“Then in 1986 I wrote a song for a big Swedish artist, and she didn’t want to record it. “I first met Marie sitting by a piano, singing so incredibly I’d never heard anyone sing like that.” As soon as I heard Marie, we talked about maybe doing something together. The problem was, I knew I could write songs that demanded a better singer than I was. “I always felt like I was a decent songwriter. “I first met Marie sitting by a piano, singing so incredibly I’d never heard anyone sing like that,” says Gessle. International success, however, only came with Gessle’s second band, Roxette, a duo with vocalist Marie Fredriksson, who sadly died in 2019 after a lengthy battle with a brain tumor. 1 hit singles and albums in the early eighties when they were all still teenagers. In fact, Gyllene Tider got incredibly successful across Scandinavia, with No. “Then”, he recalls, “I got the self-confidence to pick up a guitar because of the punk/new wave thing in 1976, when it was okay to sound bad. In his teens, Gessle started writing poems, and quickly realized these were lyrics, but he couldn’t yet play an instrument to turn them into songs. I always went for those gimmicky things.” I liked the feedback on the intro to I Feel Fine, I liked the I guitar sound on Till The End of the Day by The Kinks. “He was a teenager in the sixties, so his record collection introduced me to pop and rock via bands like The Beatles and The Loving Spoonful,” recalls Gessle. As a kid, like many in MBW’s World’s Greatest Songwriters series, Per Gessle had a significantly older sibling – a brother – with a record collection to wonder at and crib from.