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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">JP/P.J. LeoRoxette, the Swedish duo who made it global with chart toppers such as “The Look” and “It Must Have Been Love”, may have plenty more to offer aside from nostalgia, but their concert last Saturday night at Mata Elang International Stadium in Ancol, North Jakarta, was certainly rife with it.

Indeed, it can be hard to extricate the pop-rock act from their 1980s and 1990s success, which failed to escape the memory of a bus driver at the amusement park.  

“All right, those watching the oldies concert get off here,” he said to a couple of laughing thirty-something women who proceeded to exit the vehicle.

The two women — Eva and Sylvia — were on their way to the concert. Eva said she became familiar with Roxette when she was still in elementary school. She is now working at a private bank.

Eva and Sylvia had much in common with the other showgoers — twenty- and thirty-somethings coming in groups or pairs. And while at some concerts the waiting period before the show starts can be hectic and noisy with the chirps of young adults, the crowd at this particular event was somewhat calm and collected.

They were also eager for some nostalgia. “It was in high school that I was crazy about Roxette,” Santi, an employee at a large private trading company in Indonesia, said before the show.

She went to the show with Fira, her friend from high school. Fira said she had special memories surrounding “It Must Have Been Love”.

But, apparently there were even younger showgoers who had been looking forward to the event as well.

“I have been listening to Roxette since I was little,” Widyo, born in 1987, said. “My family used to play their music,” said Widyo’s friend Dito.

Abe, who was born in 1982, also had vivid memories of the band, although perhaps more mischievous ones. “I used to steal my mother’s money to buy Roxette tapes,” he said, laughing.

Roxette, who are Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle, released their latest album, Charm School Revisited, last year. Billboard.com lists at least three number ones by the group, and last year Roxette received the Swedish government’s Honorary Award for Swedish Music Exports. “After ABBA, Roxette is Sweden’s most successful band of all time in the international music scene,” the government’s website said.

According to the band’s official biography, Fredriksson and Gessle started Roxette in 1986 after both had established careers in the local music scene. Their first recorded single “Neverending Love”, was warmly received that year.

They had their first number one hit in the US through a somewhat odd route. While their 1988 album Look Sharp! only made it big in Sweden at first, a single from the album The Look was first played by a radio station in Minneapolis thanks to the request of an American exchange student who had just returned from Sweden. The song became a hit despite the fact that the album had not been released in the US.

Although Roxette’s sound is considered by many to be catchy and poppy, Gessle, the songwriter of the duo, said in an interview with the New Zealand Herald published last month that his major influences included early punk bands such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

Roxette went on a break after Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had an operation in 2002. According to Gessle in the New Zealand Herald interview, Fredriksson lost a bit of her short-term memory and “had to restart her life altogether, and she had to learn to read again”.

However, the two re-united in 2009 and proceeded to go on tour and record new material. The concert last Saturday was part of a long list of shows scheduled this year, including in Singapore, Argentina, South Africa and the UK.

“We dared to do this because Roxette has plenty of hits and a loyal fan base,” Jacqueline Losung, the marketing director of concert organizer Big Daddy Productions, said

According to Big Daddy, tickets for VIP and Tribune class, priced at Rp 1.5 million (US$163) and Rp 450,000 respectively, were sold out seven days before the show.

The concert saw plenty of the likes of Eva and Santi dancing and singing along. The band opened with the energetic “Dressed for Success” and followed with another up tempo number, “Sleeping in My Car”.

They proceeded to play classic after classic. “[This song] took us from cold, cold Sweden to hot, hot Hollywood,” he reminisced with his signature boyish drawl before the band launched into “It Must Have Been Love”, which was on the soundtrack to the 1990 hit Pretty Woman.

Fredriksson was wearing her signature look, a platinum-blonde pixie cut, tight slacks, a sleeveless top and a white jacket. At times, she let the audience do the singing as she flashed confident smiles and warm gazes at the crowd.

Musician Christoffer Lundquist, who was touring with the band as an additional guitarist, drew cheers when he played the amped-up “Nona Manis Siapa Yang Punya”, a local folk song.

The band played “Joyride” before going backstage and returning for an encore, playing the ballad “Spending My Time” and then “The Look”. The audience even demanded a second encore, to which they replied with “Listen to Your Heart”.

However, the sound system went off just as the band reached the climax of the last number, prompting protests from the audience.

Jacqueline said the incident was due to a technical glitch with a console brought by the band themselves.

Despite the incident, the audience was mostly pleased with the show, and the duo’s final move — putting their arms around each other comradely as they walked off stage — was probably as equally strong of a statement as the words the audience could’ve heard had the sound not failed.