Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!

★ Live from London’s Shepherd’s Bush, 16 November 1995  ★

By 1995, Roxette were not slowing down. They were ‘consolidating’.

‘Don’t Bore Us – Get To The Chorus!‘ had just been released as their first Greatest Hits collection, and it was being treated not as a retrospective, but as a major new campaign. Their UK record company invested heavily.

According to the full-page ad taken from Music Week Magazine UK at the time, over £500k was poured into TV advertising, with a further £150k committed to outdoor sites and national press. Retail marketing was extensive, a refreshed and new 1995 remix of ‘The Look’ was released as a single, and Roxette themselves were flown into the UK for an intensive run of TV promotion, interviews and performances.

This was not nostalgia. This was strategy.  

As part of the UK promotion, Roxette scheduled two very special performances:

On 15 November, they recorded an unplugged-style live session at Abbey Road Studios for BBC Radio, performing the hits ‘The Look’ and ‘Listen To Your Heart’, a Beatles classic, ‘Help’, and a brand new song ‘You Don’t Understand Me’.  All in one take!

The following night, on 16 November, Roxette walked onstage (slightly late) at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire for a one-off, invite-only live club show.

We recently asked Per what he remembers about the gig:  “That gig was the sh★t!”   We think he liked it!

So, it’s this very performance that opens our ‘Monthly Mock-Up‘ series.

Before we move onto that though, it’s worth mentioning that the ‘Don’t Bore Us…‘ album went on to sell over 300,000 copies in the UK alone, achieving platinum status by March the following year.

As we write this, the album has sold over 7 million copies worldwide. Amazing!

Live from London’s Shepherd’s Bush

The gig was everything a promotional show should be. Small enough to feel intimate, but packed wall-to-wall with hits. Confident rather than nostalgic. Focused rather than indulgent. Roxette sounded sharp, energised, and completely in control of a catalogue that by then had already defined what Per has since called their “golden years”, the late 1980s into the early 1990s.

And yet, somehow, this gig slipped through the cracks.

Despite its reputation, despite the obvious logic of releasing it, and despite occasional low-quality clips surfacing years later, the concert has never been officially released. No CD. No vinyl. No streaming release. Just stories passed between fans who were lucky enough to be there.

Our first Monthly Mock-Up imagines it as a missing live album.

A document of a band at full confidence, celebrating and distilling years of global hits into a tight, high-energy club-sized show. The kind of release that feels so obvious in hindsight, that now its absence is baffling.

The gig was intimate. Hit-packed. Electric. However, for the moment it remains locked away in The Roxette Vault.

Were you there that night? If you were, we would love to hear your memories.

The Setlist

The setlist was basically a greatest hits victory lap, but dropped into a sweaty London Club rather than the arenas and stadiums Marie + Per had become used to. Hit after hit, the songs that made Roxette successful, played with confidence and zero hesitation. A celebration.

Amongst the familiar moments sat ‘You Don’t Understand Me’, still brand new at the time, alongside another outing of The Byrds cover, first played during their one-off MTV Unplugged gig in 1993, and also appearing now and then during the ‘Crash! Boom! Bang! World Tour’ in 1994/1995. Both added something different to an otherwise hit-rich set.

It would have been amazing to see ‘June Afternoon‘ in the set, which interestingly still remains elusive in any Roxette live set to date. Regardless, it was exactly the kind of super-focussed show that fit the ‘Don’t Bore Us’ era so well, and a stark reminder of why all their hits still HIT!

★  Sleeping In My Car
★  Dangerous
★  Fading Like A Flower
★  So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star  [Byrds Cover]
★  Crash! Boom! Bang!
★  Listen To Your Heart  [Acoustic]
★  Dressed For Success
★  The Big L
★  The Look
★  You Don’t Understand Me  [Piano]
★  Joyride
★  How Do You Do!
★  It Must Have Been Love

Our Mock-Up Design

Visually, our mock-up takes its lead straight from the original ‘Don’t Bore Us…’ album artwork, designed by Kjell Andersson with photography by the late Jonas Linell. It’s a design we’ve always loved, and one that still stands out in the Roxette catalogue.

The approach is deliberately simple. Minimal layout. Summery typography with plenty of space. Letting the colour palette do the heavy lifting rather than crowding it with detail.

The goal was obvious from the start. This should feel like something you could have picked up in a record shop in late 1995, sitting comfortably alongside the ‘Don’t Bore Us…’ Greatest Hits album.

The finishing touch is the Sunflower Yellow coloured vinyl. A small but very deliberate nod to the warmth and confidence of that moment, and to the sunflower imagery that featured so heavily at the time.

Our first mock-up is dedicated to ♥ Marie, Pelle and Jonas ♥
To Marie, whose voice carried these songs with power and grace.
To Pelle, whose drumming anchored the live sound so many fans still talk about.
To Jonas, for the amazing photography of Roxette over the years.

Bootleg

An unofficial audience recording of the Shepherd’s Bush show circulates online, albeit in low quality. It still offers a glimpse of what this night sounded like, but also underlines the point that this one certainly deserved a release. One day. Maybe?

Thanx! A special mention and thanx to Barry Mieny for sending over some old articles about the Shepherd’s Bush gig.  Also to the man himself, Per, for taking the time to comment (albeit briefly – he’s a busy bee!), about the gig.

Next Month

We’ll be back next month with a brand-new mock-up.
What could it be? Any suggestions?