STOCKHOLM - Gyllene Tider was the second biggest act in Europe this summer. 492,252 people saw Gyllene, which makes 23,440 per concert. Gyllene Tider surpassed artists like Madonna, Eros Ramazotti and Shania Twain, who - to be fair - didn’t play as many gigs as Gyllene.

  The only act to outperform Gyllene Tider was the Italian rock singer Vasco Rossi who reached the phenomenal number of 973,709 (!) people on his summertour.

• ST (In Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - On Monday evening, October 4, Per Gessle will receive the unique STIM-Guitar award. For the first time ever, the award will be presented with a platinum finish.

  STIM, the Swedish Performing Rights Society, protects the interests of authors and publishers of music in Sweden. The award will be presented by STIM’s CEO Kenth Muldin.


  The platinum STIM-Guitar is presented to Per Gessle due to the exceptionally successful Gyllene Tider summer tour where Gessle has composed the majority of the material performed.

Starrox contributed to this article.

• STIM

STOCKHOLM - Per Gessle has been nominated in the Best Swedish Artist category in the Nordic Music Awards - twice! He competes with himself as a solo artist and as a member of the band Gyllene Tider.

  The awards show is produced by three Scandinavian commercial TV channels: TV4 in Sweden, TV2 in Denmark and TV2 in Norway. These channels will broadcast the awards live on October 23 from 8pm to 10pm CET. Many international artists will be performing. Robbie Williams, Tina Turner and Westlife are among those confirmed.

  There will also be another show with only Nordic artists which will be recorded for TV on October 21. TDR suspects that parts of it will be shown during the live TV broadcast.

  Tickets for the both shows are available on the Nordic Music Awards website.

• Nordic Music Awards

STOCKHOLM (UPDATED) - The new single “Solsken” (“Sunshine”) will bring more Gyllene Tider to the airwaves this autumn to avoid the summer enthusiasm from dying out. The song is already getting heavy radio airplay.

  This summer has been specially hot and active for Sweden. “The boys” from Halland have come back and made everyone dance, sing-along and enjoy the tunes and melodies of Gyllene Tider with the biggest tour ever in Scandinavia… some to be part of the history, others to remember their youth, but all to enjoy this summer.

  But now summer is ending and even if it has been owned by Gyllene Tider with an overcrowded tour, multi-platinum album success and a long playing double-A-side single on radio, they want to offer more “Sunshine” to Sweden, because GT doesn’t want this summer to end just yet.

  “Solsken” (8616062) will be released September 29 and the B-sides are “Ordinärt mirakel” (“Ordinary Miracle”) and “Nere på gatan” (“Down on the Street”), both demos recorded at T&A demos.

  The cover design features a picture of a sunny day drawn by Per’s son Gabriel.

  Daniel Alvedahl contributed to this article.

The long wait is over. Today Ginza.se revealed the release date of Gyllene Tider’s “Parkliv” DVD, recorded in 1981. It will be released September 29, the same day as “Solsken” as well as the DVD “Karaoke Hits!”, that was sold during the tour.

• Ginza.se (In Swedish)

HALMSTAD - This summer’s Gyllene Tider exhibition at the Museum of Halmstad has rather unsurprisingly broken the museum’s all-time attendance record. The exhibition has had 16,400 visitors since its opening in June - 10,000 of them in July. The busiest day so far was July 21 when 755 people visited the “Återblickar” exhibition.

  “Återblickar” has broken the attendance record with a huge margin of 13,000 people. The previous record was held by an exhibition about the history of the Hallandsposten newspaper.

  “We know that even though people have written ’You are the best’ in our guest book, they don’t actually mean us,” says Pernilla Börnfors Nordbeck from the Museum of Halmstad. “Many who have come to see this exhibition don’t usually go to museums. We hope they will visit us again.”

  The exhibition will remain open until October 31.

