STUTTGART - Over the past week, workers have been busy putting up promotional posters for the Roxette concert. Now, nearly every corner of Stuttgart is full of “Room Service Tour-2001” posters.

MADRID - Palacio de los Deportes, the venue in this city where Roxette was going to play in October, was destroyed by a fire this morning.

  Tickets for the concert were to go on sale tomorrow, but now Roxette must first find a substitute venue. Palacio de los Deportes (“Sports Palace” in English) had a capacity of about 14,000 people and was one of the biggest concert venues in Madrid. It was here that Roxette played during their Crash! Boom! Bang! tour in 1994.

  One possible place for Roxette’s concert might be La Cubierta, a bull-fighting venue in Leganés, 10 kilometers from Madrid.

• El Mundo article (in Spanish, with additional pictures)

JOHANNESBURG - After Roxette’s recent chart success with “The Centre Of The Heart,” EMI has encouraged 5FM, South Africa’s most popular radio station, to devote an entire day to our favorite Swedish duo. South Africans can tune in this Friday, June 29th, and take part in various competitions via phone.
  For curious fans outside South Africa, they can listen to 5FM in streaming audio (the link is available on their website).

  Meanwhile, South African fans are eagerly awaiting additional information about dates and venues for the Room Service tour which, according to Per Gessle - as quoted in his local daily newspaper Hallandsposten - is headed here in December.

• 5FM

SOL Musica is a very well known Portuguese and Spanish music channel that, during June, broadcast the promotional interview with Roxette about the new album “Room Service” and about the lead single “The Centre Of The Heart”. The interview was split into six parts, interrupted by small bits of the TCOTH video. While many subscribers to The Daily Roxette may already be familiar with the content, here is a full transcription of the broadcast:

PER GESSLE: We released the last album in the spring of ’99. “Have a nice day” was the title. We were doing promotion on that one and we decided not to tour with it and got back into the studio and started to work on this album in January 2000. Prior to this we worked on the HAND album (1998). It takes about a year to do an album.

MARIE FREDRIKSSON: It feels great. It’s always a lot of fun being together cause we know each other so well. And this album “Room Service” is really… we both like it very much. It has a couple of songs that are much Roxette. It’s a mix of the old days and how we sound today. We’re looking foward to promoting the album. Read more…

Mix Megapol, a Swedish radio station, let their listeners vote for the best summer songs ever made. When the returns were in, Gyllene Tider’s “Sommartider” turned out to be the second best song after Tomas Ledin’s “Sommaren är Kort”. “Gå & Fiska!”, another Gyllene Tider song, ended up at number 8.

• Mix Megapol’s Summer Song List

Inspired by the successful campaigns to get Roxette and Marie to go on tour, ¡Roxette Latino!, RunToRoxette and Roxette México have launched a Web page to ask Marie and Per to include Latin America in their Room Service tour, that will be starting in Europe. At the site, you can leave messages to Roxette and view all the messages already posted.

  Roxette’s songs from Room Service have reached some of the highest positions on mostly every chart all over Latin America, and many fans are waiting to see Roxette on stage once again.

BARCELONA - Tickets for the two concerts in Spain will go on sale this Friday. They will be available from the following places:

BARCELONA SHOW (in the “typical shops):
- Fnac, Revolver, Castello, etc. - these last two are record shops in the center of Barcelona - and then Servicaixa and El Corte Ingles (these two are
selling online).

MADRID SHOW:
- Servicaixa, Corte Ingles, Madrid Rock and Fnac.

  Further details, such as pricing, will be available soon. If anyone coming from abroad needs help in purchasing a ticket, RoxSpain is willing to help. Write to [email protected] with any questions.

• RoxSpain

“Good News” is an important magazine in Switzerland with coverage about future concerts and other entertainment news. The lastest issue – just out – has Per and Marie on the cover.

  The article inside devotes four entire pages to Roxette, as their upcoming concerts are considered to be one of the highlights this year. The magazine wrote a very positive story and in the Discography sidebar, every Roxette album is praised! In fact, this reporter has never read such positive things from a journalist about Roxette.

Cover image of “Good News” used with permission.

The current single from Room Service – “Real Sugar” – has reached the highest position on Much Music Argentina after only one week on the show!

• Much Music Argentina

Apparently, the A*Teens went a little overboard with Roxette’s “Real Sugar” and now they have a “Sugar Rush.”

  In the “Countdown” program on the Much Music Channel, the “Real Sugar” video is at #4, while the A*Teens are at #6 with “Sugar Rush”.

VH-1 Europe will present again today (June 20th) at nearly 11pm (23:00) a Greatest Hits program with the following videos: “Joyride,” “The Look,” “Dressed for Success,” “Sleeping In My Car,” “It Must Have Been Love” and “Listen to Your Heart!”

nbsp; This program was first broadcast back on June 4th, so if you missed it then, this is another chance to see it.

  “Real Sugar” has started to have airplay on VH-1 Europe, just as TCOTH did.

LIMA - Expectations are high as to whether or not Roxette might come to Peru now that “The Centre of the Heart” has reached the top spot on Planeta, the most important rock and pop radio station in Lima, this week.

  “People just love Roxette and everybody here is looking forward to seeing them perform live again” said DJ Cheryl Pardo when asked about the spectacular ascent of Roxette’s first single after only three weeks on Planeta’s chart. TCOTH had reached the #1 position on other charts, but this is by far their biggest triumph here.

