Interviews

With a new frontwoman, Nightwish are reaching new heights. Tuomas Holopainen tells Dave Ling how success has come in the shape of rekindled friendships as much as record sales. Iceman: Steve Brown.

In Turku in late December, the wearing of thermal underwear is mandatory. As a taxi drops Hammer at the door of 944 Halli, a concert venue-cum-luxurious hotel complex, the temperature registers firmly below zero. Inside, however, the story is vastly different.

Though the last night of any bout of touring inevitably brings bittersweet feelings, the members of Nightwish and their crew are positively aglow. Nobody is actually running around wearing party hats and singing “ding-dong, the witch is dead”, but the relief that exudes from the backstage area is palpable, they might just as well be.

It's been a little over two years since the symphonic metal group astounded all outside their inner circle by serving the most public of severances to Tarja Turunen, the band's singer of almost a decade. The posting of an open letter on the internet in the comedown from a show before 11,500 adoring fans was hardly the most sensitive of ways to make the decision public, but Nightwish insist that wielding the axe was the only possible way to continue their amazing success story.

Stony silences at breakfast and ignoring one another at sound checks are one ting, but when the increasingly difficult Tarja and her Argentinian husband/manager Marcelo Cabuli allegedly blocked plans to take the tour for Nightwish's million-selling Once album to the lucrative American market, the stakes were raised. More crucially still, if it's true that Tarja foolishly informed keyboard player/songwriter Tuomas Holopainen, “I could leave this band at any time, giving you only one day's warning,” she effectively signed her own resignation.

As Nightwish's creative dynamo, Tuomas often states that beyond her astounding two-and-a-half-octave voice, Tarja's contribution to the band's music was nil. All the same, as risky as replacing her appeared, taking back the power represented Nightwish's only option The rancorous fallout with both Tarja and Marcelo went on to be dissected in countless interviews and finely detailed in the official book Once Upon A Nightwish, even eulogised in song with Bye Bye Beautiful and Master Passion Greed respectively – the former track featuring the telling lines: “Did we get this far just to feel your hate?/ Did we play to become only pawns in the game?”

After an equally public feeding frenzy regarding the identity of Tarja's replacement – Evanescence's Amy Lee, Liv Kristine of Leave's Eyes, Tristania's Vibeke Stene and even Sharon Den Adel from Within Temptation were all caught up in speculation regarding the vacancy – Tuomas, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, bassist/sometime vocalist Marco Hietala and drummer Jukka Nevalainen waded through 2,000 demo tapes from 55 different countries to appoint a Swede, Anette Olzon, as their new lead singer.

After a resounding cry of “who?!”, the 35 year old former Alyson Avenue frontwoman received an internet death threat from a deranged Tarja diehard. Given the powerful emotions that have always surrounded the band, it was perhaps inevitable that responses to Nightwish's comeback disc, Dark Passion Play, would be extreme. Some baulked at Anette's distinctly more melodious approach, missing the dramatic operatic stylings of her illustrious predecessor and claiming the very essence of what made the band special has been lost. But selecting Anette made complete sense.

“Tarja was the finest operatically trained singer on the planet, so to have picked someone else in the style would always have been second best,” Tuomas patiently explains.

Out on the the press trail, Tuomas was astonished when a journalist rudely informed him that he'd “ruined everything” and slammed down the phone. On another particular day, seven of the nine writers he granted interviews to gave the album the thumbs down. But on the flipside, many other media representatives and fans found themselves attracted to the band for the first time. It was easy to see both sides of the argument.

Besides personal taste, another important factor is relevant. Dark Passion Play had cost the princely sum of around £340,000 to record, promotional videos for Amaranth and Bye Bye Beautiful adding £200,000 more to the project's hefty bottom line. Indeed, when Hammer flew to Helsinki back in August to watch the new look band rehearse together for the first time, our world-exclusive story saw Tuomas freely admitting :” almost anything can happen – it could all come crashing down”.

