Mikael Wiehe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mikael Wiehe in 2005.

Mikael Christian Wiehe (born April 10, 1946 in Stockholm) is a Swedish singer and composer.

Wiehe grew up in Malmö, in the Scania region of southern Sweden, giving him his noticeable Scanian accent. He is a leftist folk musician, dealing with what he considers right and wrong in the society from the eyes of the proletariat, but he also writes personal, non-political songs.

Wiehe was one of the lead singers and the leading songwriter of Hoola Bandoola Band in the 1970s. After the split of the group in 1975, he was the leader of various other bands before becoming a solo artist in the beginning of the 1980s. He was a close friend of the late Björn Afzelius, the other lead singer of Hoola Bandoola Band. They sometimes toured around Scandinavia and recorded together in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, Wiehe performs all around Sweden, using material from his 20-some albums (excluding various compilations). A recently published song book contains the lyrics and melodies to 220 of his songs.

In 2000, he released the single Det här är ditt land, a Swedish-language adaptation of the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land which received substantial play on Swedish radio.

Wiehe has also translated many of Bob Dylan's songs into Swedish.

[edit] Political views

On February 24, 2007, Wiehe performed at a festival in Malmö, labeled as a "solidarity party for the Cuban Revolution", which was organized by the Swedish-Cuban Association, the Revolutionary Communist Youth, the Swedish Communist Party and others. The ambassador of Cuba to Sweden, Ernesto Meléndez Bachs, also held a speech at the festival. In an interview in Kvällsposten, Wiehe said that "Cuba has the best record on human rights in the region"^[1] and in an interview with Sveriges Radio he said that he would "hesitate" to label the country as a dictatorship.^[2]