STOCKHOLM – Per was on Swedish TV’s “Gomorron Sverige” program on Wednesday morning.

Even without being able to understand the Swedish being spoken, the two segments that are available for viewing on the stations website (View Segment 1 | View Segment 2 ) might prove interesting, if only to see the included clips from the tour in South America or historical clips from when Roxette first topped the Billboard list in the United States with “The Look.”

Here though, (after the jump) is a rough transcript of the first part of Segment 2:

SVT: Per Gessle is today’s guest on “Good Morning Sweden,” recently home from a South America trip, out on a big tour… and on Sunday Roxette is playing the Grand Arena in Cape Town, South Africa.
Per: “Yes, sir”
SVT: How is life as a 50-year-old rockstar?
Per: (Laughs) It pretty good actually. It’s very calm. The tour is planned so we play one day and the next day we travel. We have one day off in between, almost all the time it’s like that.
SVT: You don’t throw anything out from the hotel rooms windows?
Per: (Laughs again) No, but we’ve never really done that, actually.
SVT: What would have happened if you never would have had success with Roxette? I read somewhere that you had to sell some guitars?
Per: I was a little poor, ’84-’85 were tough years for me and my girlfriend. Nobody was really interested in me, I was a has-been at 24 years of age. The first Roxette album, Pearls of Passion, was accually my refused third Swedish solo album that I quickly translated.
SVT: A solo record that nobody wanted?
Per: “So Far Away” and other songs were written in Swedish. But that’s the way it is, sometimes it goes forwards, and sometimes it goes backwards. It was tough, yes.
SVT: Then as soon as 1989, three years after what you just talked about, you are mentioned as “one of the richest 30 year-olds in Sweden” in the media. It went fast.
Per: That’s typical media…
SVT: For everyone who wonders, can you tell us what it is like to become rich?
Per: It’s hard to say, for me it has been that I can work with what I want to work with. I think, the feeling you get from your job is everything. I don’t have to think about saving money for the end of the month. I can focus my energy on making music.
SVT: That sounds fantastic. You and Marie are on the road again. Not many thought this would happen again after 2002. How did this affect you?
Per: Hard to say. It was very difficult, mostly to her family and herself of course, but us close to her were affected to. My father had cancer in the ’70s, that was also very hard. But now, it was hard to understand. It looked bad for Marie, she had just one chance out of 20 to survive. There were some tough months back then. If you had asked me five to six years ago if there would be more Roxette, I would have said “no, I don’t belive that”. We have taken it very slow, it was the concert in Amsterdam that was some kind of start for all this.
SVT: But now when you play for 10,000 people on the other side of the world. Do you think “shit, what about five years ago?”
Per: Yes, that happens. But that happend in the old days too. I remember a concert when we played for about 50-60,000 people at a football stadium in Uruguay or something like that and we looked at each other and both thought “Is this really true? This little hobby band from Halmstad?!?”. In one way, it has never been as fun as this to play… now when we don’t feel any pressure. We don’t feel that we are fighting to chart or make the best record in the world. We are travelling the world and play our songs for people that want to hear them and having fun with our band and our music. It’s nice to not have these competitive feelings, career feelings, it’s gone, at least for me.
SVT: Anyhow, you are doing what many other bands are longing for.
Per: Maybe that’s the thing. It feels like a gift from above. We are just trying to enjoy it.
SVT: How long are you going on like this?
Per: I don’t know. It looks now like the tour is continuing a good part into next year. We’ll see… how old I am then.
SVT: When will you play in Sweden?
Per: Gothenburg 24th of july, Globen 3rd of november and Malmö arena the 4th of november. That wasn’t bad, right?
SVT: That was fantastic that you remembered that much at your age.
Per: Thank you so much for that.
SVT: You have experienced the life of a rockstar already as a 20 year old. Gyllene Tider popped up out of nowhere in 1979, I think your first hit came? 1980?
Per: 1979-80, yes. Gyllene had played all of six concerts, before friends, at that time…
SVT: You swept Sweden off its feet, and it sounded like this: (“Flickorna på TV2” clip plays.)