Interviews

Hi Mika, so you just got back from a tour in Mexico. How did it compare to last time you were there?
Well Mexico is Mexico. It’s always the same shit every time! (laughs) It’s just that the crowds are so incredibly crazy. You cannot compare the Mexican crowds to any other crowd we have done. The Mexicans are so cold blooded you know. You have the biggest mosh pits in Mexico, you have the most stage divers in Mexico. You get to sign the most autographs in Mexico and now that everybody has the mobile phones with cameras you get to pose in one billion pictures. (laughs)

But it’s the same shit every time? They don’t get any crazier? Are there more of them?
Well no. Actually there has a been a big decline in Mexico, in the popularity of metal. So it was less people than 7 years ago but they were still as crazy. For me it’s all the same. Do I play to 50 people or do I play to 5000. Of course the 5000 make more noise, but then again if you’re playing a smaller club with 50… Well we had more than 50 people in Mexico, but let’s just say 50 people in a small club that are completely insane, then you know that you will have a good show.

Good. And can you tell me any anecdotes from the road, did anything special happen?
Well it wasn’t funny. Our drummer got so sick that he couldn’t play on the last day in Puebla. So we were in a situation that the doors were already open. And our drummer was lying on the backstage floor, basically puking his guts out and he had shit loads of fever and stuff like that. The local promoter was completely panicking. Like ‘are you going to cancel the show’? and we said ‘do we have an option, because our drummer is so sick that he cannot play. He will die behind the drums.’ And the promoter was like ‘look, we have already opened the doors, the people are in. There will be a fucking riot if you cancel now. You have to find a solution.’ So, quick brainstorming, and then I said to Arkki, our bass player: ‘you used to play the drums’. And he said ‘yeah that was 6 years ago’. And the promoter was like ‘can you please do it’. So Arkki is like ‘OK’. And he took our setlist and ‘I can play that song, I can play that song, I cannot do that, it’s too hard for me’… But we ended up doing something like 14 tracks. And before we went on stage, one of our local Mexican crew guys made the announcement to all the people in Spanish, that ‘look, the drummer is sick, the band will still play a show for you but you will be without bass players, the bass player will be behind the drums.’ And the people appreciated it a lot, the fact that we at least tried to do a show. And it turned out OK. And it was like our bass player’s first time behind the drums on stage. It was weird, but it was funny at the same time.

Well it turned out ok so that’s cool.
Yeah it turned out ok. You should have seen our drummer. The poor guy! I’m sure he lost like 5 kilos that day.

You gotta stay away from the Mexican water you know!
It didn’t come from the food, because we had a couple of days off there and I was the first one to get sick. And then it went from member to member and the last one to get sick was our drummer. But the rest of us were lucky because we all got sick during the days off. It was a really weird virus because it stayed one day and the next day you were ok.

Well you’re all ok, so that’s good. I know that you signed a lot of bootleg CDs. Why do they have so many bootlegs in Mexico? Because they can’t afford them or because there is bad distribution?
They are poor people. It’s a simple fact that the Mexican bootleg market is the biggest bootleg market in the world. In Mexico City they have a huge market place where every Saturday they sell all the bootleg stuff and it’s nothing but bootlegs. And the tshirts and stuff, they are much better looking than our original ones. I took some back to Osmose. I said look at these, there are amazing ideas these people have! I just came to Hervé last week in Paris, and he was like ‘oh these look fucking good!’

How is the Finnish audience different from the Mexican audience?
Well that depends where we play. What day of the week we play and are we playing to an all ages crowd. It really depends. I mean if we are doing an all-ages show on a Friday night than you can be sure that it is going to be fucking good. If we are doing on Wednesday a show for the people that are over 18 and we are playing in the north of Finland, then you can be sure that what we call the ‘rock police’ audience will show up. They are just standing there to check out when you do a mistake. So that they can say ‘oh that guy made a mistake on that song, and that guy made a mistake on that song’.

