Ola Salo, Swedish singer-songwriter and keyboard player
Ola Salo (born Rolf Ola Anders Svensson; 19 February 1977) is the Swedish rock musician known for being the lead vocalist of the Swedish glam rock band The Ark.
He lived in Rottne, Växjö Municipality, in Sweden when he was a child, where, in 1991, he and his friends Jepson and Leari officially started the band The Ark. Salo is openly bisexual.Salo and the other members of the band had an international breakthrough in 2000 with the album We Are The Ark, containing the signature song "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane" (for which Ola won a Grammis for "Song of the Year"), a song Salo wrote after watching the Danish film Idioterne (The Idiots).In October 2006 during a party celebrating the new Swedish embassy in Washington, D.C., The Ark was performing on stage. As a plane was flying very low overhead Salo said "In this country, you don't know where those planes are headed. Well, this one seems to be heading in the right direction anyway..." meaning the airport, but then suddenly adding "...to the White House" which happened to be in the same direction.This caused controversy as many newspapers reported that Salo had "wished an airplane to crash into the White House". Salo later said that it was a bad joke, "totally unserious way of being cheeky toward the White House" and not a political statement. The band ended up cancelling almost its entire U.S. tour.On 10 March 2007, Salo and the band The Ark won Melodifestivalen 2007 and went on to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 with the song "The Worrying Kind", where, in which they came 18th with 51 points.In 2008, Salo translated Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar into Swedish for a performance in Malmö where he played the role of Jesus, and as a result he stated that "2008 will be a very quiet year" for The Ark after a hectic 2007 with the Eurovision Song Contest and the release of Prayer for the Weekend. In 2009. Salo featured on the Empire Dogs' album, Come On You Preachers. In 2018, he participated in the first season of Stjärnornas stjärna on TV4.
In 2019, Salo opened his headline residency It takes a fool to remain sane in the Rondo, (Gothenburg), directed by Edward af Sillén.
1977Feb, 19
Ola Salo
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Events on 1977
- 23Mar
Watergate scandal
The first of The Nixon Interviews (12 will be recorded over four weeks) are videotaped with British journalist David Frost interviewing former United States President Richard Nixon about the Watergate scandal and the Nixon tapes. - 5Jul
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Military coup in Pakistan: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, is overthrown. - 4Aug
Jimmy Carter
U.S. President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the United States Department of Energy. - 15Aug
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
The Big Ear, a radio telescope operated by Ohio State University as part of the SETI project, receives a radio signal from deep space; the event is named the "Wow! signal" from the notation made by a volunteer on the project. - 21Nov
God Save the Queen
Minister of Internal Affairs Allan Highet announces that the national anthems of New Zealand shall be the traditional anthem "God Save the Queen" and "God Defend New Zealand".