New Roxette banners are now shown on Swedish web sites. The banners are linked to www.haveaniceday.nu. For those who don’t know Swedish, “ny singel” means “new single” and “ny singel på väg” means “new single is on the way”. “Förbeställ hos Boxman” means “Pre-order at Boxman”.

EMI and Boxman’s advertising campaign for new Roxette releases is starting to work. “Wish I Could Fly” single (4.18 USD version) has already climbed to #3 on their single chart - even though it hasn’t even been released yet! $4.56 “Wish I Could Fly” is #13. Boxman takes pre-orders from all over the world.

• Boxman

I just got mail from www.haveaniceday.nu webmaster Martin Enestedt. He told me that a sound clip from “Wish I Could Fly” will be released at www.haveaniceday.nu on January 3. A sound clip from the song is also going to be posted to Roxette Fan Club’s site on the same day.

• www.haveaniceday.nu
• Official Roxette Fanclub

Keep an eye on the www.haveaniceday.nu site. There seems to be something new every once in a while. This time there’s a link to Roxette message board, provided by Passagen. The message board is in Swedish, and when I last checked it, it didn’t work well. All the message subject lines linked to the same message.

• www.haveaniceday.nu

I have somehow missed this in March, but here it is now :-)

A man was found guilty of importing and spreading 22000 copies of “Favorites From Crash! Boom! Bang!” album from the USA into Sweden without Per, Marie or EMI Svenska’s permission. The album was a special promotional compilation for the American market. The imported copies were sold all over Scandinavia. The man himself didn’t think he had done anything wrong. “I thought it was OK to sell the album in Europe”, said he. When the man was arrested, 18000 unsold copies was still found.

• Aftobladet’s Swedish article

Roxette was on Sen kväll med Luuk show on December 22. The show’s own site features a short introduction to Roxette’s interview. Here are some parts of it translated into English:

Roxette consists of a boy and a girl.

 

[The boy] is 39 years old and describes himself as “the oldest teenager in the country”. If he wouldn’t have become a pop star, he thinks he would have become a interior designer. Once when he had a birthday he got 700 birthday cards on the same day. […] When he was young he used to ponder a lot and write poems and song lyrics about death and religion. He can neither read or write notes and he is very interested in design and art.

 

The girl is 40 years old and as a teenager she wanted to become an actress. These dreams faded away for the benefit of music […]. She’s the youngest of five children and has a daughter (their son, Oscar Mikael, is not mentioned! - Visa) with his man who she met in fall 1991. If she’s asked to give an advice, she says: “Stand up and think for a while, take a chance on everything that’s free in life. There is luck. [It’s] not in career or in money.”

 

Together they are Roxette.

 

On the TV show they tell e.g. about their collection of musical instruments and about Spain where they recorded most of the new material.

EMI Electrola has recently registed roxette.de domain. There are no further details available yet, so I don’t know why they have registered the domain. At the moment the web address forwards the browser to EMI Electrola’s own site. Thanks to Elias for this piece of news!

• www.roxette.de

The movie “Sånt är livet” (“That’s life”) had its premiere in Sweden on October 25, 1996. The interesting thing in this movie by Colin Nutley was that it featured many songs by Marie Fredriksson. Most of the songs were later released on Marie’s “I en tid som vår” album. The movie was a success in Sweden: on the first weekend it was seen by 47,352 people. Total of 292,252 people have seen the movie since then in the theatres. Colin Nutley’s latest movie “Under solen” (“Under the sun”) was the most popular movie in Sweden on Christmas.

Aftonbladet has listed the hottest Swedish artists of 1998. Roxette is #16 and Per Gessle #18 on the list. Rather interesting, I would say, as Roxette didn’t even release anything in 1998!

On Expressen, Per tells his favorite tunes of 1998. “A top year of hit singles”, says Per. “Favorites? I like songs such as ’Rockefeller skank’ by Fatboy Slim, ’All ’bout the money’ by Meja, Cardigans’ ’My Favourite Game’ and ’Big Big World’ by Emilia.”

• Aftonbladet’s Swedish article

The Official Roxette Fan Club has recently removed the tracklisting of “Have A Nice Day!” from their news page. EMI Svenska asked them to remove it, because EMI didn’t want it to be published yet.

• Official Roxette Fanclub