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Per
Gessle and Marie Fredriksson
had known each other for years when they finally teamed up to record
the single "Neverending Love" in the spring of 1986. The whole
affair was as low-key as it gets. "It's just a hobby project,"
they both said, referring to their solo careers as the main
focus. This certainly was true for Marie, who had become one of
Sweden's most popular female singers. For Per the stakes were a
bit higher. His former group Gyllene Tider had waned and
disbanded, leaving him with a solo career that was slipping fast down
the road to singer/songwriter oblivion. The bittersweet power of
Marie's voice was the magic formula he needed to get back on track.
Initially there was very little
to reveal their knack for writing and
performing the longing and aching love songs that would give them a
place in the hearts of millions around the world. "I just wanted
to play pop…even more than before," Per said, enthusiastically adding
the digital pulse of contemporary dance music to his guitar-driven
power-pop roots. The first Roxette
singles explored this area,
making them hugely successful in Sweden but virtual non-entities
everywhere else. It wasn't until EMI Germany in 1987 promised
they could get Roxette on the
charts if Per and Marie could come up
with an intelligent Christmas tune that another side of Roxette
emerged. They duly delivered the wonderful "It Must Have Been
Love
(Christmas For the Broken Hearted)." The song topped the Swedish
charts
but wasn't even released in Germany.
Things would soon change,
however. Once the infectious chorus of
"The
Look" had reached the top of almost every chart in 1989, Roxette knew
they had things in store. The answer to "What in the world can
make a
brown-eyed girl turn blue?" wasn't just "la-la-la-la-la." The
full-blown
power ballad "Listen To Your Heart" and a seductive re-recording of "It
Must Have Been Love" (for the hugely successful "Pretty Woman"
soundtrack) confirmed Roxette's
status as the new masters of sad songs
for broken hearts. There was a lasting flavour to their
bubblegum.
Having hit their stride, the
group now started to perfect their
romantic side. "Fading Like A Flower" and "Spending My Time" were
two
misty-eyed highlights off the 1991 Joyride album, both songs
remaining in the duo's live repertoire to this day. They would
return
to the global charts a year later with the desolate "Queen Of Rain," a
gem
from the Tourism
album, which reflected their experiences during the
1991-92 world tour. With four years of unbroken success
behind them, Roxette easily
settled into 1993 with equally high hopes attached to
"Almost Unreal" off the "Super Mario Bros." soundtrack. The
film bombed,
however, and the song disappointingly got somewhat lost in the
shuffle.
Egged on by their first setback since they broke through, Roxette
returned with Crash! Boom!
Bang! in 1994, the sweeping beauty of the
title track making it one of their most loved songs ever. The
aptly
named "Vulnerable" from the same album showed the group at their most
delicate, much owing to the fact that Per by this time had gained
confidence enough to take the role of lead singer on a Roxette ballad. With 1995's "You Don't
Understand Me," from the greatest hits-collection Don't Bore Us, Get To
The Chorus, Marie was back in the vocal booth with a song so
perfectly
echoing her own blues-tinged writing style that you naturally assumed
she was the author. Instead, it was the result of Per teaming up
with
American songwriter Desmond Child to create the best Marie Fredriksson
song she didn't write herself.
Exhausted, the band took some
time off
to “pursue other projects,” a term which in this case covers both
raising a family and recording solo albums. They returned with Have A
Nice Day in 1999, comfortably adding "Wish I Could Fly,"
"Anyone," and
"Salvation" to their ever-growing number of chart and radio hits.
In
the spring of 2001 their album Room Service was released,
and in the
autumn its third single "Milk And Toast And Honey" repeated the trick,
again selling heavily and drawing massive scores when radio stations
summed up the year's most requested songs.
"The whole idea behind Roxette
was that we liked the way
our voices blended," Per and Marie explain with typical
modesty. A lot of people
tend to agree.
source:
Jarda
Hainzel, www.factorytop40.cz/dancearena, Nov. 2002
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