The Daily Roxette has learned from a well-placed, reliable source that Epic Records, a Sony label, is likely to be the distributor for Roxette Recordings in the United States. However, the official announcement is still weeks away. The source said that a high-level meeting occured last week between the parties involved and that final negotions are now underway.

Roxette chatted again on the Internet. This time the chat was provided by EMI Electrola and RTL. Per and Marie were really in a hurry: the chat started late because they had a promotional concert and it didn’t last very long because they had a plane to catch (they’re going to Paris, France).

Per said they lied in the previous chat about the forthcoming single. Now they said that the single #2 will be “Anyone” and single #3 “Stars”.

They also told that Marie (don’t know if it’s Fredriksson or Dimberg) met Fatboy Slim in London recently. Maybe we’ll hear a Fatboy Slim remix of a Roxette track soon!

Marie and Per also told that their manager Marie Dimberg is writing a book.

The decision on the tour (HaveANiceTour) will be made in the summer. They have no plans to play on summer festivals. The Romanian fans asked them again to come to Romania, too. I hope the fans get what they are longing for!

• RTL Chat

The producers of the new album, Michael Ilbert and Clarence Öfwerman, are interviewed in the latest edition of Musikermagasinet. Musikermagasinet is a Swedish magazine for musicians. The magazine has a web site, but the article isn’t published online.

• Musikermagasinet

Rox Britannia has got some interesting information on their site. They have published an EMI UK memo on the promotion of the new album in the UK. The memo tells e.g. that Q, Maxim, FHM, and Top magazines will have a review of the album.

EMI Electrola, the German EMI, is going to have an online chat with Roxette on February 25. The time of the chat has changed: it begins 5.30pm CET (4.30pm UTC).

• EMI Electrola

Today is the official release date of the new Roxette album, titled “Have A Nice Day”. The album has already been available in several countries, in Argentina and Finland, for example.

The countdown at www.haveaniceday.nu is now over and they have a new competition going on. You only have to vote for the four best songs on the new album and you can win all eight albums Roxette has done, a T-shirt, a poster or a badge.

• www.haveaniceday.nu

Tony Balogh has written a review of the new album on Hallandsposten, the local newspaper of Roxette’s home ground, Halmstad.

Balogh refers to Roxette’s online chat and to Norwegian Ketil’s (Hi Ketil! :-) question about if the album sounds too fresh and too little Roxette. Balogh thinks this is a very good question. “Those who have followed Roxette through the years - from ’Pearls Of Passion’ to the latest studio album ’Crash! Boom! Bang!’ about 40 million records later - know that they’ve at the same time got a short lecture about what rock-pop sounded like when the albums were released.”

Balogh says it’s never wrong to get new influence and ideas, but it can also be disastrous if the band loses something from their identity at the same time.

Balogh notices that there are very few guitars on this album, but that Marie sings better than ever. He thinks “Crush On You” is almost techno, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around What’s Already Gone” is a classic 80’s dance track and “7twenty7” a song á la Depeche Mode in 1986. “But is this Roxette?” he asks.

“’Stars’ tries to be like a Prodigy song, but it has become an E-type eurotechno track. However, the chorus with the children’s choir and quiet piano saves the song.” Balogh thinks that “Cooper” sounds a bit like Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s duet “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, just like I’ve also said.

In the end of his review he answers to Ketil’s question: “It sounds a lot of 1999, it sounds Roxette, but everything isn’t as top-ranking as it was 10 years ago.”

The administrators of www.haveaniceday.nu have sent a message to everyone who have subscribed their mailing list. The only problem is that the message they sent is only in Swedish. Here it is in English:

On Monday it’s time. Roxette’s long-awaited album “Have A Nice Day” is finally available in the record stores. The advance interest has been enormous among the press, record sellers and fans. This has also been possible to notice from the extremely high number of visitors on our new homepage. We know that both Per and Marie have followed the development of the site with pleasure and most importantly shown great interest in all the exciting discussion on the message board. We hope of course that we’ll see you also in the future and we can promise you more activities in the site also after the release of the album.

• www.haveaniceday.nu

The Official Roxette Fan Club has published their new site on the Internet. The fan shop has been updated to support euro currency. Per Gessle himself will be writing news to their news section.

