STOCKHOLM - The historic Polar Studios in Stockholm will close its doors on May 1st after 26 years of operation. Nearly every major Swedish artist has recorded at Polar, including Roxette, Robyn and the Cardigans. Owners Lennart Östlund, Marie Ledin and Tomas Ledin have failed to reach terms that would allow them to continue leasing the facility’s space.

  “We have been in long negotiations with the private landlord but have not been able to reach an agreement, so we have to shut down the so-called ’ABBA studio,’” Marie Ledin says. “For us and many in the music world, it is the end of an era.”

  Stig “Stikkan” Anderson, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson bought the building and opened the studios in 1978 to consolidate recording for ABBA and other Polar Music artists in one location. Several artists worked there before ABBA, including Led Zeppelin, which used the studio to record its album “In Through the out Door.”

Article by Jeffrey de Hart for Billboard magazine. Publicity photo from December, 2000, shows Roxette (Marie, Ronny Lahti, Per, Clarence Öfwerman and Christoffer Lundquist) at Polar Studios working on the “Room Service” album.

• Polar Studios

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STOCKHOLM (UPDATED) - This morning at 9 a.m., Gyllene Tider’s summer tour tickets went on sale. And on sale they went! Reports from several Daily Roxette readers able to access the Ticnet site, indicate that the premier concert in Halmstad sold out within an hour. Both Ticnet’s telephone lines and the Internet booking system have been jammed during most of the day.

  EMA Telstar, the tour promoter, says that 100,000 tickets were sold in less than three hours. The concerts in Halmstad, Helsingborg and Gothenburg are sold out and ticket scalpers such as Biljettnu.se are already offering tickets at an inflated price.

Update:  The Daily Roxette has learned that additional tour dates are under consideration, including the addition of a second concert in Halmstad.

Lissie and Daniel Alvedahl contributed to this story.

• Aftonbladet’s article (In Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - Roxette is sentenced to pay 3.6 million kronor (€400,000) in taxes after a tour in Germany.


  “We will appeal,” says Per Gessle.
Per is among the top tax payers in Sweden, with
taxes around 10-15 million kronor each year. “He could avoid a lot of it, but that’s not the way he wants it,” says Per’s financial advisor Mats Nilemar.


  The county administrative court sentenced Per and Marie to pay about 3.6 million kronor in unpaid taxes.
“They have to pay taxes for what they have not declared,” says
Bo Ryding, who has been handling this errand at the IRS.


  This issue has its ground in the German part of the
Crash!Boom!Bang! tour in the mid ’90s. Altogether, Roxette
did 19 gigs in Germany (a country known for their harsh
tax laws).
“The artist tax was not very advantageous,” says Bo Ryding.
By acknowledging themselves as employees of EMA Telstar,
Per and Marie were able to avoid the tax and get their
salary directly from the company.


  They would then get 640,000 SEK each for all the German concerts. This unproportionately low wage made German tax officials suspicious. “They found the amount unrealistic,” says Bo Ryding.

  The alarm from Germany led the Swedish IRS to start an investigation. The investigation showed that the wages have not been paid. Instead, compensation had been sent directly to Per’s and Marie’s company, Roxette Productions.
This income, says the Swedish IRS, has not been declared.


  Per and Marie’s lawyer has appealed against this.
He claims that an employment could not be proven, and that
the money therefore not could be taxed as income from a
service. The process has been going on since the end of the ’90s.


  But Per and Marie have not given up.
“We still claim that we’re right, and we will appeal,” says
Per Gessle.

• Aftonbladet’s article (In Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - Sixteen tour dates were announced today as the schedule for this summer’s Gyllene Tider 25th Anniversary Tour were finally made public:

Jul 14 Halmstad, Örjans Vall - Sold out

Jul 15 Halmstad, Örjans Vall - Sold out

Jul 17 Lysekil, Pinneviken - Sold out

Jul 18 Helsingborg, Sofiero Castle - Sold out

Jul 20 Norrköping, Idrottsparken

Jul 21 Sunne, Rottneros Park

Jul 23 Stockholm, Stockholm Stadium - Sold out

Jul 25 Falun, Lugnet

Jul 28 Skövde, Karstorps Fritidsområde

Jul 30 Växjö, Värendsvallen

Jul 31 Malmö, Mölleplatsen - Sold out

Aug 4 Örebro, Eyravallen

Aug 6 Jönköping, Elmia

Aug 7 Gothenburg, Ullevi Stadium - Sold out

Aug 11 Eskilstuna, Sundbyholm Castle

Aug 13 Sundsvall, Park Arena

Aug 14 Skellefteå, Torget

  The tickets will go on sale on Friday, March 12, at 9 a.m. CET. The price will be 325 kronor (about €36) plus a service charge of 25 kronor. Children under 10 need only pay a service charge of 10 kronor.

  Gyllene Tider’s comment: “This will be a great adventure! We feel younger and better than ever before!”

  The celebration of Gyllene Tider’s 25th anniversary will continue all through 2004, and “officially” starts March 24th with the remastered releases of Gyllene Tider’s first three albums, and a new greatest hits album.



  Please note that even if a show is “sold out”, tickets still may be available later on.

• Aftonbladet article (in Swedish)
• TicNet/Biljett Direkt (Phone # +46-(0)771-707070)
• Halmstad (Check out for accomodations)
• EMA Telstar (in Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - This week, “Tycker om när du tar på mej” climbed to #1 on the official Swedish radiochart (Music Control) after being #2 for three weeks in a row.

  “Här kommer alla känslorna,” the first single from “Mazarin,” also reached #1 on the chart while “På promenad genom stan” managed to climb to #2.

