STOCKHOLM - Swedish freelance journalist Jan Gradvall, one of Per’s favorite music critics, has published a lengthy, exclusive interview with Per on his own website.

  In the Swedish-language article, “In the head of Per Gessle,” Jan and Per discuss records, drawings, Per’s family and pop music in general.

  “Per Gessle has never revealed much of himself and his life on his previous albums,” Gradvall writes. “But he does it on ’Son of a Plumber.’ The album leads straight into his old boyhood room in Halmstad.”


EDITOR’S NOTE: With the kind permission of the author, The Daily Roxette is pleased to be able to reprint this interview below in full, translated into English by our own Thomas Evensson. It’s a little Christmas gift to our worldwide subscribers, courtesy of Mr. Gradvall. From all of us at TDR… warm wishes for a God Jul och Gott Nytt År!.  – LEO

• Interview with Per (In Swedish)

In the head of Per Gessle


By Jan Gradvall



  Per Gessle’s latest album is released under the name Son of a Plumber. It has been considered a funny or silly pseudonym, but it’s really a correct description of his own background. Per Gessle’s father was a plumber.


  Per Gessle, born in 1959, has never revealed much of himself and his life on his previous albums by Gyllene Tider or Roxette or [even on] his own solo albums using his own name. But he does on the “Son of a Plumber” album. The album leads straight into his old boyhood room in Halmstad.


  When you open the record sleeve you find a picture of his father, Kurt, and his mother Elisabeth. Kurt Gessle ran a heating, water and sanitation firm and worked continously. He probably didn’t know much about his sons thoughts and ideas.


  Inside the record sleeve of “Son of a Plumber” there are two drawings made in watercolors and pencil. One is a handball game-situation, the other is a hockey game. The drawings are made by Per Gessle when he was around seven years old.


  I recognize the twisted perspective in the drawings: all the players are facing forward. I recognize the attempts to get the exact lifelikeness in the display of the goal posts and the coloring of their jerseys. This is exactly how I drew at this age.


Where did you find these old drawings?


  – I found them at my mom’s house. I was looking in an old photo album and when I opened it a stack of old drawings fell out. I drew a lot when I was little. This, for instance, is Brynäs scoring against Teg.


What team was Teg?


  – Kjell Rune Milton played with them. He went to MoDo later, but started in Teg.


Did you collect hockey cards as well?


  – Of course. I made lists of everything. I even wrote down who scored in “TV-pucken”. Brynäs was my favorite team. I remember when they lost the Swedish Championship gold in a game against Leksand. I was devastated, I couldn’t go to school. I’ve always been a sore loser.


Does your mom still live in the old house?


  – No, we’ve moved a lot. The first time we moved was ’68 or ’69. My dad had asthma. The doctors said that he should move up the country because that would be good for his windpipes. That was strange advice, I realize now. I’ve heard otherwise that sea air is better if you have asthma.


I have asthma. It sounds very strange.


  – Doesn’t it? We lived by the Folkpark in Halmstad, but moved 20 km up country. We lived there maybe five years, when I was about 9 to 13. Then we moved again, to Vilshärad, where we built a house. That was when my dad got sick. He got prostate cancer. He couldn’t work and laid at home for a year.


  – At the end of that period we couldn’t afford keeping the house so we moved again. It was in that house I wrote “När alla vännerna gått hem”. It was at Hamilton’s Väg 1978. I remember it vividly. My dad died in 1978.


There’s an underlying pensive melancholy in that song. Did you write it after your father’s death?


  - (Thinks) Yes, it must have been after. My dad only heard us once. It was when Grape Rock was on the radio show “Bandet går” (“The Tape’s Running”). We were supposed to be a punk band, but the song, “En av dom där,” was over six minutes long. It was built on an eternal riff that probably had more in common with Led Zeppelin. But my dad didn’t like it at all. Above all he thought my singing was terrible.


What did your boyhood room look like?


  – Well, we moved a lot so nothing remained constant. We were three siblings but we were seven years apart. When I was born my sister (Gunilla) was 14 years old. She disappeared from home rather early of course. It was mostly me and my brother (Bengt). But I remember that my sister had her room at the top of the stairs and that she always played “Lipstick On My Collar.” Have you heard that?


Connie Francis?


  – Green vinyl.


I guess it’s the Connie Francis era that Agnetha Fältskog is looking back to on her latest album. The innocent time before The Beatles.


  – A fantastic era. Many of those songs sound exactly the same, but you can’t help liking them. Do you have this collection? What’s his name again… The guy who did “Telstar” with The Tornadoes? All his productions are amazing.