• OfficialRoxetteFanclub

Finnish pulp magazine 7 päivää has a short article about Roxette. According to the magazine Marie and Per are going to take their children with them on the band’s world tour which will be launched next June (!). “We want our children and spouses to be with us on the tour, even though it means more work for us. How are we going to get over with the hotel life? How will we get our children to bed in time? We have to discuss all this with our partners”, says the duo in 7 päivää magazine.

The German EMI has now a 30-sec sound clip of every track on the new album available on their site. The clips are reported to be different than on www.haveaniceday.nu site which still has its own sound clip countdown going on.

• EMI Electrola

The UK/Ireland fan club has now moved to its permanent home. The new URL is easy to remember: roxette.co.uk. Check out the site, it’s huge!

• Rox Britannia

A reader from Latvia reports that the cassette version of Roxette’s new album “Have A Nice Day” has been available from February 16, at least in the capital Riga. The CD version will be in the shops later.

Roxette was back on stage in Sweden today evening. They performed “Wish I Could Fly” at the Grammis gala. The 30th annual show was broadcasted “live” on TV4 from the Royal Tennis Hall in Stockholm.

The show wasn’t really broadcasted live: it was recorded a couple of hours before it was shown on TV. The media in Sweden have criticized this “cheating” strongly. Roxette’s performance was done playback.

• Aftonbladet’s Swedish article

Per and Marie were in Finland last Friday. They were supposed to be in Finland both Friday and Saturday, but the trip had to be shortened to one day because the Finnish air traffic controllers are on strike and the Helsinki airport was closed on Saturday.

Because of their tight schedule they were only in Pasila where the main TV channels have their studios. First they recorded “Wish I Could Fly” playback for Miss Finland competition (it was shown yesterday) and then they did an interview for Jyrki in the same studio (the interview was shown today). After lunch they went to another TV channel’s studio where they did a short clip for a TV show called Dynamo (will be shown in March).

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to meet them, but maybe next time… :-)

Roxette.Org is a new Roxette site on the Internet. They are going to provide free server space for Roxette-related web pages.

A short roxette.org URL sounds much better than a mile-long geocities.com URL, doesn’t it? :-)

• Roxette.Org

“Have A Nice Day” will be in Japan on February 17. Toshiba-EMI has already made a page about it on their web site, in Japanese of course. There’s nothing special said, the text is mainly the track listing of the album.

Per told yesterday on the chat that this time the Japanese won’t get any bonus tracks.

• Toshiba-EMI

Today at 5pm CET Roxette will be chatting live at www.haveaniceday.nu. I’m looking forward to see you all there!

• www.haveaniceday.nu

A “die-hard Roxette fan” from Iowa, USA reports that “Wish I Could Fly” has been played on the radio there. “Coming from the US, I rarely hear Roxette on the radio anymore, so I was genuinely, but quite happily, shocked when I heard their new single playing on a local radio station”, Brian Haglund tells in his message.

Roxette chatted live on the Internet just moments ago. The system got so overcrowded that many people were kicked away from the chat. For a while, the fans couldn’t get any questions through and Per was asking if there’s anyone on the line.

They didn’t tell anything really interesting (IMHO). If I understood them right, the single #2 won’t be “Anyone” but “Crush On You”. “Anyone” will be released in the autumn.

According to Per, there will definitely be a HaveANiceTour starting later this year. Brainpool or Janne Kask won’t be their support acts. Per also told that they are not going to perform Spanish songs in the USA, but they do play English songs in Spain :-)

The www.haveaniceday.nu chat is going to be provided by Passagen. Their “celebrity chat” system is a Java applet, so you’ll need a browser that supports Java. Netscape and Internet Explorer have a support for Java from version 3.

Soon you will be able to listen to all the tracks of “Have A Nice Day”. From February 9 Roxette is going to release a new 30-sec sound clip from the album every day. The sound clips will be available at www.haveaniceday.nu.

Expressen’s article also tells about the chat which is going to take place on Monday 5pm CET (that’s 4pm UTC). The chat is going to last two hours, so we’ll going to hear a lot of interesting stuff on Monday.

