There’s less of a link between successful movies and hit singles these days, but back in the glory days of the CD single, getting your song into a box office smash could make your career. Just ask Berlin (Take My Breath Away) or Wet Wet Wet (Love Is All Around) or for that matter Bryan Adams (Everything I Do) whose record-breaking 16-week stay at the top of the UK charts in 1991 has only recently been beaten by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean.
Or indeed Roxette. Their biggest hit, It Must Have Been Love, was another whose placing in a film – the Richard Gere/ Julia Roberts vehicle Pretty Woman – applied turbo boosters to an already successful career. The tear-jerking ballad is probably their signature hit. Indeed, it recently reached the landmark milestone of a billion plays on YouTube.
Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle were both established artists in their native Sweden when they formed Roxette in 1986. The original intention was to see if could break out of their home market. “The whole idea with Roxette was that we wanted to go international,” Gessle explained to the Dutch web show Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “I’d had success with my band in Sweden, Marie’s solo career was going really well.”
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Initially they were disappointed. The first Roxette album, 1986’s Pearls Of Passion, produced a couple of decent-sized Swedish hits but nothing more. At this stage, scoring US hits wasn’t on Gessle and Fredriksson’s radar – they had the more modest ambition of scoring a hit in West Germany. But EMI Germany turned its nose up at Pearls Of Passion and suggested that, in order to kick things off outside Sweden, the duo might try and write a Christmas single.
So Gessle set about that task. At home in Halmstad in the spring of 1987, he sat at the piano where he prepared all of his ballads.
“I always try to get the same temperature in the lyric and in the music,” he explained to Songwriting Magazine in 2020. “This music was really beautiful and it needed something reflective in the lyrics. It’s not about a specific event or a person, it’s a mood that I wanted to reflect. It was the music first and then the lyrics. With the best songs, you start writing the music and then you start writing the lyrics, then you continue with the music and you continue with the lyrics! They go hand in hand. I think that’s because I want to have them say the same thing.
“When I make demos, I keep them very simple. I’ll just play piano and sing over it. Then, of course, the big thing was to get Marie into the song. When she starts to sing it, you change the keys and you go from there. It’s also got a great opening line, one of my best: ‘Lay a whisper on my pillow’. That line just opens up a lot of things in your mind when you hear it. With pop music, you have to grab people’s attention with either a lyric or a hook that makes it interesting.”
Gessle added a line that references the time of year (‘it’s a hard Christmas day’) and gave it a title that made the connection obvious. Then it was time to go in the studio.
“A friend of our engineer had just bought a studio in Stockholm that had a Synclavier, one of the first digital-sampling synthesizers, so a lot of It Must Have Been Love was made by programming,” producer Clarence Ofwerman told the Guardian in 2025.
“Then we added drums and guitar in the EMI studios. I improvised the piano solo, the only time I’ve ever done that. It wasn’t a party tune, so we didn’t try to make it Christmassy, with bells or anything. Just after the solo, there’s a big key change where Marie suddenly sings much higher. It’s really difficult to sing like that, but she gave such a great vocal performance.”
It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) duly was a big hit in Sweden that holiday season. Unfortunately, it didn’t cut any ice (or snow, for that matter) with EMI Germany. “They didn’t even release it,” remembers Gessle. “That goes to show how the music business works. It’s not enough if you have the right song, it has to be the right timing.”
But Roxette only had to wait another year. Their next album, Look Sharp!, was released in autumn 1988, and when the singles Dressed For Success and The Look were substantial hits at home, fortune smiled upon them: “This American exchange student who was in Sweden and became a big Roxette fan,” Gessle told the BBC. “When he went back to the States, a radio channel called KDWB had a show where the listeners can call in and request songs.”
“So he went up to the radio station and gave them the Look Sharp! album, and they kept it there for a couple of weeks. From what I heard, the programme director fell in love with the first song, so he played The Look. The phones started to ring and people wanted to hear the song over and over again. It was pure luck.”
And so Roxette broke America – both The Look and Look Sharp!’s ballad, Listen To Your Heart, were Billboard Number Ones. The rest of Europe fell into line soon after. Suddenly, Roxette were in demand.
“We had a lunch in 1989 in Los Angeles with EMI,” Gessle told Top 200 a go go. “They had just got the rights to a soundtrack to a movie called $3,000. It was a guy who hired a girl for a weekend for $3,000. They said they had David Bowie on board, they had Go West, Natalie Cole…. all those EMI artists. And they wanted us to write a song for the soundtrack.”
Gessle and Fredriksson were flattered, but were in the midst of promoting an internationally successful album. They simply didn’t have any spare time to come with a new song for a soundtrack album that was most likely destined for the bargain buckets. Then Gessle had a brainwave.
“But… I have a Christmas song,” he remembered. “I could very easily alter the lyrics to that song.”
And so It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) was repurposed; upcycled, in modern parlance. The line about ‘a hard Christmas day’ was replaced by one about ‘a hard winter’s day’ and some minor touches were added. “The two versions aren’t that different,” says Clarence Ofwerman. “For the second one, though, the mixing engineer in LA put a load of gated reverb on the snare drum that he called his ‘lucky snare’, because it had already been on about 10 No 1 singles.”
“I remember when I received a telephone call from Garry Marshall the director of the film,” says Gessle. “And he said ‘Hey I just wanted you to know that I loved that song so much that I have given it a great place in the movie. There’s no dialogue over it because it speaks for itself – it just gives the whole movie a certain character’, and I was like [all nonchalant] ‘OK thank you very much.’”
Pretty Woman – as it had been retitled – became one of the biggest films of the 1990s and It Must Have Been Love’s prime spot in the movie guaranteed success for the song. It reached Number One on the Billboard chart in June 1990 and ended up becoming the second biggest seller in the US that year, behind Wilson Phillips’ Hold On. In the UK it was the group’s biggest hit, reaching Number Three, and it topped the charts in Canada and around Europe that summer – ironic, given that the song was originally meant to evoke the desolation of midwinter.
Its success cemented Roxette’s success around the world. The duo ended up selling over 75 million records, clocking up four Billboard Number Ones in total and hacing up 19 hits in the UK. They are quite comfortably Sweden’s most internationally successful act. Aside from Abba, of course.
They endured throughout the 1990s, but went on hiatus in 2002 after Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumour. “After she became ill, she came to one of my solo shows in Amsterdam and I asked if she wanted to join me on stage,” Gessle told the Guardian last year. “She hadn’t sung in public for eight years but came on for the encore and sang It Must Have Been Love. I’ve never in my life seen so many people crying. Marie got so much energy from that that she wanted to make another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a couple more years.”
The singer died in 2019 from complications from the original tumour and that appeared to be that for Roxette. But the heritage pop industry abhors a vacuum and in 2024 Gessle teamed up with a new vocalist, Lena Philipsson, for a new iteration of Roxette. Inevitably, at their live shows, the song that’s dedicated to the memory of Fredriksson is It Must Have Been Love.