Oh, sounds like Switzerland!
Well it’s not only Finland. If we are talking about European crowds in general, in every country there are cities and towns where you do good when the crowds are good and the next day… I mean you can have the best show of the tour in Paris and the next day you are playing somewhere and blablabla you will have the worst show on the whole tour. So it doesn’t really matter on the country. Some areas are good, and some really suck.

Yeah and like you said it depends on the day of the week too.
Yes people are much more wild when they are drunk. It’s just a fact.

Haha yes. But I think we’re here to talk about your new record…
Yes! And about one hour ago I just got the excellent news: we are 38 in the Finnish national charts.

Awsome!
Yes it’s the first album since Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz that has actually entered the Finnish charts.

So are you going to celebrate?
Yeah, I’m going to drink cold water, because I have nothing else! (laughs) But I have one cigar, which I’m smoking right now. It’s my victory cigar.

So you just got back from France then. And did you survive through the riots?
Well I didn’t see any of this. I was kind of waiting, like ‘ok I’ll be in the middle of the riots and I will be arrested because of the way I look.’ But then I saw nothing. I know that there was one million people demonstrating that one day but it must have been on the completely other side of Paris. Thankfully.

So when you were in Paris answering hundreds of questions and doing millions of interviews, can you tell me what the press’ reaction to your new record?
Well of course the most asked question, in every fucking interview basically that was done in Europe, not one single interview outside of Europe they didn’t ask this, but every European interviewer asked this: “why did you name your album Pro Patria Finlandia’? I’ve done so far I counted 115 interviews. So I have answered about 95 times.

I was NOT going to ask you about the title, aren’t you happy?
But… Don’t you want to know? (laughs)

I DO know, because I did my homework and I know that you called it like that because of the Finlandia Vodka and because you wanted a title in Latin.
Exactly. And also because Sibelus has the work… the classical work called ‘Finlandia’ which is his main composition. So it’s also a homage to him, and that’s it.

Haha see? I came prepared! But there IS one thing that I wanted to ask you. Everyone knows that Impaled Nazarene is very used to getting censored every now and then. I know that there are also some issues with the new record, would you like to tell me more about that?
Well yeah. There are some misunderstandings. We thought that we couldn’t get to the FNAC [French equivalent of the Virgin Megastore] and shit. But like you went and found out that’s actually not true, and then we checked with Osmose and then they said that no, we have no bans in France. So it was kind of like maybe I have misunderstood that we have been censored in France or something, but so I thought. But it turned out to be false. The German Rock Hard Magazine refuses to interview us because of the album title.

But they don’t have the lyrics…
They don’t have the lyrics, and they don’t want to have our side of the story. They just say that nope. And then we have this other thing… this actually happened last week when I was in France doing these phone calls, phone interviews, I was making, I get this emergency phone call from our touring agency, Bruchstein. We have 13 shows in Germany. And 7 of them have been cancelled. The antifa movement have started a complete organized attack against the tour, and they have been sending the city councils letters that we are a nazi band blablabla… They didn’t find anything on the new album so they took lyrics out of the Suomi Finland Perkele album, the song Total War Winter War. So they copy-pasted the lyrics from that song and were saying ‘look these people hate communists, they must be Nazis, they must be banned’. At the same time, and this is how two-faced these people are, at the same time that they were trying to get their message through city councils, at the same time, they were sending death threats to all the clubs that we were supposed to play [at], and they were sending even death threats to the people who were selling the presales tickets to the shows. So thankfully Hervé from Osmose happened to be in Paris and so he took over and he said that this is impossible, that they cannot ban you. You know in Germany there is this so-called index list? There are certain albums and certain bands that are banned in Germany and if your album is on that index list, then you cannot perform any songs fro the said album. Like Cannibal Corpse cannot play any songs from their 3 first records in Germany. You didn’t know this?

No…
Oh, ok, but it’s true. So Hervé said that ‘this is impossible, that you are no in the index list, let me make some phone calls’. So phone calls were exchanged between German lawyers and the French lawyers, and it turns out to be that the German lawyers found out that because the clubs had signed the fucking contracts, with signed contracts they cannot cancel the dates just because of a couple of e-mails. None of the city councils in Germany have banned us because we made a statement about the Total War Winter War, and we explained what it’s about. And after we made the statement, they said that they don’t have any problem with this act. So it didn’t get banned after all so al the shows are happening on the tour, but people are trying to get us banned, so you know this shit is happening all the time and it’s getting really fucking tiring, I can tell you!

