DANA

Dana Rosemary Scallon, better known as her stage name Dana, found fame in 1970 after winning the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland with the ballad "All Kinds of Everything". The song was a worldwide hit and became the launchpad for Scallon's career as a successful folk-pop artist. Born Rosemary Brown in Islington, London on August 30, 1951, Scallon moved back to her father's birthplace of Derry in Northern Ireland when she was five and began making a name for herself at talent contests as a child. Shortly before her 16th birthday, Scallon signed a deal with the Decca Records subsidiary label Rex and in 1967 released her first single "Sixteen", which was written by her teacher and the music promoter Tony Johnston. The single's B-side featured Scallon's own composition, "Little Girl Blue". Following her Eurovision win in 1970, Scallon released the follow-up singles, "I Will Follow" (1970) and "Who Put the Lights Out" (1971) and amassed a hefty collection of albums over the proceeding years, including 1975's Have a Nice Day and 1976's Love Songs & Fairy Tales. Scallon became a leading figure of the Christian rock movement, topping the charts in 1980 with "Totus Tuus", a song released in homage to Pope John Paul II the following year she scored her first hit LP, Everything Is Beautiful. 1981 also saw the release of the religious album Totally Yours and that same year she collaborated with her younger brothers on the official Northern Ireland 1982 FIFA World Cup song "Yer Man". After relocating to the US for most of the 1990s, Scallon shifted gears and entered Irish politics in 1997. She continued to release albums, largely focussing on religious music, and in 2019 unveiled new album My Time.