They also mention that “Wish I Could Fly” has sold gold in Sweden in only 5 days. The limit for getting a gold record for a single in Sweden is 15000 copies.

Two people from the Italian Roxette Fan Club met Roxette yesterday. Per and Marie told that the tour they are planning is definitely going to be a world tour and it’s going to start around September, depending on the USA release dates.

According to our reader from Denmark, Roxette is going to perform at the Danish Grammy Awards tomorrow. The special guest of the show was supposed to be Cher, but because of pain in her back, Roxette was appointed on the last minute. The awards will be broadcasted live on DR1 at 9pm CET.

EMI Finland tells that Per & Marie will give only two interviews while they are in Finland on February 12-13. The other one is for MTV3. The other hasn’t been announced yet. They are also going to be on two TV shows: Dynamo will be shot at Yle’s studios on Friday at 6pm local time and Miss Finland at MTV3’s studios on Saturday morning at 9.

EMI Finland has the new remix single already in the stock and it will be in the shops “very soon”.

According to EMI Finland the negotiations for a live tour are already going on. The decision will be made in March and the tour is going to be announced in April-May. This means that the tour will be launched in August-September, except if they are going to perform on summer festivals. It’s also very likely that the tour is going to premiere in Helsinki, Finland again, just like all their previous tours.

However, they are going to see how the album sells before any decisions are made.

Roxette’s world wide discography will be soon published as a book. The book, titled “The Look for Roxette - The Illustrated World-wide Discography & Price Guide”, is compiled by Robert Thorselius and published by Premium Publishing. The layout of the book is in process at the moment and they are expecting the release in March-April.

• Premium Publishing

In addition to the domains I told about earlier, Per’s company Jimmy Fun AB has also registered the domain asagessle.com. Åsa Gessle is Per’s wife. Their son Gabriel has also a domain of his own, gabrielgessle.com.

Michael Bunkin’s Roxette site, Roxette 2000, has now it’s own domain. Go and check out the site!

• Roxette 2000

Music Television’s next weekend is going to be “New Music Weekend”. One of the weekend’s special shows was recorded at Midem expo in Cannes. The theme of the expo was Swedish music, so stay tuned for Roxette and other Swedish superstars!

Brainpool has recently released their new single, “You Are Here”, on the Internet. Net surfers can listen to the song through Shockwave Streaming Audio (yes, you probably have to download few megabytes of stuff on your computer to get it working).

The new track is sung by Brainpool’s guitarist David Birde. Janne Kask, band’s former lead singer, left the band in the autumn of 1997. He has just got his own solo album to the shops.

Brainpool was found by Per’s record company Jimmy Fun Music in the early 90’s. Brainpool’s bass guitar player Christoffer Lundquist plays also on Roxette’s new album.

• Brainpool

The official “Have A Nice Day” site, www.haveaniceday.nu, has now also an English section. The English site has its own message board. The English version has the same features as the Swedish one, except that there’s no English Roxette quiz.

Rumours say that “Wish I Could Fly” remix single will be released on February 15.

I’ve also heard that the original “Wish I Could Fly” single has already sold gold in Sweden!

“Once Per Gessle and friends sat down to write postcards to get ’Flickorna på TV2’ on Poporama. Later he did the same thing with Roxette’s ’Neverending Love’ which became #1 on Sommartoppen.”

Today he uses the Internet, tells Jan-Owe Wikström on Hallandsposten. “[…] sometimes he connects to the Net like an ordinary man (with another name, though) and plants seeds of news and calms down rumours on Roxette’s home pages. Just to let you know.”

Jan-Owe Wikström tells on Hallandsposten about Gyllene Tider’s special performance at Per’s birthday party. As I earlier told, Gyllene Tider played five songs. The played them at 3.30am and the songs were “Det hjärta som brinner”, “(Dansar inte lika bra som) Sjömän”, “Skicka ett vykort”, “Flickorna på TV2” and “Tylö sun”.

Roxette is going to have an online chat at www.haveaniceday.nu on February 8, 5pm CET. Even though the site is in Swedish, this chat will be “English only”.

• www.haveaniceday.nu