused EMI's demand to move to Los Angeles for Joyride. His brother Staffan sang and played percussion in the band, and Clarence later co-produced PG Roxette's Pop-Up Dynamo![1] [2] [3]

Per Gessle and Mats Persson. Mats MP Persson co-founded Gyllene Tider with Per in 1976 and co-owned their Halmstad studio, nicknamed Tits and Ass, where many Roxette demos were born. He co-wrote Listen to Your Heart and Spending My Time, played guitar across Roxette's catalogue, and demoed songs with Per for albums right up to Charm School.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Marie Fredriksson and Lasse Lindbom. Producer Lasse Lindbom heard Marie at an audition arranged by Per in 1982 and offered her a solo deal, which she was too nervous to accept. She toured in his band instead, and when she finally went solo he co-wrote and produced her debut album, Het vind, launching the solo career that made her a star in Sweden before Roxette.[1] [2]

Roxette and Brian Phillips and Dean Cushman. Exchange student Dean Cushman brought Look Sharp! to Minneapolis station KDWB, and program director Brian Phillips put The Look on air and mailed it to stations across America. Phillips later said Cushman's persistence was what great promotion men do. Cushman became friendly with Per and Marie, who signed the very CD he had handed in.[1] [2] [3]

Roxette and EMI America. EMI's American arm first rejected Roxette as unsuitable for the US, then signed them in a hurry once The Look took off. After the 1991 merger that created EMI Records Group North America, Per felt the band was abandoned. The McDonald's release of Crash! Boom! Bang! finished the relationship, and EMI issued no new Roxette release in the US until 2011.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Marie Fredriksson and Michael Ilbert. Mix engineer Michael Ilbert co-produced Have a Nice Day in 1998. Marie later accused him of ignoring her, dealing only with Per and Clarence, calling her voice weak and her songs not good enough, and criticising her until she cried. She said the experience destroyed her confidence and her happiness in Roxette. Ilbert was not involved in the sessions for Room Service.[1] [2] [3]

Roxette and Jonas Åkerlund. Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, once a drummer in the black metal band Bathory, became Roxette's main video maker, shooting a dozen clips. His work included the banned video for Anyone, the costly Centre of the Heart video at California's Madonna Inn, the Room Service artwork, and the 2016 documentary Roxette Diaries.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Per Gessle and Lena Philipsson. Per wrote Kärleken är evig, the 1986 Melodifestivalen song that became Lena Philipsson's big breakthrough. Both appeared on Swedish stamps in 1991. After Marie's death Per chose his old friend to sing Roxette's songs live, announcing her as the band's vocalist in May 2024 and saying he was hiring her to sing Roxette, not to chase a new success.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Per Gessle and Helena Josefsson. Producer Christoffer Lundquist recruited singer Helena Josefsson for Per's 2003 solo album Mazarin, starting a long partnership. She sang on his later solo records, toured with Roxette in 2011, fronted many songs on the 2018 Per Gessle's Roxette tour, and became one of the two vocalists of PG Roxette.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Roxette