Yeah I know that you had problems in Italy or in France even…
Well in France a couple of times, in Italy yes… But as they say you know, any publicity is good publicity.

Now I’d like to get a little bit more into questions about the new record. First of all I wanted to tell you that I visited the Impaled Nazarene message boards, and I wanted to congratulate you on the studio report section, because I find it very professional and very informative. After reading that, there are some things that I wanted to understand. First of all, regarding the singing: I’m a singer myself, and there are 2 things that we have to stay away from no matter what and that’s alcohol and milk products, because they are very irritating for the voice. But you say that you walked into the studio with Jack and milk. What kind of an effect does that have on your voice?
Well it was kind of like an experiment for the vocals of the song ‘for those who have fallen’, because it is done the death metal vocals and I have never really done it so I wanted to have as much slime in my throat as possible. And so the fat milk… When you drink the fat milk, that produces the slime in the throat, and the Jack I just drink to get more out of my voice. I’m used to it. The thing is of course that if you are singing clean vocals, then you have to stay away from the alcohol and milk of course. I mean you don’t have to be Einstein to know that! (laughs) but when you are doing vocals like me, which is not singing, it’s just screaming your ass out… Cos I don’t have any kind of technique, I have never taking any kind of lessons, I absolutely understand nothing of the music theory, the only thing that I do is that I just listen to the snare, how it goes, how fast it goes, I sing with the snare. And it’s the same thing when I sing live, in my monitors I don’t want to have anything else but my own voice, I’m not listening to what the guitar players are doing, the only thing is I’m listening to what our snare drum is doing. I have learned… All our song I know by snare. How it goes. I count the snare all the time. I’m not thinking about what the others are doing. So if the drummer fucks up, I fuck up.

Well that show you did in Mexico with Arkki at the drums, that must have been fucking brutal!
Yes of course and you know he wasn’t playing the same way our drummer was playing so… But then actually I was listening to guitars more! (laughs) that must have been the only time that I was listening to what our lead guitarist was doing!

And to go back to your new record, you said that you nailed almost all the songs in one day. How did you do that? Are you God? What’s your secret, apart from Jack and milk?
I smoke cigars, that’s the secret. (laughs) That’s what gives me a good voice. Smoking as much cigars as possible and drinking whiskey. No seriously I have never done anything else. We are used to the fact that we work fast. It’s nothing new for me. We have done a couple of live albums and I have like 2 or 3 days for vocals. And if you listen to ‘All that you fear’, the previous album, and you compare how I sing on that compared to how I sing on this I mean, I sing so clinically. I mean it sounds so studio produced. But that’s when you have time you don’t do one take, you do 2 or 3 takes. And then you can say, oh that’s the best take, and this part here and this part there… and that’s how it sounds on “All that you fear”. And then there is the live album. And when the live album came out, I was listening to ‘all that you fear’ the I was listening to the live album and I was saying to myself ‘like what the fuck I sound so much better on the live record than I do on the studio record but something is wrong and I have to change something and that’s where I got the idea that maybe we should just have a hand held mic. And having the hand held mic and basically running around the studio and not just standing in front of the mic of something. I was not mainly concentrating on singing for the album it was mainly ‘now we are going to concentrate like this is a gig without the audience.’ So I said to our soundman what do you think of this idea he said ‘it sounds fine, let’s try out’ we did a couple of takes and it sounded absolutely excellent so we said let’s do the whole album like that. The only thing he was worrying about is that because when you have a live gig sometimes you sing with a lot more force and sometimes you kind of like back down. So the only thing that he had to do was make sure that he had the volume control, well the recording control over the microphone that it was going on a steady level. But basically i have been through with this so long that I know when not to over do things. It sounds good. I mean I’m listening to my vocals on the new albums now and I’m so so so much happier than the last couple of albums.

