The Spin

With an image built on '70s glam rock costumes and big gestures, combined with catchy radio-friendly songs, the Ark had a major breakthrough in Sweden in 2000. Before that, few had heard of the band, even if it had been around since 1991, when it was formed by singer Ola Salo, guitarist Jepson, bassist Lasse "Leari" Ljungberg, and drummer Olsson. As a local band, they played small concerts and minor festivals through the '90s, and their EP Racing with the Rabbits got catastrophic reviews, if any.

In 1997, the band was close to breaking up but was contacted by Robert Jelink, who had sung with the Creeps. Jelink managed to get the Ark a record deal, and with backing from Grand Recordings and the new members Martin Axén (guitar) and Sylvester Schlegel (drums), the quintet moved to Malmö. In 2000, the Ark played warm-up for Kent on a nationwide tour, and later that year released the single "Let Your Body Decide," which became a big radio hit. The next single, "It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane," was even more successful, and when the debut album, We Are the Ark, was released in the autumn, it won two Grammy Awards and sold very well.

In the press, the Ark was often said to represent the return of glam rock, but while the clothes definitely had a '70s connection, the music had less to do with it. Their next album, In Lust We Trust, continued their success and sparked hits in singles "Father of a Son" and "Calleth You, Cometh I," the former song also causing some controversy as it addressed homosexual adoption rights. Salo, however, still wasn't totally satisfied with the band's sound and wanted to really mix things up (and make people dance!) for the Ark's third album. Consequently, he took over creative control of the band and got together with their unofficial sixth member, Jens Andersson.

Their songs are big but nimble, built around anthemic hooks and driven by rock-dance rhythms. That, however, only makes them a good band; what makes them more than that is their joyful humanism. The Ark are not maudlin, angry, cynical, or ironic, which distinguishes them from almost every other current band I can think of. Put another way: They have absolutely no fear of being uncool.
Salo, 29, is the visionary. Like the rest of the band, he comes from a semi-industrial rural area called Smaland, the upstate New York of Sweden. The son of Lutheran missionaries who had lived in Africa for a decade, he was sawing away on the violin by age 5 and, not much later, writing his own material. His first songs were in made-up English, a language he thought far superior to his native tongue. "My parents had these two dictionaries side by side, the English-to-Swedish and the Swedish-to-English," he says. "The first one was so much bigger because English has so many more words, so much more creativity. Swedish was the language of all the stupid people I had to meet every day. Stupid people speak English, too, of course, but I only discovered that later."
Rock music marked the way out of a stoic culture burdened by low expectations. "Growing up in a religious household, I expected life to be full of miracles," Salo says. "When I realized that nobody was ever going to walk on water or split any seas in this world, it was deeply disappointing. I thought that in music, I could create the magic missing in real life."
In 1991, Salo started the Ark, its members brought together by a love of sixties psychedelic rock. "Our parents were old hippies, and they had these great record collections," says guitarist Martin Axén, who was close to the band from early on and joined it officially in 1997. "Compared to Hendrix and the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, everything else sucked."
They staged wild floor shows and wore glittery, feathery costumes. All that, however, would have meant little if the Ark didn't also have great songs. Salo created an operatic style of rock; one of his classic compositions is the blazing, thoroughly uplifting "Father of a Son," about gay parenting, which became a hit in Sweden just as the law was changed to allow it. Opponents of the change-and there were more of them than you'd think in Sweden-were singing along to the chorus without knowing what they were saying.