The Olsen Brothers sang Fly on the wings of love in 2000.

Jørgen and Niels Olsen are the brothers from Odense in Denmark. They first formed a band called Kids in 1965. Jørgen was then only fifteen and his brother an even younger eleven years old.

One of their claims to fame was to have been the warm up act for the British pop band The Kinks. They also performed two songs in a Danish film in 1967 and their successes continued when they won a talent contest later in the same year.

They must not have been shy as they auditioned for the musical Hair in 1972 and both got a part in the show. Later Jørgen became one of the leading performers. Their first album was released the same year and achieved 100,000 sales. Hit after hit followed and they were the pin-ups for many girls in Denmark.

They have performed across the world including countries as far away as Japan. Closer to home they were very popular in Germany.

2000 wasn’t the first time that they entered the Danish National Final either together or separately.  After seven attempts they were ultimately successful.

The Eurovision Song Contest 2000 was the forty fifth edition of the event.

The venue was the Globe Arena in Stockholm. It’s the national indoor arena for Sweden and is located in the Johanneshov district. It’s also the largest hemispherical building in the world taking two and a half years to build.

Although it has a 16,000 seating capacity, once the Eurovision staging was installed this reduced to approximately 12,000.

This was promoted as the first contest of the second millennium.

As the system of using the lowest average scores was still being used Bosnia & Herzegovina, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia could not participate. This was the debut year for Latvia. Due financial issues Slovakia, Greece and Hungary did not participate.

Although a compilation of many of the entries was released in 1999 this was the first year of the official CD.

Notable happenings: The Dutch broadcaster stopped the broadcast as there had been a serious firework disaster. They used the jury’s votes. Israel’s group PingPong waved Syrian and Israeli flags to advocate peace between their countries, and the Russians protested about the use of a vocoder being during the Danish entry.

The result was an outright winner. The Danes received points from all but FYR Macedonia, including eight douze points, seven ten points and two eight points. This amounted to a total of 195. The nearest placed country was Russia when Alsou’s song Solo had 155 and the newest member of the Eurovision family, Latvia, amassed 136 points with the charismatic Renārs Kaupers leading Brainstorm and My star to third place.

Previous 1 2 3Next