Marie and Per will be guests on the ZDF-show “Die Nacht
der Stars” (“The Night of the Stars”) this Thursday at 8:15pm (CET). In 1999, they performed their single “Stars” on this show.

  Then, on Saturday, they are visiting the “Big Brother” show in Cologne, and performing “Centre of the Heart.” “Big Brother” is one of the most popular shows on German TV.

“Rox-ETTE! … Rox-ETTE! … Rox-ETTE!”

  It was a very appreciative, enthusiastic audience that greeted Roxette in Cologne, Germany today for the first of a series of “showcase” concerts. Fans and others in attendance were chanting “Rox-ETTE!” between almost every song during the fully-staged performance. Those not lucky enough to be there in person were able to watch the concert live over the Internet. A German portal site provided the streaming video webcast in three different resolutions.

  Roxette played “Dressed for Success,” “Centre Of The Heart,” “Listen to Your Heart,” “Real Sugar,” “Dangerous,” “Stars,” “Wish I Could Fly,” “Sleeping In My Car,” “The Look,” “It Must Have Been Love,” “Joyride,” and finished with “Perfect Day.”

  “Stars” was a vastly different version – “a special version” as Marie said – sung in a slow, almost ballad style.

 “It Must Have Been Love” featured Marie on the piano… and, of course, the crowd went wild!

  “I had been expecting some kind of accoustic thing, but it was really, really ’rocky’,” reported TDR reader Judith Seuma, who listened in Spain to the concert over the Internet. Another reader, Per Andrén in Sweden, reports that the sound quality of the webcast was “surprisingly good!” The picture quality however, according to other messages left in our SmallTalk section, was not nearly as good.


  Performing with Roxette were Pelle Alsing on drums;
Mats Persson, percussion and backing vocals; Christoffer Lundqvist, bass guitar and backing vocals; Jonas Isacsson, guitar; and Clarence Öfwerman, keyboards.   Photo courtesy OIRFC

The maxi-single for “The Centre of the Heart” will be released on April the 16th. The CD will contain six different versions of the song, with most of the remixes being provided by Stonebridge.

The “Room Service” promotional site at Roxette.se features video clips of Per and Marie commenting on each of the new album tracks. Here’s what’s said:

1. Real Sugar

A very simple song. That’s always the hardest to write. The idea was that they both should be singing it. It’s a classic 3-chord pop song which you can have a lot of fun with in the studio. You can do a lot of production to it, what we did. It begins like an old-fashioned home recording. It’s a pop song, one of those I love to write.


2. The Centre of the Heart

Was written five years ago. The first version was recorded in Spain for HAND. It was a totally different version, much slower. We made a disco song out of it. A little bit like Frankie goes to Hollywood meets G. Moroder. It’s fun.


3. Milk and Toast and Honey

Marie had a lot of problems to sing it. It’s so simple but you must deliver it from the heart. First she thought, it’s easy, but it wasn’t. She must find the magic lines. They’ve worked really hard on it and in the end, Marie says, she is very proud of the atmosphere and the voice in the song. Will be a single. Per says it’s probably the best song on the album. He had it in his head for six months, before writing it down and making a demo.


EDITOR’S NOTE: TDR reader T-Rox originally posted this to our SmallTalk forum. We thought it should be on our Front Page as well. Thanks T-Rox… and also to Charles (RML) who figured out the direct links to these video clips!   – LEO

• “Room Service” campaign site
• Real Sugar (Real Player required for all)
• Centre of the Heart
• Milk & Toast & Honey
• Jefferson
• Little Girl
• Looking for Jane
• Bringing Me Down To My Knees
• Make My Head Go Pop
• Try
• Fool
• It Takes You No Time To Get Here
• My World, My Love, My Life

Read more…

STOCKHOLM - EMI Sweden has transcribed the videotaped interview with Roxette, portions of which appear on the Roxette.se site, and made it available to the press.

  Here’s the full text:

Back In Business

Per Gessle: Well, we released the last album in the spring of ´99…
’Have
A Nice Day’ was the title, so we’ve actually been busy doing promotion
with that one, and we decided not to tour with it, just went straight
back into the studio, so we started working on this album in January
2000. So… That’s basically what we’ve been doing for the last two
years.
And prior to that of course we started to work on ’Have A Nice Day’. It
takes about a year to write an album.

