Roxette

Roxette reached number one in the United States because an exchange student took a record home with him.

His name was Dean Cushman, he was American and he was spending a year in Sweden. He bought "Look Sharp!", he liked it, and when he got back to Minneapolis at the end of 1988 he walked into a local radio station with the tape and kept pushing until they played a song.

The song was "The Look". The station played it, people called in, other stations copied it, and the American label —which had no plans to release the album— was forced to put it out.

In April 1989 it was number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

What came after that tape

It was not a one-off fluke. Roxette had four number ones in the United States: "The Look", "Listen to Your Heart", "It Must Have Been Love" and "Joyride".

Four. There are enormous English-speaking stars who never manage one.

And something that gets repeated about them is worth correcting: that they came from a country with no tradition of worldwide pop hits. That is not true. ABBA had sold more than a hundred and fifty million records a decade earlier, from the same country and in the same foreign language.

What Roxette did was not open the door. It was to prove that the door was still open, that ABBA had not been an unrepeatable accident, and that a country of eight million people could do it again.

Marie Fredriksson supplied the voice and Per Gessle did the writing. He had an almost mechanical instinct for the hook; she had the range to make a hook sound like feeling rather than formula.

The "Pretty Woman" song already existed

"It Must Have Been Love" is known as the song from "Pretty Woman", from 1990.

But it had been around since 1987, released in Sweden as a Christmas single, with a festive line in the lyric and not much of a run.

When the film asked for it, they recorded it again without the reference to winter. The same song, three years older, minus one detail. And that is how it became one of the most listened-to ballads in the world.

It is a useful reminder: sometimes a song fails not because it is bad, but because it came out on the wrong day of the calendar.

The night of 11 September 2002

Here there is an important correction, because it changes what the story means.

It is usually told that Marie Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the peak of her career, as if she had gone to the doctor and been given the news.

What happened was that she suffered an epileptic seizure at home on 11 September 2002. She collapsed in the bathroom and fractured her skull. She was taken to hospital because of the fall.

The tumour showed up on the scan they did to check the fracture.

She was given very little chance of being alive in two years. She lived seventeen.

She went back to recording and back to touring, with lasting damage to her sight and her mobility that never went away, singing seated much of the time. She died on 9 December 2019, at sixty-one.

An author's note on distance

There is something "It Must Have Been Love" does especially well, and that is speak the language of absence.

It came out when loving from far away really meant being far away: the letter, the house telephone, the long wait between one meeting and the next. The longing piled up because there was no way to soothe it on the spot.

That way of loving had its singers in every language. In Spanish it was Nino Bravo who sang the farewell and the return best, and he too was taken early by an accident, in 1973, at twenty-eight.

It is a reading, not a fact. But it explains why that ballad hits differently for anyone who heard it when it came out.

What to remember

Roxette are proof that sometimes all a great song is missing is someone willing to take the trouble to carry it to the other side of the ocean.

Put on "The Look", "Joyride" or "Listen to Your Heart" and you will hear pop-rock built with a watchmaker's precision, with a voice on top of it giving it the weight songs like that do not usually have.

And keep in mind the two things that do not appear in the official version. That the record was carried across the Atlantic by an exchange student, not by a campaign. And that Marie's tumour was not found by a check-up, but by a fall in her own bathroom.

Remember them like this: the duo that made possible again what ABBA had already done, and a voice that went on singing seventeen years after being given two.

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Sources

Roxette, Swedish duo formed in 1986 by Marie Fredriksson (vocals) and Per Gessle (songwriting, guitar and vocals). Their entry into the American market came by a route that had nothing to do with the record company: the American exchange student Dean Cushman took the album "Look Sharp!" from Sweden to Minneapolis at the end of 1988 and persuaded a local station to programme "The Look"; airplay spread to other stations and forced the American label to release the record. "The Look" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1989. The duo obtained four number ones in the United States: "The Look", "Listen to Your Heart", "It Must Have Been Love" and "Joyride". "It Must Have Been Love" had been released in Sweden in 1987 as a Christmas single, with a seasonal reference in the lyric, and was re-recorded without it for the film "Pretty Woman" (1990). The idea that Sweden had no tradition of international pop hits before Roxette needs qualifying: ABBA had reached estimated sales of between 150 and 170 million records in the previous decade. On 11 September 2002, Marie Fredriksson suffered an epileptic seizure at home, collapsed and fractured her skull; the brain tumour was detected in the imaging carried out because of that injury, and not in a previous diagnosis. The initial prognosis at two years was very unfavourable; Fredriksson partially resumed her musical activity, with permanent damage to her sight and mobility, and died on 9 December 2019, at 61. The reflection on love at a distance and the mention of Nino Bravo —killed in a road accident in 1973, at 28— are offered as the author's reading. ABBA has its own profile in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard, Wikipedia, Aftonbladet, The Guardian and other coverage.