But for now, with no further need to spend their lives walking on eggshells, Nightwish can pick up the pieces, continuing at last with the task of being a fully functional rock group once again. And whatever reservations anyone might have regarding Dark Passion Play, commercially speaking, they've never been in a stronger position. A Finnish-only single called Erämaan Viimeinen sits proudly atop the national chart, the 38 shows that the new-look Nightwish have thus far performed included a long-overdue Stateside run, and tonight's 2,000-capacity show represents a comparatively intimate way of closing the first leg of the tour, having filled venues two or three times larger during preceding weeks. Understandably, Tuomas Holopainen is, by now, throughly sick of talking about Tarja Turunen, nodding wearily when Hammer suggest that the introduction of Anette Olzon administered Nightwish a lifesaving transplant.

“Did the cancer have to be cut out to allow this band to continue?” he repeats the question, carefully weighing up its implications. “I suppose that is a very fair statement. When I look back to 2005, things had become so ugly. Being in a band is supposed to be about having fun, but it had almost become a living hell. Now the companionship and friendship are back – it makes us all warm inside. We have been reborn.”

This process began in earnest last September when, under the guise of a Nightwish tribute band, the group discreetly introduced Anette by performing at their own album launch parties in Estonia, Helsinki and Hamburg. Despite having attracted a few dissenting voices at the fan forums, Tuomas looks back on these shows as “an easy landing”. The first real gig as Nightwish took place before 3,500 fans in Tel Aviv on October 6. In interviews for Dark Passion Play, Tuomas consistently repeated a mantra of devout, regret-free self-belief. But as the lights went down, for the very first time since the switch was made, doubt figured among the range of emotions that swam around his head.

“I must be honest, a part of me did think: 'what have we done here?'” admits Tuomas. “We were one hundred per cent satisfied with the album and the same goes with Anette as a person and her performance in rehearsals. But this was one last test, and the only to find out for sure whether it would work was to step out onto the stage.”

Fortunately, a few gremlins notwithstanding, the debut concert turned out as well as could be expected.

“The band wasn't back to it's very best, but to sell out a show in a place like Israel felt weird mad exhilarating,” recalls Tuomas. “We enjoyed ourselves so much that we ended up playing for two hours and 15 minutes – our longest ever show. We even included our cover of Symphony Of Destruction by Megadeth which, considering the location, felt pretty appropriate. It was a great start.”

After the intense frustration of missing out on American with Once, the revised Nightwish breathed a communal sigh of relief to touch down on US soil and pick up the pieces of what had looked like being a promising career. The ensuing run of club dates helped them to notch around 35,000 copies of Dark Passion Play – exceeding what they achieved with Once in the same timescale.

“I can't even begin to tell you how bad we felt when two individuals torpedoed our plans last time around,” Tuomas relates, a face like thunder. “After a year in the studio, we are definitely up for trying to become successful in such an important market. This band loves a good challenge. Roadrunner, our US label, predicts that we will sell at least 200,000 copies. But it's not the end of the world if we don't make an impression there – absolutely not. All we need is to know that we tried our best.

“During those American shows, Anette really started to relax as her self esteem grew,” Tuomas continues. “At first she was trying a little too hard, which is a perfectly natural mistakes to make. But before too long she was really being herself, chatting along with the audience.”

As proven in Turku, Anette's stagecraft and also her command of Finnish are both improving. The Finnish audience quickly warms to her after she apologies in the local lingo for being Swedish, then jokes that a hangover from the previous night might prevent her from singing properly – but it's all good, harmless fun. Unlike her predecessor, Anette is more than happy to sit up into the early hours of the morning and join in the post-show banter of her male colleagues. And while the demands of her performance obviously exclude drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, on at least a couple of occasions Anette proved herself Tarja's polar opposite by being the last person to retire to bed.

“Anette is more down to Earth than Tarja in just about every respect, and we've been criticised for that but it's exactly what we wanted,” points out Tuomas. “She is one-fifth of the band. Tarja was awesome at being a diva onstage, no disrespect to her for that, but now we're a real band.”

This statement is borne out by Anette's low key stage outfits, which are more attuned to comfort than looking like an ice queen at some upper-crust high society function. Tuomas grins affectionately: “Anette does have her fancy days, but she's natural – like Pippi Longstocking from hell”.

Though it extended back as far as the band's second album Oceanborn, the setlist in Turku was dominated by material from Dark Passion Play, with bassist Marco Hietala assuming far more vocal responsibility than ever. A note of annoyance creeps into Tuomas' voice in refuting the suggestion that Anette might not be able to handle the songs popularised by Tarja.

