Eddie Koch braved the generation gap and took his daughter to see Roxette
IT’S Saturday night at Ellis Park and a swarm of adolescents hover around the turnstiles. The man at the gate eyes my receding hairline. “Tickets?” he asks, although the subtext of his query is written in the baffled look on his face: “Sure you got the right concert?”
My 10-year-old daughter shows the passes. He understands and waves us through. She’s my passport to the power of pop, a night of Crash! Boom! Bang!, the Roxette concert.
Next morning I meet one of my editors in Soweto at Joe Slovo’s funeral. He lives on Yeoville ridge above the stadium. Normally he can’t even hear the cheers when the Springboks score a try. This time he heard every bang on the bass, every crash of the chords. “Did you survive? Because we didn’t.”
Actually, I explain, it was interesting. The band is from Halmstad, the Merseyside of Sweden. They’re quite political, you know. Four of them belong to Amnesty International. Lead singer Marie Fredriksson has a beautiful voice. She even sings poetic ballads. A look similar to that of the usher crosses his face.
There are elements of truth in all of the above. Bandleaders Per Gessle and Frederiksson played for a number of bands in Halmstad in the 1960s, where a vibrant mix of music and experiments in new wave earned the town a reputation for being Sweden’s Liverpool.
Gessle, who writes all the lyrics and the music for Roxette, was born there. His first taste of rock came from an LP he bought from his brother who needed five kronor to buy a pack of fags — The Kink Kontroversy by The Kinks.
The band is our generation. These roots show in the lyrics, sometimes even in the rhythms of the band. A number called I Love the Sound of Crashing Guitars is dedicated to Pete Townsend. “Mao Mao,” it says. “I love the sound of crashing guitars … Red guitars against the wall … Hey you long- haired vintage Jesus, break that guitar into a thousand pieces.” See. A mix of politics and rock rooted in the 1960s and 1970s.
Frederiksson takes a break from her high energy sing-and- kick-your-legs around routine. The music stops. The lights dim. “I wrote this for my daughter,” she says. “But tonight it is for all of you.” It’s a moving ballad called Go to Sleep which shows that Frederiksson does indeed have a powerful voice.
“There’s a shadow on the terrace/A snow dance for the living/ There’s heavy weather on the way/Life’s a tough principal who won’t reward the losers …/I wish you the best before you go to sleep.” It’s about her 18-month-old daughter called Josefin who travels around with her on tour.
Frederiksson recorded much of Roxette’s new Crash! Boom! Bang! album while she was pregnant. That, she believes, explains the new-found subtlety in some of the tracks. “It was a wonderful experience,” she says in a press release (no interviews, please, the schedule is far too hectic). “I felt much more comfortable making this album, much more stable, much more relaxed. Some people say they hear the difference too. But I know, I just felt good about it.”
Maybe that’s why, instead of doing an interview with journalists before the concert, she chose to chat backstage to a couple of lucky kids who packed out the aisles of Ellis Park. The band breaks back to the hard driving power of pop — songs like Crash! Boom! Bang!, Fireworks and Sleeping in My Car with lyrics about lovesick rockers undressing girls on the back seat of their cars with the radio blaring out words of songs even more banal. I spot a couple of other fathers with receding hairlines, mothers dressed in African print dresses and sandals in the crowd. They are jiving with their sons and daughters in the aisles.
The 50 000-strong crowd demands three encores and the concert ends late. “Hope the security is this good when we come back in a few weeks,” I remark as we leave. “Mick Jagger?” asks my daughter’s 10-year-old friend. Her face resembles that of the usher and the editor. “He’s like a stick figure that a man drew on the wall of a cave many years ago.”
Maybe we weren’t at the wrong concert.
SPORT