Living with Roxette

The problem with growing up in the early nineties was Roxette. Now you are thinking that I am going to start slagging off their back catalogue, talk about how terrible their music was. It’s true that their songs were pretty annoying, you’d think that you hated them and then find that they would be on a permanent loop in your brain for hours after you’d heard them. But no that was not the main problem with me and Roxette, the main problem was with the singer and my burgeoning sexuality.

I was 14 in 1990 when Must Have Been Love hit the charts. Over the next three years Roxette were everywhere, TV, radio, magazines, billboards and there was always that question in my mind, did I fancy the singer in Roxette?

Everything should have pointed to a resounding yes, she was tall, blonde, slim, Swedish, dressed from head to toe in leather, what more could a 14 year old need? But I just couldn’t make up my mind. Some days I did and some days I didn’t. And in fact, the days I did it was more about because I thought I should rather than because I actually did. This caused a huge amount of turmoil in the young me.  It’s a strange time 14, you are basically discovering yourself and I’d been busy discovering myself with Kylie Minogue, Julia Roberts, Wendy James, Amy Scales from the year above and of course Lisa Towers who I sat next to in maths and who I secretly fancied the arse off. I guess I was a typical 14 year-old; I fancied everything. But now the woman from Roxette threw a spanner in the works. I knew about homosexuality back then but I didn’t understand it. There was I watching the video for Fading like a Flower, seeing this woman who should have ticked all the boxes and feeling very confused. Why didn’t I fancy her? Did this mean I was gay? There must have been about 3 months of my life where I seriously searched my soul and questioned my sexuality. Every time I heard a Roxette track, there was an elephant in the room as those same questions would flood my mind. I poured over the photographs, staring at her for hours why didn't I fancy her? I even started staring at Pers (See I knew his name but I never knew hers) wondering if he did it for me; some days he did, some days he didn't.

I guessed the questions stopped the night I snogged Lisa Towers at the youth club disco, all the evidence was there that I was not gay.

Looking back on it, it wasn’t homosexuality I didn’t know much about but sexuality. Who knew back then that you didn’t have to find every member of the opposite sex attractive? Who knew that being gay was about more than not fancying all women? And whenever I hear a Roxette track on the radio I smile to myself as I turn it off, quietly thinking about the confusion they caused to the 14 year old me.