You mean Joe Meek?


  – Yes!


Haven’t bought it yet I’m afraid.


  – Almost everything on this collection is great. Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages, “I Ain’t Mad At You.” Unparalleled. Damned great. My brother had this single. My brother is born 1951. I started out borrowing records from him before I built my own collection. My first favorites were the Hep Stars.


Aren’t you too young for the Hep Stars really?


  – I liked them. My parents drove me to see the Hep Stars on stage. They said the exact same things between the songs as on the live album “On Stage.” I asked my mom about this recently, but she couldn’t remember anything about it. She’s 81.


  – I liked the Hep Stars so much I forced my friends to pretend we were a band. We stood there with couronne cues as guitars and lip synced “Sunny Girl” and “It’s My Life” by The Animals. But my friends were totally uninterested in music. They thought I was weird.


What was the dominant thing in their lives? Soccer?


  – I played soccer too, but it wasn’t my thing. I was pretty technical, I could kick the ball in the air 100 times. But I was kind of fat back then and a bad runner. The thing that settled it was when I turned 15. I got to choose between a used moped and a used stereo. I picked the stereo.


I have the exact same story. We were maybe a few rungs above you on the middle class’ social ladder: for me it was a new moped or a new stereo.


  – I’ve always been a loner and became even more so when I decided against the moped. Maybe it’s my personality, but it’s also due to us moving so frequently. You never rooted, didn’t get any close friends. I stayed at home instead, with my headphones. I listened to records, listened a lot to the radio and wrote down statistics.


  – At the same age, when I was 14-15, I started writing my own songs. We had a piano at home that I never used. I took a few lessons, but I could never connect the thing about musical notes. I never understood how the notes became music. So when I wrote songs it was just lyrics. I had the melodies in my head. I had hundreds of songs in my head.


Finished songs you had thought up?


  – Yes.


You heard them in your head with arrangements and all?


  – Yes. Not the way Mozart did (laughs), they weren’t symphonies where I could hear every single instrument. But I had pop songs all finished in my head; beat, verse, bridge and chorus.


  – It was there, inside my head, where I lived my life. We moved and moved. Junior high school was a damned painful time for me. I felt totally out of place. I was kind of bullied and felt worthless. Plus I was rather fat. To get away from school I decided to take a sabbatical and start working at Bingo-Livs.


A sabbatical at Bingo-Livs?


  – Yes, it was an ICA [grocery] store. I’m born in January 1959. When I took the school maturity test at the age of six I got to choose if I wanted to start school a year early. We chose that alternative and I started school as early as six. I was therefore always the youngest in the class during my youth. Taking a sabbatical was a way to start over in a new class, with persons of my own age. Mom and all were unanimous that a sabbatical was a good idea.


  – I worked at Bingo-Livs unpacking milk and things like that. I got to drive a moped after all, one with a platform even, picking up groceries. When I stood there packing milk one day one of my teachers at the disgusting school came by and said “Oh, so this is where you would end up after all.” Goddam what an ass. But to me it was a chance to start over. During the sabbatical I managed to lose some weight.


How? During those days they had neither gyms nor health clubs?


  – I lived on chicken and crisp bread for a year. Everything was at the end of the line. I was determined to start over from scratch. New house, new school, new friends. I was looking for a year zero.


  – Parallel with this punk rock arrives. I bought Patti Smith’s “Horses” and the Ramomes first. I got a kind of abstract self confidence from this. Punk rock said it was OK to not be especially great. In the spirit of the times that had been before, marked by “Brain Salad Surgery” and “Dark Side of the Moon,” everybody were so damned good.


  – When I came back to school, where I finally ended up in a new class, I found a friend. A great friend named Peter, Peter Nilsson. It was 1977 and he played the bass in a band called Audiovisuellt Angrepp. The band rehearsed in Harplinge, 15 km away. We went there as soon as we could and stayed all day long there.


  – Among the other members of Audiovisuellt Angrepp were MP (Mats Persson, Gyllene Tider) who played the drums. That’s how I got to know him. In the band was also Martin Sternhufvud who later started MaMas Barn together with Marie (Fredriksson). After a while MP and I started a band on the side, but in the beginning I sat there, with my back to the wall, and listened to them play.


  – The room they used to rehearse was small, a lot smaller than this room. And it was so damned loud. I sat there thinking, wow, this is exactly what I want to do with my life.



  The room we’re sitting in today is big. We’re sitting in Per Gessle’s living room in Stockholm having coffee, or should I say, I’m sitting and drinking coffee. Per Gessle bounces up and down running into the next room, a music room, playing different songs.


