What was that like for you and how well did you cope with it? Roxette’s three-year joyride was about to begin – and Gessle was about to prove himself as an all-time songwriting great… You had over three years of continuous success around the world with Roxette. Pretty soon, EMI Sweden were also fielding calls, from labels who had previously passed on Roxette, including one from their American colleagues. It wasn’t just a local US radio station’s phone that started to ring. In fact, we’d been rejected by every US label.” We didn’t even have a record contract in America, the album hadn’t been released. “The station’s phone started to ring people wanted to hear the song – and they didn’t know anything about it, or us. So he dropped the needle on side one, track one – The Look. The station’s programme director had no idea what from the album was the official ‘single’ – nor what the band/label might want promoted. The only thing I had at that time was an unreleased album in Swedish, we translated it into English and that became the first Roxette album featuring the two of us.”Īn American exchange student took the record back from Sweden to Minneapolis that year and harangued his local radio station into playing a track. “Because of that, EMI in Sweden wanted Marie and myself to make an album together. I kept it and EMI Sweden asked me to translate into English and record it with Marie, and that was our first Roxette song, Never Ending Love, which was a big, big summer hit.

“Then in 1986 I wrote a song for a big Swedish artist, and she didn’t want to record it. “I first met Marie sitting by a piano, singing so incredibly I’d never heard anyone sing like that.” As soon as I heard Marie, we talked about maybe doing something together. The problem was, I knew I could write songs that demanded a better singer than I was. “I always felt like I was a decent songwriter. “I first met Marie sitting by a piano, singing so incredibly I’d never heard anyone sing like that,” says Gessle. International success, however, only came with Gessle’s second band, Roxette, a duo with vocalist Marie Fredriksson, who sadly died in 2019 after a lengthy battle with a brain tumor.

1 hit singles and albums in the early eighties when they were all still teenagers.

In fact, Gyllene Tider got incredibly successful across Scandinavia, with No. “Then”, he recalls, “I got the self-confidence to pick up a guitar because of the punk/new wave thing in 1976, when it was okay to sound bad. In his teens, Gessle started writing poems, and quickly realized these were lyrics, but he couldn’t yet play an instrument to turn them into songs. I always went for those gimmicky things.” I liked the feedback on the intro to I Feel Fine, I liked the I guitar sound on Till The End of the Day by The Kinks. “He was a teenager in the sixties, so his record collection introduced me to pop and rock via bands like The Beatles and The Loving Spoonful,” recalls Gessle. As a kid, like many in MBW’s World’s Greatest Songwriters series, Per Gessle had a significantly older sibling – a brother – with a record collection to wonder at and crib from.

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