Marie Fredriksson: It feels great. We always have a lot of fun together, and we know each other very well. And this album, the new album, ’Room Service’, both of us really like very much and there’s a couple of songs that are very much Roxette, they’re very… I think it’s a mix between
the
old days and how we sound today, so… I’m really looking forward to
promoting the album. Read more…

Roxette were in the TOPradio studio in Belgium this (Saturday) morning to promote their new album. The on-air, webcast-with-video interview lasted about half-an-hour.

  While Marie seemed to be a bit nervous, Per was relaxed and laughing all the time. He even started moving to a dance song upon entering the studio.

  They said they had left Edel and are looking for a new record company in the States to release Room Service, with promotion hopefully this autumn. Per said “Real Sugar” will be the next single, and that – as he’s said numerous times before – he checks the main Roxette sites every day. He thinks RoxAttaq is a very good idea. Marie said she wasn’t really aware of “RoxAttaq.”

  Mentioning the new Roxette.se site, Per said there might be some new interactive tools added.

  Amongst other comments, Per said that there will be a new DVD videobox released this year (including rare stuff). He also said there won’t be a Spanish version of this album.

  The radio station also played “The Look,” “Real Sugar” and a bit of “Milk And Toast And Honey.”

COLOGNE - Roxette’s showcase concert here on Monday, March 26th will be webcast live using streaming video on Germany’s largest internet portal site.

  The party that night begins at 8pm CET, with Roxette scheduled to take the stage at 9:30. T-Online plans to have streaming video available for those who log onto their site.

  Then, the following Saturday, March 31st, they’ve scheduled what presumably will be a half-hour live chat with Roxette.

• T-Online’s Roxette section (In German)

According to EMI Music Canada, they will be releasing “Room Service” on May 15th. Marie Dimberg, Roxette’s manager, said “we have a very strong fan base there, as they are more influenced by Europe than the U.S.” Roxette and EMI are hoping that “Room Service” will do well in Canada.

  There had been some confusion at EMI in Toronto regarding Roxette. Whether accurate or not, they thought Edel had the distribution rights, and this accounts for the delay from the April 2nd “worldwide” release date.

• EMI Canada

Marie Fredriksson sings a duet with Totta Näslund, 55, a well-known blues artist in Sweden, on his new album due out on Monday. It’s called “Duetterna” (“Duets”).

  Marie is Totta’s partner in a new arrangement of a song written by Ulf Lundell entitled “Sommarens Sista Servitris” (Summer’s Last Waitress) – the only song on the album that was not written especially for this project.

  Other female member’s of Sweden’s so-call “pop elite” that appear on the album include Josefin Nilsson, Louise Hoffsten, Kajsa Grytt, Jenny Öhlund, Sara Isaksson, Sanne Salomonsen and Charlotte Berg (from the musical group Charlie’s Magazine). The first single will be “Utan Dig” (“Without You”), that he sings with Sharon Dyall.

  “The idea behind the project is to blend Totta’s special voice with different women,” says Dan Hylander who produced the album and wrote some of its songs.

  As for the duet with Marie, an EMI spokesperson told TDR that “it’s damn good!” Totta told Aftonbladet that Marie was “very easy to work with.”

  Amongst other online retailers, the album can be ordered from Swedetown.com, a site that specializes in exporting Swedish music.

• Aftonbladet article (In Swedish)
• Expressen article (In Swedish)

On April 2nd, Roxette’s new album, “Room Service,” will be released in most parts of the world. But for two days now, it’s been possible to download the entire CD from the controversial, legally-embattled Napster file-sharing service.

  This fact has been the subject of discussion in our SmallTalk forum and on the Roxette Mailing List. Today, it hit the pages of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

  “There’s not much that can be done about it. It was the same for Madonna and U2,” said Roxette’s manager Marie Dimberg to Aftonbladet. “We can hope that the majority of Roxette fans will want the real album with the booklet and packaging” she said.

  “It’s sad that this has happened,” said Li Eriksson of EMI, who, along with Per and Marie, has their attorney attempting to remove the files from Napster. As to how they got there in the first place… well, the list of potential suspects is large. While the Aftonbladet article mentions a possible theft from the factory, Eriksson told TDR that “of course there is a possibility that someone from the media put it there - journalists get listening copies of the album before interviewing Per & Marie. Also, retailers get copies to listen to before hand.”

  Yet to be determined, of course, is how damaging this will be to the overall success of the “Room Service” project. Legal and monetary issues aside, the fear is that it will hurt sales – and therefore chart positions. Other fans cite industry figures that CD sales are up, and feel that that the impact will be negligible.

  So far, there has been no direct comment from Per or Marie, who are in rehearsals for the upcoming showcase concerts.

• Aftonbladet article (In Swedish)