Pure pop music. An absolute artform in my humble opinion. All of us sing and hum to pop music, whether we care to admit it or not. Pure pop has been around since the 50s and despite being a genre that is much derided, writing a decent, catchy pop song is harder than most people appreciate.
Today’s choice is a pure pop classic, though the selection is heavily influenced by being a song with a half-decent cover (for the first time in a few posts here). It is one of my all-time favourite pop songs though, so I’d have been writing about it at some point soon anyway. It is Roxette’s classic earworm, ‘The Look’
The artist
Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson had successful music careers in their native Sweden prior to joining forces to become Roxette. Gessle was a member of the band Gyllene Tider before releasing a number of solo albums, whilst Fredriksson recorded solo albums of her own. In the mid-eighties, a record company executive suggested they should work together and, taking the name Roxette from a Dr. Feelgood song title, in 1986 they released their debut single, Neverending Love. Their debut album was released the same year and sold over 280,000 copies in their homeland. They released the song It Must Have Been love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) in 1987 and, whilst a top 5 hit in Sweden, international divisions of EMI chose not to release the song elsewhere as a single.
In 1988, Dressed for Success and Listen To Your Heart were released as the first two singles from their second album, Look Sharp!, with both reaching the Swedish top 10, whilst the album was number one for 14-weeks. The Look then became another Swedish top 10 and caught the attention of an American exchange student, Dean Cushman, who was studying in Sweden at the time, heard the single, and took the album back to the US during the summer of 1988. Passed on to a Minneapolis radio station, KDWB 101.3 FM, they started playing the song, it became hugely popular, quickly spread to other radio stations, and became a hit before any Roxette material had been commercially released or promoted in the US.
The rest is pop history! Roxette is currently Sweden’s best-selling music act after Abba, having sold 75-80 million records worldwide. In the UK, Roxette had nineteen top 40 hits and sold over 3 million singles. Although they never had a UK number 1 single, their biggest hit in terms of chart position was the version of It Must Have Been Love heard on the Pretty Woman soundtrack, which reached number 3 in 1990. Other memorable top 10 hits include Listen To Your Heart, Joyride, and Almost Unreal.
Why I’ve chosen to write about this song
I genuinely believe The Look to be one of the finest pop songs of the decade – it’s certainly in my personal Top 10. It has everything I want in a pop song. With guitars prominent throughout, it has a driving rhythm which immediately grabs you and propels you through the song. The verses are strong, the chorus is huge, and who doesn’t love a good ‘na-na-na-na-na’ singalong part?! Despite the prominent guitars in the final version, Gessle wrote this as a more synth-based song, rather than using a live band, figuring this would help them stay with what he saw as current musical trends. He has admitted that the lyrics, particularly the first two verses, are largely nonsensical. Gessle wrote guide lyrics simply to get a feel for the melody, though he subsequently decided to keep these words in place. He asked Fredrikkson to sing the lead (he always intended her to be the lead vocalist in the band), though she insisted it was better to use Gessle’s vocal, adding just the “na-na-na” element as the track progressed, plus some of the responses to Gessle’s main vocal during the refrain.
All this suggests The Look shouldn’t have been a huge hit! However, for me, it is a classic example of why not everything about a classic pop song needs to work on paper. So what if the lyric doesn’t necessarily make perfect sense? So what if the final arrangement is different from that which was originally written? As long as the stars align and there is a massive hook to sing along to, that is surely all that matters?
The video
A neon-fused domestic scene, there isn’t really anything groundbreaking about the video. The temptress the song is about looms large and is clearly a femme fatale, though my favourite scenes are those where Gessle and Fredriksson figure, purely as the chemistry between the two is clear to see.
The stats
The song first charted at number 98 on the 1st April 1989. Spending 13 weeks in the top 100, it peaked at number 7 on the 27th May chart. For the stats fans, the number one single that week was the charity version of Ferry Cross The Mersey (recorded by the likes of Gerry Marsden, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson and The Christians, to raise funds for those affected by the Hillsborough disaster), whilst the number one album was Jason Donovan’s Ten Good Reasons.
The cover version
At some point in my life, I will be the guitarist in a band that plays rocked up versions of pop songs. Combining two of my absolute passions, I love it when rock bands do this, and one of the songs I am desperate to play is this one. The cover version today does just that. Animal Drive are a Croatian rock band and do a great job here, helped significantly by Canadian singer Rosa Laricchiuta, who has one hell of a set of pipes! Turn this one up loud, make the devil horns hand signs, throw yourself around the kitchen and sing it loud!
The wrap-up
I love a wide range of music and the key to a great song for me is quite simple – it has to make me feel something, whether that’s happiness, pain, sorrow, unbridled joy, nostalgia, an urge to sing out loud / move / dance, anything really – I just need to feel something. Whenever I hear The Look, without fail, it always makes me smile and sing like a loon. It makes me feel happy to be alive. To these ears, it sounds as fresh today as it first did 37 years ago. Roxette were a fantastic duo, Per Gessle was a hugely talented songwriter, and their music should never be dismissed as a result of it ‘just being throwaway pop’.
Best wishes.
Mick