• Roxette took their name from a 1974 Dr. Feelgood single written by guitarist Wilko Johnson. The pub rock band Dr. Feelgood released Roxette as their debut single in November 1974. It never charted, but Per Gessle borrowed the title when Capitol needed a pronounceable name for Gyllene Tider in America.[1] [2] [3]
• The first record released as Roxette was actually a Gyllene Tider mini album in America. Capitol took six tracks from Gyllene Tider's English album The Heartland Café and issued them in the US under the name Roxette. Per recalled the thrill of finding his band filed just in front of Roxy Music at Tower Records.[1] [2]
• Neverending Love began as a Swedish song written for singer Pernilla Wahlgren, who turned it down. Called Svarta glas, it was offered to Pernilla Wahlgren, who passed it to her brother Niclas. His version was cancelled at EMI's request once Per recorded it in English with Marie.[1] [2]
• Per wrote The Look while learning to use a new synthesizer. He built the song as an exercise on an Ensoniq ESQ-1, around a repeating bass line, with a rhythm borrowed from ZZ Top.[1] [2]
• The Look was first written as He's Got the Look, for Marie to sing. Per and EMI wanted Marie as the lead voice, but when Per sang the demo himself he felt it fitted him better, and the pronouns changed.[1]
• The Look's famous riff was written days earlier by guitarist Jonas Isacsson with his girlfriend. Isacsson said he wrote the riff while composing with Marianne Flynner, and Per wanted it as the opening the moment he heard it.[1]
• The intro of The Look alone contains eight programmed digital snare drums. Former Gyllene Tider bassist Anders Herrlin programmed them, plus about twenty other effects, because Per wanted to avoid the live band sound of their debut.[1]
• The spine of Look Sharp! promised two good friends, three great chords and twelve brilliant songs. Per told the Los Angeles Times the joke was a way of poking fun at the glamorous side of the business and keeping some distance from it.[1]
• Listen to Your Heart was the first US number one never sold as a seven inch vinyl single. It reached the top of the Hot 100 in November 1989 on cassette, as vinyl singles were disappearing and before CD singles took over.[1] [2]
• The director of the Listen to Your Heart video thought Borgholm Castle was a fake set. Doug Freel's crew believed the ruins on Öland had been built for the shoot, and Per said it took time to convince them it was real.[1] [2]
• For the It Must Have Been Love video, Marie had to mime at double speed. Director Doug Freel wanted slow motion, so Marie lip-synced twice as fast. She called it her first lesson in singing an emotional ballad Mickey Mouse style.[1]
• It Must Have Been Love was written because EMI Germany wanted an intelligent Christmas single. The 1987 original was subtitled Christmas for the Broken Hearted. Germany then declined to release it, three years before Pretty Woman made it a global hit.[1] [2]
• Per whistled the Joyride solo himself, overdubbing it twelve times. He said he had just seen Monty Python's Life of Brian and had always wanted a whistling break in a song.[1]
• The spoken narration on Joyride is by Dave Edwards, credited as a former Beatles and Roxette tour manager. Joyride is full of Beatles nods. Its title came from Paul McCartney describing writing with Lennon as a long joyride, and the sleeve drew on Magical Mystery Tour.[1] [2]
• The Joyride album set was designed by Mikael Varhelyi, later art director on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Inspired by South American carnivals and funfairs, the bright sleeve was designed by Roxette with Kjell Andersson and shot by Mattias Edwall.[1]
• In 1991 Roxette appeared on a Swedish postage stamp alongside Lena Philipsson and Jerry Williams. Decades later Lena Philipsson, who shared that stamp series, became Roxette's live singer after Marie's death.[1] [2]
• Roxette were the first act singing in a second language to appear on MTV Unplugged. They filmed their set in early 1993, but it was never issued as an official Unplugged album. It later surfaced on the Rox Box DVD.[1]
• Almost Unreal was written for Hocus Pocus and still says hocus pocus in its chorus. Disney gave the Hocus Pocus theme to En Vogue, so the song went to the Super Mario Bros. movie. Roxette agreed partly because they liked Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper.[1]
• Marie sang Almost Unreal when she was nine months pregnant. Her vocals were recorded at Polar Studios in Stockholm in March 1993, soon before the birth of her daughter.[1] [2]
• The Crash! Boom! Bang! video had to be shot twice because of a sound sync fault. It was one continuous take of Marie climbing an endless spiral staircase. Per joked that the first version was a two hundred and fifty thousand pound rehearsal.[1]
• Sleeping in My Car was written in under an hour and was the last song made for its album. Per felt the finished album sounded too grown up, went home annoyed and wrote a caveman riff. Marie's vocal on it spans over three octaves.[1]
• Roxette's McDonald's CD sold over a million copies in America but could not chart. Billboard then excluded albums sold by a single retailer. Roxette later sued to have forty thousand illegally imported copies destroyed rather than seek damages.[1]
• A Swedish court ordered Roxette in 2008 to pay four and a half million kronor in back tax. The bill covered money earned on the German part of their 1994 and 1995 tour.[1]
• The title Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus! comes from a saying of Motown founder Berry Gordy. The 1995 hits album also featured You Don't Understand Me, co-written with Desmond Child, which Per called the first Roxette song written with an outsider.[1]
• Roxette's Spanish lyrics were written by Luis Gómez-Escolar, later a co-writer of Livin' la Vida Loca. His translations for Baladas en Español were criticised as simplistic, yet the album went double platinum in Spain and sold over a million worldwide.[1] [2]
• On Have a Nice Day covers sold in Arabian territories, the naked babies were digitally removed. It was done because of religious concerns. Spanish language editions also had a blue floor instead of the pink one.[1]
• Marie's unreleased demos leaked in 2002 after a former EMI employee sold a bootleg CD at a Dutch record fair. The demos were songs she recorded at home in Djursholm for Have a Nice Day, some of which were later officially released.[1]
• The Centre of the Heart video, shot at California's Madonna Inn, is Roxette's most expensive video. Jonas Åkerlund filmed it over three days in 2001, beating the budget of Spending My Time from ten years earlier.[1]
• Travelling was meant to be called Tourism 2, but the label said a number in the title would confuse people. When they also rejected T2, Per pointed to Adele's 21. He got no answer and settled on Travelling.[1]
• She's Got Nothing On But the Radio borrows a line attributed to Marilyn Monroe about her calendar photos. Monroe reportedly said she had the radio on. The single made Roxette the only duo on Billboard's adult contemporary chart in four decades.[1] [2]
• On the 2011 tour Roxette sold a hundred thousand tickets in Australia but only about a thousand copies of Charm School. Per blamed Capitol's promotion, noting the same gap in Britain, where they sold thirteen thousand Wembley tickets but about three thousand albums.[1] [2]
• Per Gessle co-wrote a song on ABBA singer Frida's 1982 solo album, setting a Dorothy Parker poem to music. The song was Threnody, on Frida's Phil Collins produced album Something's Going On, so Per shares a credit with Dorothy Parker.[1]
• Per subscribed to Billboard from 1981, long before he had an American hit. So when The Look entered the Hot 100 at number fifty in February 1989, he knew that was a very high debut for a new act.[1]
• A Ugandan musician used It Must Have Been Love for a landmark song about living with HIV. In 1989 Philly Lutaaya, then based in Sweden, adapted it as Alone and Frightened on the album where he went public as HIV positive.[1]
• Every piece in Marie's first art exhibition sold by the end of its second day. Unable to read after her tumour, she took up charcoal drawing as therapy. The 2005 show After the Change was held in Stockholm.[1]
• Per Gessle co-owns a seaside hotel in Sweden that houses his Ferrari collection. Hotel Tylösand, near Halmstad, displays art and photography and The Joyride Car Collection, his private collection of Ferraris.[1]
• The Vancouver Canucks took the ice to Joyride during the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs. The song was used as the hockey team's entrance music before each playoff game that year.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.