Roxette - Look Sharp!
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 21.10.1988
She's got the look, and the singer just keeps right on going la-la-la.
The look is all she needs, so simple, so easy, but things did not come so easily to Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson. Both were fairly successful musicians in their native Sweden.
Gessle, born in 1959 in the city of Halmstad, founded his first band, "Gyllene Tider", at just 17, and a few years later he met Marie Fredriksson for the first time. She had endured a difficult childhood, overshadowed by the family trauma of her older sister's death in a car accident.
Fredriksson had collaborated with several local bands, and in 1981 she sang backing vocals on one of the songs by Gessle's band. Gessle recognized the distinctive quality of Marie's voice and later introduced her to the respected Swedish producer Lasse Lindbom, who produced two solo albums for her. But Fredriksson, who was shy, preferred to be part of a band, and she grew close to Gessle by accompanying him and his group on their tours.
But there was a catch. "Gyllene Tider", a well-known and successful band in Sweden in the late Seventies and early Eighties, was fading, and in an attempt to court markets beyond Sweden part of its last album was released as an EP in the US under the name "Roxette", taken from a song by the British pub-rock band "Dr. Feelgood", after EMI demanded a change of name.
The move failed, but EMI executive Rolf Nygren suggested that Gessle and Fredriksson sing together, and Gessle, who was thrilled by the idea, argued that with his songwriting and her voice they stood a chance of bringing something new and fresh.
The duo released a debut album that put Gessle and Fredriksson back on the Swedish public's radar, but in those days, to be a Swedish duo recognized beyond your borders you needed either a strong showing at Eurovision or an extraordinary coincidence, and luck was about to come knocking.
Even before that, ahead of Christmas 1987, the duo released a special holiday song called "It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted)". Three years later the song would become a huge international hit thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack of the film "Pretty Woman", after its lyrics were lightly altered to turn it into a love song.
After releasing their second album, "Look Sharp!" (named in homage to the 1979 debut album by Joe Jackson, "Look Sharp!"), in Sweden on October 21, 1988, and enjoying local success, the turning point came thanks to Dean Cushman, an American student from Minneapolis who was studying in Sweden on an exchange program. He fell so in love with the song "The Look" that he took it home with him for his Christmas vacation (1988) in the US, where he handed it to the local radio station, KDWB 101.3 FM. Before long the station was playing the song again and again at listeners' request, and it became popular on other stations until it reached number one in early April 1989, about four months after it first hit the airwaves.
Gessle wrote "The Look" while practicing on the new synthesizer he had bought, an Ensoniq ESQ-1. Gessle said he wrote the first lyrics just to have something to work on alongside the steady beat, and the throwaway words eventually became permanent.
In the song's original lyrics the title read "He's Got the Look", because Gessle had originally planned for Marie Fredriksson to sing it. When he realized the song didn't suit her style, one word was changed to "She's", and Gessle sang it himself, with Fredriksson joining him on the chorus.
Sometimes you need a little help from the goddess of luck. "The Look" was the fourth single from the album, preceded by "Dressed for Success", a phrase for success that comes from the books of John T. Molloy, written in the Seventies. Molloy was America's leading "scientific image consultant", and his books launched the image-consulting industry and encouraged women working in corporations to wear suits to the office.
Marie Fredriksson recalls: "Before I started the vocal session everything went wrong, Per and I were arguing about the arrangement, and I came in very wound up." There is no doubt that you can hear it in Marie's voice.
The music of "Roxette" was built on pop full of catchy Sixties-style melodies that weren't too sticky, as in the ballad that became the second single, "Listen to Your Heart", whose sound strongly recalled American bands such as "Starship" and "Heart". The video was shot in the ruins of Borgholm Castle on the island of Öland in the Swedish Baltic Sea.
The fifth and final single from the album, "Dangerous", is about a guy drawn to a dangerous girl, inspired by an early-1970s action film. "A nice piece of bubblegum."
The duo's second album, "Look Sharp!", became a bestseller, with some nine million copies sold worldwide.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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