Per Gessle, singer, songwriter, guitarist

In my early 20s, I was in the biggest band in Sweden. But after Gyllene Tider [Golden Times] collapsed, I was depressed for two years. At first, Roxette only got together when Marie Fredriksson, our singer, wasn’t busy with solo stuff. To keep her in the band, I needed to make it successful, so I was very motivated.

Back then, apart from Abba, Sweden were pop underdogs. Our aim was just to get into other Scandinavian countries, or even Germany. But EMI Germany couldn’t get us on the radio, so they suggested I write a Christmas song. I wrote It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted), as it was originally titled, on the grand piano at home in Halmstad. I’d already started it as a love song: “It must have been love, but it’s over now.” But after the German label’s request, I added in a solitary reference to Christmas in the second verse. It was spring and I wasn’t feeling very Christmassy.

The demo I made had terrible vocals, because it’s a really tricky song to sing, but Marie was up for the challenge. We recorded it in time for Christmas 1987 and in Sweden it went Top 5. But EMI Germany hated it and didn’t want it.

A couple of years later, after we’d had other hits, EMI called from Los Angeles asking me to write a song for Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere Julia Roberts. The soundtrack already had David Bowie and Robert Palmer, but we were just about to fly to New Zealand so I told them I was too busy. Then I remembered “the Christmas song”.

We dashed back into the studio, changed the “Christmas Day” lyric to “a winter’s day”, and added a new guitar melody at the beginning. Not long after, the director Garry Marshall called to say: “I wanted to let you know that when your song plays in the film, there’s no dialogue. It’s just 55 seconds of your music driving the whole movie.” The rest is history.

One time after we became huge, we had 2,000 people outside our hotel room in Buenos Aires singing our songs all night long. David Coulthard later told me that all the Formula One drivers were staying there the same evening and were really annoyed because they couldn’t sleep. I got 4,000 cards for my birthday. I had people sleeping in my garden, stealing my underwear, even the aerial on my car! Today, the song is approaching a billion streams.

People think it’s a power ballad, but it isn’t. The production is sparse. It doesn’t need power chords or big orchestrations: all the power is in Marie’s voice. She had the ability to pour her heart out. After she became ill, she came to one of my solo shows in Amsterdam and I asked if she wanted to join me on stage. She hadn’t sung in public for eight years but came on for the encore and sang It Must Have Been Love. I’ve never in my life seen so many people crying. Marie got so much energy from that that she wanted to make another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a couple more years.

Clarence Öfwerman, producer

A friend of our engineer had just bought a studio in Stockholm that had a Synclavier, one of the first digital-sampling synthesisers, so a lot of It Must Have Been Love was made by programming. Then we added drums and guitar in the EMI studios. I improvised the piano solo, the only time I’ve ever done that. Just after the solo, there’s a big key change where Marie suddenly sings much higher. It’s really difficult to sing like that, but she gave such a great vocal performance.

It wasn’t a party tune, so we didn’t try to make it Christmassy, with bells or anything. For the second version, Marie came in again to sing the changed line “a winter’s day”. Otherwise, the two versions aren’t that different. For the second one, though, the mixing engineer in LA put a load of gated reverb on the snare drum that he called his “lucky snare”, because it had already been on about 10 No 1 singles.

Before the film came out, we’d almost forgotten about the song and weren’t playing it live. Then suddenly it was a monster hit. I never got to meet Richard Gere or Julia Roberts, but I’ll always remember that first day in the studio together. Per made us T-shirts saying: “Today Sweden, tomorrow the world.” We all laughed and said: “It happened to Abba but it’ll never happen again.” And then it did.

• Don’t Bore Us – Get to the Chorus! Roxette’s Greatest Hits (30th anniversary edition) is out now