  Tomorrow, the popular Swedish radiochart show Svensktoppen is aired. Per is at #5 this week with “Här kommer alla känslorna” and has stayed around that position for several weeks now, while “Tycker om när du tar på mej” is at #2. That means that “Här kommer alla känslorna” has been on the charts for 39 weeks on Sunday, which gives Per a spot on the record list for Svensktoppen. He will enter the list of “longest runs on Svensktoppen” at #10 together with the Swedish singer Per Myberg’s hit “Trettifyran” (“This Ol’ House”) from 1964.

  If he stays on the list next week, he will share the #9 spot with the Brandsta City Släckers’ song “Kom och ta mej” (“Come and Take Me”), and the week after that he will have the #8 spot all by himself.

HALMSTAD - For some time now, it’s been widely reported that the upcoming Gyllene Tider 25th Anniversary tour would kick off some time in the mid-July. In addition to that, a person familiar with the negotiations with Örjans Vall, a soccer stadium that will serve as the opening venue, was quoted as saying it would be about a week before a scheduled soccer/football match there. That narrowed the potential opening concert date down to about a 4-day window of possibility. But what will the exact date be?

  Today, this TDR reporter called Örjans Vall to ask when Gyllene Tider would play there.

  The man on the other side of the phone line didn’t have any problem answering the question, and said that the date would be July 14th.

  Obviously, this is not an official announcement. The Daily Roxette expects there will be a press conference to announce the tour dates within the next week or so, with tickets possibly going on sale as early as March 12th.

GOTHENBURG - Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reports that Gyllene Tider’s 25th anniversary summer tour will visit Gothenburg on August 7. The tour plan is not yet disclosed, but the paper says the concert - or one of the multiple concerts in Gothenburg - will be at Slottsskogsvallen on that day. Göteborgs-Posten also repeats an earlier rumor of the premiere in Halmstad to be held in mid-July.

• Göteborgs-Posten article (in Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - The Fre brothers, a Swedish duo performing soul music, are going to record their version of Marie Fredriksson’s 1996 hit ballad “Tro.”

 “We’re making an album of older Swedish songs that we like and which we perform our own way. Sort of like our own interpretations,” says Henok Fre. “Our version sounds very good. We’ve given it our own touch; our voices, our own choir arrangements and an unbelievable grand background with strings and all. Although it’s natural for a soul production.”

 Other artists whose songs are on the yet untitled album are Mauro Scocco, Peter LeMarc and Bo Kaspers Orkester. Bo Kasper and his company are even performing on the album. “It would’ve been so nice if all the artists were singing with us, but we haven’t had time to organize it. We would’ve loved to sing with Marie Fredriksson, but we didn’t want to ask out of respect for her now that she’s been so ill.”

 Marie isn’t the only Roxette member the brothers admire. “Per Gessle is cool and I really like ’Tycker om när du tar på mig’, but it’s probably too new to make a cover song.”

• Sundsvalls Tidning article (in Swedish)

HALMSTAD - Beda Hallberg, the woman who came up with the idea almost a hundred years ago of selling small paper flowers on May Day to raise funds to fight tuburculosis, was declared the ’Halland Resident of All Time’ last night in a contest in which Per Gessle had also been a finalist. The contest, sponsored by the Museum of Halmstad, was designed to draw attention to a special exhibition that opened yesterday.

  This museum is the very same that will mount the Gyllene Tider exhibition this summer.

STOCKHOLM - Gyllene Tider is beginning the celebration of their 25th anniversary by re-releasing their first three LPs – “Gyllene Tider,” “Moderna Tider” and “Puls” – with re-mastered tracks. At the same time, they’re releasing a new CD: “GT 25 - Samtliga Hits!” (“GT 25 - All the Hits!”) [Incidently the same title as the subtitle of the last two greatest hits albums, released in 1989 and 1995.] This album will be relased both as a digi-pack (5769602) and in a normal jewel case (5769592). The scheduled release date is March 24th.

  While it hasn’t been officially announced, The Daily Roxette has reported previously that Per and others have talked about new material that they are recording, so the widespread expectation is that a new album/single/EP will be released later in the spring, just in time to help promote the tour.

  Yes, the summer of 2004 will see Gyllene Tider tour the country of Sweden again. It’s been eight years since they toured with “Återtåget” in 1996… a tour so successful that in Stockholm they had to move from a open-air venue outside of the Naval History Museum (where the Marie Fredriksson concert DVD was filmed) to the Stadion arena as 35,000 people wanted to see the band! Now, everyone in Sweden will have the chance again to experience the band live. The journey in time will continue - with Gyllene Tider playing for a new generation of fans.

  Update March 1: “Kung av sand” was mistakenly omitted from the tracklist.





Tracklisting for GT 25 - Samtliga Hits!



01 Flickorna på TV2

02 Ska vi älska, så ska vi älska till Buddy Holly

03 (Dansar inte lika bra som) Sjömän

04 Rockfile - Marie i växeln

05 När vi två blir en

06 Kärleken är inte blind (men ganska närsynt)

07 (Kom så ska vi) Leva livet

08 Det hjärta som brinner

09 Billy

10 Ljudet av ett annat hjärta

11 Tylö sun

12 (Hon vill ha) Puls

13 Sommartider

14 Flickan i en Cole Porter-sång

15 Pers garage - Småstad

16 Det är över nu

17 Kung av sand

18 Gå & fiska!

19 Juni, juli, augusti

20 Faller ner på knä

21 När alla vännerna gått hem



Daniel Alvedahl and Robert Thorselius contributed to this story. Read more…