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Swedish soft metallers Europe are best known for their 1986 global smash The Final Countdown.

The song, complete with its huge synthesizer riff, went to number one in 25 countries. Lead singer Joey Tempest, 46, who now lives in London with his British wife and their young son, talks about private jets, poodle perms and writing that keyboard riff.

I was at a wedding on Saturday night and they played The Final Countdown - the dance floor went a bit mad. Are you surprised that it still gets that reaction after all these years?

Well, we play it live a lot, we do many shows, and it's a magic song for the live show. We don't listen to it privately at home but we do love playing it in front of a crowd - it's magic when we play that song.

What can you remember about the songwriting process for The Final Countdown?

I was in college and keyboards had started to make their way into rock music. I tried a few sounds on it and I came up with that riff. I thought it was very special and I kept it in the drawer until we did the third album many years later. By then, there were some other bands experimenting with keyboards, like Van Halen with Jump. I wanted to make a combination of guitars and keyboards. That was a statement on that and it sort of worked out nicely.

Are you ever embarrassed by some of the hairstyles and clothes you wore back in the day?

Not really, we were very young, we were MTV generation - we were one of the biggest bands on MTV. I just wanted to look like Robert Plant, to be honest.