Ola Salo of The Ark - Interview

The son of a preacher man, The Ark’s flamboyant frontman, Ola Salo, was raised in an environment where things like ascensions, apocalypses and magic legends were as natural a part of everyday Rottne Sweden life as the music of outrageous performers like David Bowie, Queen, Kiss, Roxy Music and Sly and the Family Stone. Salo’s epiphany came when he realized that his father’s Sunday pulpit was a stage and he formed the belief that every great performer needs to serve his audience to deserve his time in the limelight. Together with bandmates Sylvester Schlegel (drums), Martin Axèn (guitar), Jepson (guitar) and Leari (bass), Salo found his calling with The Ark, reaching for nothing less than a miracle each night through charismatic performances. As the band finishes up a tour with The Darkness to support its third album, State Of The Ark, its glam rock is beckoning new legions of listeners with messages of love and lust trussed up with a sarcastic sense of realism and showmanship.

“I think I partially got it from my father who’s a preacher man,” says Ola Salo about his performance instincts. “Being a preacher man is very much about having a sense of theatricality. It’s very important to really reach out to people…If people invest their time in looking at you, they deserve to get something back in the form of some ecstasy or euphoria…You’ve got to give them some kind of magic…Otherwise they have wasted their time on you and that’s the only sin of a performer.”

The artists who always appealed to Salo were those who pushed borders. He never really understood “down-to-earth performers.”

“The pulpit or stage is not a normal place,” says Salo. “It’s not a place for being down-to-earth because it is a pedestal. The thing that happens on that pedestal should be something apart from everyday life. I always thought there was something very phony about performers who try to act out an image that they are on stage the same way as they are in everyday life because of course they are not. In everyday life they don’t stand with a spotlight on them and have all the focus in the room on them.”

Salo’s religious upbringing also directed his mindset that he was destined to do special things.

“When you call your band ‘The Ark,’ your ambition can be no less than changing the world or saving it in some way,” says Salo. “But I think there’s another aspect of the symbol of The Ark, that it’s a vessel…Growing up in a dull, small, industrial town in rural Sweden I think that as much as we wanted to save the world, we wanted to just get away from that place…It was the idea of going around the world with your friends in a vessel which could take aboard all of the other people you wanted to hang out with…If we create this kind of collective where we’re more open-minded and tolerant and loving then the rest of society then perhaps we already have sort of made the world better in a partial way. Maybe that’s enough?”

While The Ark has mistakenly been simplified by some as an “Oh why can’t everyone just be friends and hug one another” kind of band, according to Salo, that’s only a partial picture.
“I have, shall we say, a belligerent side, sort of a side that not at all wants to be friends with everyone,” says Salo. “[The album’s] also about realizing that to find real love and friendship you have to sacrifice fake and phony love and friendship.”

The Ark performs at Bowery Ballroom on March 23.

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly 3/8/06.

The Ark perform "One Of Us Is Gonna Die Young."