  The fans in Peru are excited. “We’ll do anything possible and impossible to have them back here” said one fan today when a group got together to celebrate their favorite artist’s latest success. Spanish-speaking fans can e-mail Planeta radio at [email protected] to express support for Marie and Per.

LISBON - Popular Saturday night talk show “Herman SIC” welcomed Roxette yesterday, who had come here to promote “Room Service”. The show was awesome, with Per and Marie performing “The Centre of the Heart” while the studio audience clapped along to the beat of the song! Both seemed to be in a happy mood and Marie in particular just rocked.

  The host of the show, Herman Jose, who had welcomed Roxette six years ago when they were promoting DBUGTTC-GH, was very friendly and invited them to take part in the rest of the show seated next to the other guests. This was unusual, as most English-speaking artists just perform and that’s it.

  Herman complimented Roxette on the new album, which he said was great. Per was asked if he could give his old Ferrari motor (that he is going to give way) to one of the other guests that had built a helicopter… but it seemed that this helicopter needed a Porsch motor instead of a Ferrari. A nice try, and everyone had a big laugh! When the host received a joke “present” from an audience member - a huge rubber penis - he asked Marie and Per whether they had such kind of shows in Sweden, so free and with such “objects”! Per replied, “Only on Wednesdays!”

  It was a very funny show, and while Per and Marie might have felt a bit lost since everyone was speaking Portuguese, they appeared to “hang in” the entire time.

The new single “Real Sugar” has just been serviced to European radio. There is also a great dance remix available made by Shooting Star that appears on the Maxi-single. The band will continue to do promotion in Europe throughout June and then have July off for a well-deserved vacation.

It doesn’t happen very often, but with limited resources to check facts, we sometimes get a story wrong. The editors of The Daily Roxette regret that despite the fact that three of our reporters submitted similar stories about the “Room Service” album going Platinum in Brazil, it appears that the article was erroneous.

  Our reporters all based their stories on the same source… and that source, apparently, had based his declaration of “Platinum” status on units shipped instead of units sold. We have deleted our earlier story until such time as we can be more certain of the situation there.

  As we go to press with this retraction, TDR has been unable to independently confirm how many copies of “Room Service” have actually been sold.

The Austrian Roxette Fanclub has launched a Flash-animated website, offering news, a complete discography, photographs, and more.

  In the media section, you can find private pictures of Roxette taken by the Fanclub, with more to be added.
There is a funny video greeting of Roxette there too.

• Austrian Fanclub Site (In German)

GUARULHOS, SP - Brazilians are really enjoying Roxette’s song “Milk and Toast and Honey”… so much so that there’s already a remix version. The last Roxette remix to play in Brazil was “How do you do” in 1992. This time, radio station Metropolitana FM is playing a version that is, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the best dance remixes ever done for a Roxette song. The DJ said it was created by Fragma. It is uncertain at press time whether this remix was commissioned by EMI, or is simply an independent project.

• Metropolitina FM

UK fans may have reason to be optimistic about seeing a concert or two this winter. Per Gessle, in an answer to a question on the roxette.se site, said “We’re quietly planning to do some UK shows in December. It will happen if “Milk and Toast and Honey” and the album get the attention they deserve. M&T&H will be out in August, by the way.”

There’s more good news coming from Latin America!

  Roxette’s “Room Service” album has gone Gold in Brazil, which means over 100,000 copies have been sold so far!

  In addition, “Room Service” is #6 this week on the Br@sil 100 chart, its highest position so far. While this is not the official Brazilian sales chart, it is based on a sampling of retail sales, mass merchant and internet sales. The soundtrack album for the novela “Um Anjo Caiu do Céu”, which includes Roxette’s “Milk & Toast & Honey” is at #3 this week on this same chart.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A spokesperson at EMI Brasil has indicated that Roxette are expected to visit that country in August for promotional appearances.

• Hot100 Br@sil’s Top 50 CDs

It’s an idea that pops up every year or so amongst the musically talented Roxette fans who are connected with each other online… but it seldom gets very far. This time, one of our readers seems prepared to actually make it happen.

  TDR’s SmallTalk forum has been the launching pad for a project that will compile fan-produced versions of Roxette songs and put them onto a CD.

  The compilation album is the idea of René Jepsen (TDR: AppleInTheMud) who has his own recording studio in Germany. “Every fan can send us their personal demo, of any Roxette song they want,” he said. “The 15
best – or most loveable – will be put on the CD.”

  Once the CD is ready, TDR will deliver a copy to both Per and Marie. René and his partner Jan Petersen in Denmark have offered to send the CD to readers of The Daily Roxette for free. We’ll provide details about how to get your copy at a later date.

  If you have a recording that you’d like to be considered, send it to Studio (C) Production; c/o René H. Jepsen; Charlote Niese Weg 6; D-253 55 Barmstedt, Germany. The deadline for submissions is July 15th.

After a delay of two weeks, “Room Service” was finally released by EMI Canada on May 29th. Apparently, EMI Canada’s only promotion for the album was to announce it on their Web page. In most record stores the album can’t be found in the new release section. Disappointingly, TCOTH didn’t receive any exposure on radio or TV.

• EMI Canada