All studies of creativity say the same thing: the most important thing is patience and perseverance. There is no getting round hard work.

Meanwhile, the biggest colour explosion in Swedish pop history is proof of the opposite. A work based on 100 percent intuition.

This spring marks the 30th anniversary of Joyride by Roxette. On 11 May 1991, the title track went to number one on the Billboard charts.

After two Roxette albums with black and white images of the band, the new album had a circus theme and shone with colour on the cover. It fit well with the overall feel of the disc. “We wanted to convey that colourful, exuberant feeling, positive pop,” Per Gessle has said.

The positive feeling was also confirmed in the reception. “We were at a meeting in the USA where I got to meet a lot of radio producers. Everyone stood in a row and congratulated me on another number one. The single had not even been released yet.”

Per Gessle has been uniquely productive as a songwriter and musician for five decades, but he has never written on a fixed schedule or in a studio.

“I could never, like many other songwriters, go to an office and write. Sitting there for six hours, sometimes something comes out, sometimes not. I refuse to work like that. Instead, I sit in front of the telly with my guitar on my lap. If it’s a half-decent film, I turn the sound down and sit and strum. I read the lines of the film, not thinking about what I’m doing, and then suddenly a melody can appear. Damn, what was that?”

Late one night when Per Gessle came home, he found a note on the piano where Åsa Nordin Gessle, his love, had written in ink pen: “Hello, you fool, I love you”. Translated into English it reads: “Hello you fool, I love you”. The phrase directly inspired a song and became the opening line of Joyride.

Per Gessle: “I spend a lot of time with Björn Ulveaus from Abba. He told me that when they wrote the song Mamma Mia, that was the moment when everything suddenly felt right, when all the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. It felt perfect from the very first note. That’s exactly how I felt with Joyride.”

After the note with “Hello you fool, I love you” provided the chorus, an interview quote popped into his head that provided the song title.

“I had read an interview with Paul McCartney where he said: ‘Writing songs with John Lennon was always a long joyride’. I liked the word. I didn’t realise then what joyride actually meant: stealing a car, crashing it and leaving it standing.”

Despite the odd title, the prophecy of the jaded American radio producers came true. Joyride became Roxette’s fourth number one. No other Swedish artist, not even Abba, has had more than one Billboard number one.

Progressive pop songs tend to be categorised as immediate and direct, but the underlying construction is in fact often anything but simple.

Joyride, for example, is actually a very odd hit song, with constant shifts in both tempo and key.

When Roxette collected their recordings in The Rox Box 86–06 in 2006, I wrote the history text in the box and interviewed Per Gessle, Marie Fredriksson and all the musicians involved.

Producer Clarence Öfwerman said: “What is typical of the Roxette sound is the combination of Per’s and Marie’s voices. Per was a reluctant singer for a long time. He always had low self-confidence, especially in comparison to Marie. She was born to be a singer. But Per’s voice also has something unique, something that goes straight through, which children in particular recognise. If you play pop music to a three-year-old, in the noise of other songs they always react to Per’s voice.”

Per Gessle’s daffy self-confidence as a singer is a baggage from childhood. Per Gessle’s father, who was a plumber, died in 1978. His father never understood his son’s interest in pop music and only got to hear his son on the radio once. “It was when Grape Rock, my very first band, was invited to take part in a demo programme on Swedish radio. We were supposed to be a punk band, but our song was six minutes long. My father didn’t like it at all. Above all, he thought I sang very badly.”

But after the overwhelming international reception of songs like Joyride and The Look, Per Gessle learnt to accept his own singing voice.

Roxette also learnt to combine two different voices. “I sing well in G, Marie preferably in C. I can use that when I write. The key changes become a quality in the music. Used correctly, it can be a way of keeping a song alive, making it more exciting. The element of surprise in pop is important. The listeners should be hooked.”

30 years later, that’s still how listeners react when the sounds of Joyride come on the car radio. What was that?