So you would never go back to regular static recording microphones then?
Well you never know what I will do in the future, maybe I’ll learn to sing and I’ll have no choice but to drink water and I’ll have to use the normal studio microphones. But at least for this record, it worked out really well. But that was the thing that we tried to capture with this one. We tried to have a good studio sound but we have to have that fucking live energy that we have. But because not only the vocals have been very clinical. I mean what we call the ‘pro tools’ production, you can hear that every possible mistake has been cut out ad stuff like this. But at least we wanted to have a much more live sound than what we had. And if somebody says that it’s not, they can fuck off!

Well you also said that you wrote some of the lyrics when you were in the studio, so how do you prefer to work? I know you said you prefer to work under pressure… Do you like to have all the material ready before you enter the studio or compose as you go along?
Only for one song. Well we are like this: the music has to be 100% ready when we go into the studio. There’s no other choice. We need to have a deadline. It’s clear. Because if we say: ‘let’s just book the studio next year’, then we know that we are not going to do anything before the next year, and we will have nothing next year. So we need to say that we will book the studio for January 2007, and I know, knowing us that – of course nothing is going to happen before next year like this, so let’s imagine now – so let’s imagine a situation that ok, we are going to record an album next year so we will book a studio. And it will start in like November 2006 and the studio starts in like January 2007. I know that maybe we will have like 2 songs ready. That’s because we need to have that fucking wake up call, that suddenly we understand that shit, we have only 2 months left or something. And then we have to fully concentrate only for the album, and that’s it. I mean I know this sounds like kind of weird but that’s the way we are. I prefer to also have the lyrics ready to all the songs. So the only song that was written in the studio was ‘this castrated world’. Which is ironic, because it is the first song that was ready! And then we started doing the music for the album. So I kinda never did the lyrics to that song because I was concentrating on other things. And then when we started doing I realized that ‘fuck I haven’t touched that song’, it’s without lyrics. I had all the other songs ready and then it was the last song that I actually sang. I was just waiting for ideas to come and then suddenly I just got it and it was just like ok, I mean actually I had the idea for the song but the problem was that I didn’t plan any kind of like phasing of the songs together with the lyrics. So I had to do a couple of demos takes and that’s it. So then our producer said what the hell this sounds fucking great so let’s just tape it.

And why are there no Finnish songs on the record?
Because everybody else is doing Finnish songs in Finland. We are basically the first band… I mean, yes there have been heavier bands who did it earlier but in 1993 we did Suomi Finland Perkele which had 2 songs in Finnish. And at that time it was unheard in extreme music, in Finland. So we started this and now we pay the price! I mean I was looking at some of the albums that are coming out, and I was looking at the titles these people have and the lyrics they have and I was like ‘ok I think this Finnish thing is done now for some time’. Maybe on the next album, but no on this one. You know in Finland heavy metal is so trendy! I mean it’s nice that it’s selling and of course it’s nice for us to be able to go on the charts, that’s a fact, but then you will start to have the side effects, and now we are talking the ugly side effects of heavy metal when you have shit like fucking ‘heavy metal karaoke’ and stuff that has absolutely no place in heavy music. I mean there’s the heavy karaoke and then we have the bands like Lordi you know, what the fuck! And they are representing our nation at the Eurovision song contest! So I mean all these kinds of things that just eats the credibility of the metal! I mean it looses all the credibility the metal had. That’s my point. So since you have been in Finland, you probably know Teräsbetoni?

Uh… In fact no I don’t!
Teräsbetoni, this fucking Manowar-copy band, that sings in Finnish. Anyway, they are huge selling band. They are a complete rip-off of Manowar but they sing in Finnish. And they are basically a joke band. So now that they are huge, this comedy group has started another comedy group. So there are comedy groups parodying other comedy groups, that are parodying heavy metal! So this whole thing is just turning into a joke, and like if all of this wasn’t enough, we have a Finnish heavy metal band singing in its local dialect! So it would be the same things as if you would have a French heavy metal band from Marseille or something, doing say local pronunciation when they sing.