It Must Have Been Love: Roxette’s power ballad is a masterpiece of pain
December 12, 2019By following the Motown blueprint of blending ecstatic music with agonised lyrics, Roxette created the ultimate breakup song and the late Marie Fredriksson delivered it perfectly
Theres a case to be made that Roxettes It Must Have Been Love sung by Marie Fredriksson, who has died after a 17-year health battle is the greatest 80s power ballad of them all, and perhaps the greatest breakup song.
Its certainly one of the biggest. The epic chorus It must have been love, but its over now is the sort of thing anyone can bellow, in an arena or the bath. When I saw Roxette in Manchester in 2012, the signature tune was the climax of the night, greeted with massed singing and beach balls in the audience. Frederiksson was already visibly and occasionally audibly frail, and yet seemed to summon up vast reserves of passion and emotion, which she poured into the Swedish bands biggest global hit.
Ironically, for a song which has been ubiquitous on the radio and in clubs for over 30 years, It Must Have Been Love started life in 1987 as a Swedish-only Christmas single (subtitled Christmas for the Broken Hearted). EMI Germany had asked Roxettes songwriter Per Gessle for an intelligent Christmas single, but balked at releasing it internationally. In Sweden, it reached a more than respectable No 4, but it was inclusion in the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts that saw it explode around the world, spend 14 weeks in the UK chart (reaching No 3) and propelled the soundtrack album to triple platinum status in the US. By the time Gessle submitted the song for consideration in the film, the duo had already scored two US No 1s. Meanwhile, perhaps crucially, It Must Have Been Loves intro and outro had been given crisper edits and the line Its a hard Christmas day had been changed to Its a hard winters day, adding to the songs universal appeal. It has subsequently notched up five million radio plays and earned an astonishing half a billion dollars.
Gessle, who as a child would sneak into his older brothers room to play the likes of the Animals We Gotta Get Out of This Place and the Hollies He Aint Heavy, Hes My Brother drew on years of appreciation of the transformative power of epic pop, as well as Swedish folk. However, perhaps because of their trademark 80s look (big hair, PVC and eyeliner), gated snare drums and squeaky synths, Roxette were long dismissed as pop fluff. Few bands claimed them as a source of inspiration. Oft-compared, hardly dissimilar Australian duo Savage Garden even made a point of insisting they were not influenced by Roxette. Gessle was unfazed, pointing out in eight years, Abba never got a good review in Sweden, making a not-inappropriate comparison with that other Swedish pop sensation.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us