LEVERAGE: Interviewed for rockunited

LEVERAGE members Pekka (Brother Firetribe, Leverage) and Tuoppi were interviewed for Rockunited webzine. Below are couple excerpts from the interview:

What gave the band the first spark to become musicians?

Pekka - For me the whole thing started when I was seven years old, and the first album that really blew my head off was Hanoi Rocks' "Two Steps From The Move". I started liking and digging music like crazy with my friends. I think I was about twelve years old, when I put my first band together without any instruments, just to have a band. I think I was around fourteen, when I put my first real band together with real instruments and a rehearsal place. Ever since I was seven years old I wanted to do this and here we are.

Tuoppi - I started playing the piano when I was six years old. I played that for a few years, but it had nothing to do with playing in a band. I picked up the guitar at the age of ten and pretty soon after that I wanted to play in a band. I got my first band together when I was around twelve or thirteen. I was lucky to get to record and tour with a band very early, I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and I thought this is the way it's gonna be for the rest of my life. I thought it was gonna be real easy and all that, but it ain't. And now many, many years later I'm back at the same thing, we have a new fresh band with Leverage.

You must be happy to have gotten the deal with Frontiers, but what has the promotion been so far?

Tuoppi - It seems to me, that Frontiers is a really big fish in a very small pond. They're very well known inside the genre and the melodic rock community, but outside of that they're just a small record company. They've done a good, basic job with us, and they've been happy with our music and in their world they've been pushing real hard, so it's all been good. The good thing with a company like this is they can move real fast, they can sign people fast, release people fast and promote people fast, 'cos their channels are all manageable. In that sense it's good for us, 'cos we're a small band, so for us to get any attention outside of Finland is all good.

Pekka - As far as promotion goes, "Blind Fire" came out in January and (at this point) they've pretty much done their promotion.

Tuoppi - It's on its own now, I guess.

Pekka has done more of these cover nights with other bands as well, singing Europe, Foreigner, Thin Lizzy and so on. Do you join the bands out of just digging the music or just doing a favour for a friend?

Pekka - Well, sort of. I have nothing against it. If there are likeminded people in the band and they dig the same kind of music that I do, it's always fun. Usually when I do these cover nights I know those guys and they just ask me. So what the hell, it's always nice to play music and go out there. It's no big deal, it's a lot of fun.

Earlier Leverage has gotten good promotion through radios and magazines. The Finnish Inferno magazine released a promotional Leverage single with the magazine. One of the biggest things must've been the airing of their song "Superstition" off their debut album in the icehockey championship games?

Pekka - That was definately a good start for our debut album, a lot of people noticed that. But we had nothing to do with (all the) cd-compilations.

Tuoppi - That (Inferno) is a funny thing, 'cos 99 percent of Inferno readers are very strict with their metal. I'm absolutely sure that none of those records have been spinning at all, they've probably been like "what the fuck is this?!". Maybe later if they check us out through some other way, they might go back and play it. It was a good thing to put it there, we got the songs out for people to check out later, but I don't know how many of them were actually spinned the day they received them.

Read the entire interview at this location.