Internationally acclaimed singer who with Per Gessle formed the Swedish duo RoxetteCommanding female vocalists were never more popular than in the late 1980s, and for a time Marie Fredriksson, whose voice could blister paint or seduce a kitten, was one of the biggest. The singing half of the Swedish power-pop duo Roxette, she piloted them, with guitarist Per Gessle, to near ubiquity, and 75m record sales. Her widescreen delivery of their four biggest songs – It Must Have Been Love, Joyride, The Look, and Listen to Your Heart – helped to send each to No 1 in the US, a country rarely receptive to Swedish groups, even those singing in English.
Britain and the rest of Europe also succumbed, and Fredriksson, who has died of cancer aged 61, was one of pop’s most recognisable frontwomen in Roxette’s 1989‑91 golden hour.
Even those who found the group’s
music insubstantial – a view that has recently been undergoing reappraisal – agreed that Fredriksson could sell a song. They included the
New York Times, which panned the duo’s first Manhattan concert in 1992 (“Roxette won’t be accused of too much originality … Hearing Roxette could make a listener long for Abba”), while praising Fredriksson: “[Their] main asset is Marie Fredriksson, a singer with a sob in her voice [and] a platinum-blond Billy Idol hairdo.” In fact, the hairdo was closer to Annie Lennox’s streamlined crop, and Fredriksson was as angular and statuesque as the Eurythmics singer. She and Gessle probably did not engineer their look to resemble Lennox and her musical partner Dave Stewart, but there was an undeniable similarity, adding to the perception that Roxette were lightweights. “We don’t care what they say,” Gessle maintained in 1990. “We’re used to people saying our music sounds like crap.”