  – Don’t you remember Lobo? “I’d Love You to Want Me”? Wait, I got to play it then.


  Per Gessle keeps his vinyl collection in his house in Halmstad. In his Stockholm apartment he keeps all the CDs. But everything he likes is now uploaded to an iPod that he has hooked up to a sort of boom box. He hunkers down, lets the finger slide over the control wheel, clicks up a new song.


  – ”Me And You And A Dog Named Boo.” Also Lobo.


  Per Gessle has gone through quite a few iPods. “The first one was the all-black U2 iPod, but I filled that in a minute”. During 2004 he started uploading his entire CD collection onto iTunes.


More often than not he was so absorbed in it that when he checked the time it was 5 a.m.


  – I get to hear a lot that I’m so meticulous. That my albums are sorted alphabetically and things like that. Sure, they are. But in the middle of that I also have a totally different side to me. I can’t handle when my time is expected to be in order. The worst thing I know is schedules. I don’t like deadlines. I don’t like when I know in advance what will happen.


  – I don’t understand people who write songs 9-5. To sit there for six hours, sometimes you write something, sometimes you don’t. I refuse to work like that. Instead I sit in front of the TV with my guitar in my lap. If it’s a semi-crap movie I turn down the volume and strum the guitar. I read the subtitles, don’t concentrate on what I do and then suddenly a melody can appear. Damn, what was that?



  When Per Gessle uploaded his record collection into iTunes he rediscovered a lot of old music. Things he had listened to on his headphones in his old bedroom.


  – In the old days on the radio you could hear Chicory Tip followed by Harry Belafonte and then Deep Purple. It’s so damn boring with this format-thinking these days. Who likes just one thing? Who wants to eat the same thing the rest of his life?


You got a sort of popular cultural all-around education through the old monopoly radio. You got to learn who Jules Sylvain was.


  – Yes, people don’t know that anymore. And at the same time I believe that the Internet and digital music can turn things around. On the web you can find, like radio in the olden days, random new songs and music.


  – It’s too bad that iTunes Music Store still has so little older music. I don’t understand why companies like EMI or Warner don’t open their own versions of iTunes Music Store. They should upload exactly everything. Imagine if everyone got a possibility to click around there, go through the entire catalogue, discover all the music that’s hidden in the archives.


  Per Gessle takes his iPod, i.e. his record collection, with him when he travels. He goes to Halmstad several times a month.


  At about the same time as he was in Halmstad and looked in his mom’s old photo album – when his own drawings fell out – he started thinking about the music that shaped his adolescence.


  – I have an eight-year-old son. It’s very fun to see what music he finds and why he likes it. On Cartoon Network they apparently have some music. He can come to me and ask about for instance The Rembrandts.


  – A while ago I played “Smoke On the Water” for him. He had never heard it before. The live version from Japan. Duh-duh-duh… It was amazing to witness someone hearing that riff for the very first time in his life. I saw his eyes light up.


  – Because what is it really that makes you stick to different songs? What was it I liked in different songs when I was eight. That feedback loop in “I Feel Fine.” What’s cool with that?



  Per Gessle decided to try to capture that happiness to discover, the totally open and unbiased attitude to music, on an album. An album that audio-wise was characterized by the music he heard on the radio at the beginning of the 1970s. Gessle once again contacted Clarence Öfwerman and Christoffer Lundquist who he’s worked with before.


  – I’ve worked with Clarence since 1986. We know each other very well. One of the things that Clarence always has thought was negative is that I’m always too prepared before starting a record. I make very advanced demos. Demos that sometimes sound exactly like the end results.


  – Now we decided the ultimate change in my world. I made no demos at all for the “Son of a Plumber” album. The only thing I had before the recordings commenced were three instrumentals. The rest is stuff that were made during our work. I played ideas for Clarence and Christoffer who now got a much bigger chance to influence them.


  – I wanted to avoid spearheads on the album. Our idea was to make an album where the whole was the principal, a double-album with a few songs too many. Music doesn’t have to be effective.



  The result is an album that recreates the dreamworld that Per Gessle lived in his headphones. A journey with songtitles that speak for themselves like ”I Never Quite Got Over The Fact That The Beatles Broke Up” via ”Keep The Radio On (This Is The Perfect Song)” to ”Kurt – The Fastest Plumber In The West”.


  A song named after a plumber in Western Sweden. A plumber who had a son who against all odds, succeeded to start over from scratch. Who in his second life became the one he could only dream about in his first.



Reprinted with permission from Gradvall.se. Translated by Thomas Evensson for The Daily Roxette.