• Hallandsposten article (in Swedish)
• Museum of Halmstad

STOCKHOLM - Gyllene Tider performed last night at Swedish phone operator Comviq/Tele2’s kick-off event in Alvik outside of Stockholm. About 650 employees from Comviq attended. “This has been planned for a while,” Göran Fritzon, keyboards, explained to Aftonbladet.

  Comviq have been trying to get Gyllene Tider to play at one of their kick-off events for years. They succeeded this time because they were a major sponsor of the GT25 tour.

  hstd99 contributed to this article.

• Aftonbladet’s story (In Swedish)
• Expressen’s story (In Swedish)

HALMSTAD - The weather wasn’t exactly the best in the Halland area this summer and it affected many of the happenings in Halmstad and nearby cities. Except for Gyllene Tider: their three concerts in Halmstad were seen by 75,000 people, not counting the 10,000 to 20,000 people watching the final concert at Stora Torg.

  Björn Nohlgren of Nöjet AB worked as a producer for many of the summer’s successes. In addition to Gyllene Tider’s summer tour, he worked on Tältprojektet (“The Tent Project”, a tour with Magnus Uggla, Sweden’s Eurovision Song Contest winner Lena Philipsson, Robert Gustafsson, Cecilia Frode and Johan Rheborg) and Rhapsody in Rock (a special combination of classical music and rock arranged by pianist Robert Wells). Tältprojektet had four shows in Varberg and Rhapsody in Rock one in Falkenberg. All concerts were sold out, but the number of attendees were far from Gyllene Tider concerts.

  “Gyllene Tider’s summer tour is not on the map. Nothing like it has ever happened in Sweden and nothing like it is likely to ever happen again,” Nohlgren said to the local newspaper Hallands Nyheter.

• Hallands Nyheter article (in Swedish)

STOCKHOLM - Gyllene Tider thanks all the people that attended the GT25 tour, all 492,252 of them. A post-tour advertisement appearing in several newspapers reads “Thank you all who made GT25 the biggest tour in Sweden through all time!”

  The ad goes on to proclaim a sold-out tour, and that “Finn 5 fel!” has sold more than 210,000 copies so far, and “GT25” (Greatest Hits) more than 65,000.

  The photo in the ad, featured both in Expressen and Aftonbladet, bears a striking similarity to the one published in ’96 after Återtåget, also used on the “Återtåget” VHS/DVD sleeve.

HALMSTAD - This is it, this is “The End.” “The End” is what the last concert was called at Örjans Vall in Halmstad, Gyllene Tider’s final concert this tour. In total, over 492,000 (499,000 according to some sources) people have seen GT this summer during their 21-gig-long tour. This reporter assumes that the Gyllene boys are tired, because it was damn hard covering the tour!

  When The Daily Roxette came to Örjans Vall it was pouring cats and dogs, the rain started trickling at 5 and escalated to a downpour at 7, when The Latin Kings entered the stage. TDR had a little talk with Per Gessle at 7:45 (see below). During the interview, Mats “MP” Persson allegedly got sick of the rain and told the others that he would stop it. So MP sticks his hands in the air and shouts. The rain stops immediately. When TDR comes out from the interview at 8 the rain is gone!
  While the setlist didn’t contain any surprises, the concert itself did. Gyllene Tider’s members became “honorary citizens” of Halmstad 2004 for being such great ambassadors for the town for so long. Another amazing thing that happened was that Micke “Syd” Andersson confessed that he’s been lying the whole tour through…

  The lie? He has been telling each and everyone that he’s been traveling with his wife. Now he came clean and told us that she merely was his girlfriend! So Micke brought Helena on stage and proposed to her. Helena said yes! After that they sang “Min tjej och jag” together, although renamed “Min fru och jag” (“My Wife and I”), the proposal was a huge success.

  After the concert Sweden’s Princess Madeleine came backstage and congratulated Gyllene Tider on a great show. Then the Golden Lads entered the semi torn down stage and had cake and champagne before the press. Anders sprayed the photographers with champagne…

  All in all… a great end to a great tour, by a great band.