ROXETTE SIGUEN TENIENDO EL LOOK / Roxette have still got the look

Incluímos el artículo de ayer en el periódico inglés "The Guardian" sobre Roxette.

Enclosing yesterday's article from English newspaper "The Guardian" about Roxette.

Roxette have still got the look

[Willi Schneider. "The Guardian" 12/4/2012]

Back on the road, Roxette are playing to huge crowds. It recalls how they first gained success, by coming under the radar.

Roxette  sold out Wembley Arena – 12,500 tickets – last autumn, yet they only sold a few thousand copies of their last album, Charm School, in the UK. In the US their hits It Must've Been Love and Listen to Your Heart are still played on the radio every day (Roxette won an award for reaching 4m plays in the US of the former, and it's now nearing 5m plays), way more than their compatriots Abba – yet most Americans don't know who they are, or that Roxette isn't a solo artist. The female of the Swedish duo is Marie Fredriksson, and Per Gessle, the male, partly blame their lack of celebrity status in the US on the fact they had no plan when they started the band. "We were grateful we got airplay in Holland."

"The secret to success is luck, talent and timing," Gessle says. He speaks from experience, and could probably add tenacity and persistence to the list. Luck played a big part in them breaking the US. Had it not been for an American exchange student to Sweden bringing home a copy of their second album, Look Sharp!, and submitting it to his local radio station's listener recommendations show, it may have never happened. It wasn't picked to be played, but when he popped in to collect it he bumped into the programme director, who thought the album cover looked interesting, stuck it in the record player and was blown away by the first track, The Look. At the time, their label, EMI, had no plans to release Look Sharp! in the US, deeming it unsuitable for the market. But with The Look spreading like wildfire from station to station, EMI soon made plans.

A few years earlier, EMI's Swedish boss had suggested Gessle write a Christmas song, to help the duo get played on German radio. It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted) was a hit in Sweden, but German stations still refused to play Roxette, so they decided to leave it off Look Sharp! But once they were riding high in the US charts, the label's American A&R boss asked them to supply a song for a soundtrack of a new movie featuring Richard Gere and, then unknown actor, Julia Roberts. As the band was on a year-long promotional tour, Gessle offered to rewrite the track, taking out the Christmas reference ("it's a hard Christmas day"). The director Garry Marshall loved it so much he let it play, sans dialogue, for almost a minute over one of the movie's key scenes.

"It's all about timing," Gessle explains. "It was exactly the same song in 1987 when no German station wanted to play it. Of course we made a new intro to it, rerecorded it and Humberto Gatica, the hippest mixing engineer at the time, used his 'lucky snare' on it, but the song was the same."

Roxette have been on a world tour for over a year and a half now, playing to more than a million people. And for Fredriksson music has truly been a healing force. After having a brain tumour successfully removed a decade ago and going through a slow, gruelling recovery, she was unsure if she would ever tour, or even sing, again. But in 2009 she came to Holland to see Gessle, who had been releasing a few solo albums, on his Party Crasher tour. He asked her to come up on stage to sing a Roxette song.

"She had no self confidence, and said she couldn't sing any more," Gessle explains. "But she staggered up on stage anyway – and the audience just died. There were about 1,200 in the audience and people were crying to the left and right. Afterwards she was like a changed person and two weeks later she called me asking if I'd want to write another Roxette album."

Tour-wise they started out gently with a five-song set every night on the Night of the Proms tour, a pop-meets-classical music event, where artists perform with an orchestra. By the time they hit the German leg of the tour and had played for 600,000 people they realised they still had a huge fanbase, and so they booked a few full-scale gigs, which turned into tour that's now lasted 19 months.

"We've always stood for a type of music that doesn't go over well with reviewers, but in Australia and Asia we've had some fantastic reviews," Gessle says. "And we've never sold as much merchandise as we did in Australia, this time. For some reason Australians like walking around in Roxette T-shirts – it's incredible."

During the tour they've recorded an album of new songs, soundcheck performances and live tracks, called Travelling. The first single off the album, It's Possible, has been A-listed on Radio 2, which also chose it as a record of the week.

But those fans dreading the "and here's another one from our new album" announcement when going to a concert will have little to worry about. Sure, they'll slip in a few of their new tracks, but Fredriksson's illness has affected her short-term memory, making it difficult to learn new lyrics, while the old hits are inked firmly in her brain.

"Both Marie and I feel so grateful that this works," Gessle says. "What she's been through is truly harrowing, but touring makes her feel incredible. She gets so much back from the audience – it's like she's in the world's oddest rehab."