(Credits: Far Out / Record Sleeve / Roxette)
Mon 16 February 2026 21:00, UK
After a little-known 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winner, Sweden’s biggest pop export is without a doubt the power pop duo Roxette.
Not even Robyn or The Cardigans come close. Commercially speaking, Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson’s Billboard-conquering dance-rock songbook has shifted as many as 80 million claimed record sales, behind only ABBA in Sweden’s premier unit shifters. For a moment across the late 1980s/early 1990s, Roxette’s arresting pop bluster and stirring balladry felt right at home next to the likes of Belinda Carlisle or even Bryan Adams.
The pair had been plugging away for a while. Geesle already had a taste of fame with the successful Gyllene Tider group, while Fredriksson had been shaped by Swedish punk before dropping a string of solo records, but a hunger to break into the German charts saw Geesle attempt to pen a Christmas song to please their Deutsche pop gatekeepers, EMI Germany. The festive hit nabbed a tidy Top Five on the Swedish charts, but was buried by EMI due to their frank dislike for the number.
On they went, dropping several hits, including the MTV dominating ‘The Look’ and ‘Listen to Your Heart’, before their domestic Christmas number was dusted off for a rerecord for their new US market. It turned out that Roxette were sought by filmmaker Garry Marshall to feature on the soundtrack for his upcoming romantic-comedy drama Pretty Woman.
Resurrecting their early festive hit in Sweden, some lyrical revisions and an added guitar melody yielded the power ballad smash ‘It Must Have Been Love’, bringing Roxette their third Hot 100 chart topper and an explosion to superstar status.
They got exactly what they wanted and then some. Their popularity reaching across South America, a stop by Argentina made clear to Geesle just how dizzyingly mammoth Roxette had become, as much as 2,000 frenzied fans congregating outside the pair’s Buenos Aires hotel, allegedly all singing their hits with such volume that even the Formula One drivers staying the same evening had trouble sleeping due to the singalong din from the street.
From 4,000 birthday cards sent to Geesle on his special day, sleeping fans found dozing in his garden, to pilfered aerials from his car, the madness touched on the craziness of Beatlemania’s feverish peak.
While it’s well-known that hysterical girls would grab at the Fab Four with such ferocity that pieces of their suits would be ripped off, not even The Beatles reported nabbed underwear during their pop heyday. Looking back on their early 1990s pop rise, Geesle revealed that somehow, somewhere, a dedicated fan managed to swipe some of his undercrackers in a 2025 interview with The Guardian.
How Geesle didn’t divulge, but one can only imagine such a goal achieved by some meticulous planning and disquieting reconnaissance of his private residence or hotel accommodation in the efforts to yoink his bloomers. Could have been worse, perhaps? Infamously, an eager US fan managed to snip a lock of Ringo Starr’s hair when The Beatles were visiting the British Embassy during their Fab Four heights.