Lene Nystrøm was born in Norway's oldest city of Tønsberg in 1973. A live wire as a child, she began to perform at the age of ten, allthough she had been taking jazz ballet classes since she was six!Lene grew up listening to Elvis, The Rolling Stones and - like any Scandinavian youngster - Abba. However, it was the Norwegian Eurovision winner Bobbysocks that first inspired the young Lene to perform. She explains: «When I was about 11 or 12, me and my best friends would copy Bobbysocks in our pink and black outfits. One day I was standing in the living room, performing in front of my elder sister, when suddenly my sister punched me in my stomach! It was this that made me realize that I had to use my whole body to sing. Before that I had been singing flat.»While Abba and Bobbysocks provided the inspiration for Miss Nystrøm's music, her unlikely dancing inspiration was an English pop star called...Shakin' Stevens! Lene laughs as she recalls dancing around to the records of this British rock'n'roller, who for many was a pale imitation of Elvis Presley. This infatuation soon waned as she fell in love with other artists including Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd, all of whom would be influential in her role as singer with the mighty Aqua.
Lene had already had a big chance to show off her vocal skills when, while hosting a Scandinavian TV game show, she was thrown in front of the cameras to sing the Randy Crawford song «Almaz», accompanied only by a piano. A star was born.
«I had a really great time and learned a lot on that TV show,» she says. The producers were impressed with the budding star - so impressed that Lenen and the TV host went to work on a cruise ship, sailing between Copenhagen in Denmark and Oslo in Norway. It was on the ship that Lene first encountered a certain René Dif. René was working as a DJ on board the ship and searching for a singer. Little did he know, when he met Lene, that she was the one he was looking for - René had fallen in love with the beautiful Lene without knowing that she could sing!. Lene remembers: «He was playing me some music from another project he'd worked on. I remember listening to another girl singing it and thinking "I can sing better than her." I told René and hist reaction was "Can you sing?" That was it - I was in the band!» When René proudly showed Claus and Søren a video of Lene singing they were equally thrilled and so they invited her over to Denmark. Lene met up with Claus and Søren and they just clicked. The foursome spent the whole weekend together at Søren's parents' house - just the four of them and a piano.
The early days were simply fun. Claus, Søren, René and Lene hung out together, getting to know each other and just dabbling with the odd tune.«It was so important that we got on,» explains René, «or it wouldn't work.»For the next six months, Lene travelled back and forth between her native Norway and her adopted Denmark, spending as much time with the band as she could while holding down her job at a jewellers.As work commitments intensified, lene was forced to quit her job, relying on René to help her get by.«It sounds funny now,» laughs René, «but we really lived on nothing. I was DJ-ing at the weekends and that was it.»The four were starting to take things a bit more seriously. The began to buckle down, and as time went by, they worked later and later, spending up to 14 hours in Claus's flat working on their music.As is the case with many bands at the start of their career, times were hard for the four friends, but they helped each other out and there was never any talk of quittting. There were difficult times, times at which Lene admits to having been a touch resteless.«When you're 20, you want to do everything at once. You don't have the patience to sit down and wait. The boys just held me back and said: «Everthing's going to be allright, just take your time.»
Source: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Lene-Nystrøm-Biography/097118C1A60EC75B48256E29000DF6CE