“Anette could sing everything that we tried out,” he responds. “I was doubtful that she could do justice to Sleeping Sun or She Is My Sin, but she pulled them off perfectly. The only ones that we consciously left out were Stargazers, The Phantom Of The Opera and Passion And The Opera because they were all too closely associated with Tarja.

With Tarja's debut My Winter Storm, having sold a tenth of what Nightwish achieved with Dark Passion Play (though admittedly in a marginally shorter space of time), the press has done its best to stroke the fires of competition.
“I won't play that game,” promises Tuomas. “Tarja was kind enough to send us some copies of her new album, but I have only played two tracks and don't want to offer an opinion until I have listened to it properly.”

Until recently, Nightwish had enough troubles of their own. When Tuomas spoke to Hammer on th eve of the album's launch, he candidly revealed: “I'm just hoping to get back the money that we spent on making it, and to get to make another.” With domestic sales of 100,000, Dark Passion Play is now triple platinum in the group's homeland. And on a worldwide level, in just three months it's more than halfway to repeating the million-plus figures the band achieved with Once – more than enough to secure their foreseeable future.

“I'm relieved to say that the new album has successful beyond our wildest dreams,” nods Tuomas happily. “If you'd asked me before it was released how many copies I could realistically expect to sell in Finland, I'd have told you 30,000 or so. There are so many diehard Tarja fans that won't even look in our direction anymore.”

Speaking of which, Tuomas occasionally succumbs to monitoring the thoughts of his group's web community, more often then not ending up wishing he hadn't bothered.

“There's always somebody criticising us,” he sighs. “They accuse Anette of being common. They want to know where the drama's gone. I have very low self-esteem and meanness like that never fails to amaze and hurt me. Why take everything so seriously? At the end of the day, it's only music.”

It takes a visit to Finland to reveal the full extent of Nightwish's national celebrity. As one of the first homegrown acts to join HIM, Apocalyptica and Children Of Bodom in making an impact overseas, the tabloids now hang on even the group's most innocent of utterances, much to Tuomas' chagrin. Incredibly, the country's prime minister was forced to offer an opinion of Tarja's headline-making dismissal. The band seem slightly blasé that Erämaan Viimeinen – which originally appeared on Dark Passion Play under its English title of Last Of The Wilds – is the best-selling single of the week. What makes the subject interesting is that Anette's vocals were replaced by those of Jonsu Salomaa, the singer/violinist of Indica, an eccentric all-girl Finnish pop troupe that are opening for Nightwish on these dates.

“Anette is totally comfortable with what we've done, it's not slight against her,” stresses Tuomas. “The single is only available here in Finland, and we'll never play that version of it life. We've used a lot of guest musicians before and will very much continue to do so; it's just a treat for the fans.”

Some might regard the forthcoming Platinum Edition of Dark Passion Play – complete with five bonus tracks – another welcome gift. Others could view the repackaging of a product that's only been available for four months as a blatant rip-off. “I totally understand the frustration of the fans, who feels they're expected to buy something twice,” acknowledges Tuomas. “But I also see why the record company had those ideas. I can assure you that it's nothing to do with the band. I'm the biggest Disney fan ever and you cannot imagine how many versions there are of those same classic movies. Ultimately, nobody forces you to pay for another edition of something that you already own.”

Kicking off on March 25th, and with Sweden's Pain (featuring musician/producer Peter Tägtgren) in support, the new Nightwish are finally set to give British and Irish audiences a glimpse of what they can or cannot do. The eight-date tour includes three gigs at London's Astoria, one of which is already sold out and the other two are close behind. So the band's fortunes haven't slipped too drastically since their last appearance in the capital, headlining the Hammersmith Apollo in September 2005.

“We are beginning to take off in the UK,” enthuses Tuomas. “In the British chart, Dark Passion Play went to no.25. We had quite a few number ones [in Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and Croatia] around the globe, but that one was among the most thrilling chart positions because after the US where the album peaked at no.84, you guys are the second most difficult market in the world. But I really feel that things are changing there at last.”

 

Transcribed by Faith from the Nightwish Discussion Board