Roxette Celebrate 30 Years Of ‘Joyride’ With Anniversary Box Set
Today, Sunday 28th March, Roxette celebrate the the 30th anniversary of their third album Joyride – the much anticipated follow-up to the band’s spectacular 1989 global breakthrough, Look Sharp!.`
The albums three US No 1 singles The Look, Listen To Your Heart and It Must Have Been Love”and other big hits like Dressed For Success and Dangerous had almost transformed the dynamic duo of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle into an overnight world-wide hit phenomenon that would soon pave the way for other Swedish pop acts during the 90s.
Unsurprisingly, Joyride therefore carried a heavy weight on its shoulders; the album was supposed to cement Roxette’s new-found status as a global success, proving that the hits of 1989 and 1990 were no fluke. Some artists would have found this pressure hard to handle. But Roxette delivered. Or as Per Gessle remembers:
“Björn Ulveaus once told me how he felt when ABBA recorded Mamma Mia. It was like the whole pop world revolved around them. Their sound was spot-on, they had produced a string of hits, and everybody was waiting for the next one. But despite that pressure, they never thought it was difficult to deliver. And that’s exactly how I felt about Joyride. I had read an interview with Paul McCartney, where he said that ‘writing songs with John Lennon was just a long joyride’. The song came very easily, and I instantly knew it was a hit: it would provide the album with a great title, ‘hello, you fool I love you’ was a cool hook. Everything was there. With Joyride the whole album was in the can.”
In the spring of 1991, most things seemed to go Roxette’s way. The cheery title track zoomed up the charts, giving the group their fourth No 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in the US – setting a record that still holds for Scandinavian acts – while future singles like Fading Like A Flower, Spending My Time and Church Of Your Heart were waiting in the wings. Soon the album had passed the 11-million mark.
“Marie’s superb vocals is one of the main reasons that Roxette – and not least our biggest album Joyride – was such a huge success. Around this time, she was at the absolute top of her game, effortlessly creating lasting wonders with my songs. Beside the big hits, Joyride also contains Perfect Day, Hotblooded, (Do You Get) Excited? and not least Watercolours In The Rain, a song that Marie had written wonderful music to, and I happened to have a fitting lyric in the drawer”, Per says.
To celebrate the album’s anniversary, Joyride will be released as a 4LP and a 3CD box, containing the original release as well as previously unreleased or hard-to-get material, released this Autumn.