Nightwish :: Biografije izvodjaca i bendova

Dobar je Dead letters, sigurno njihov najbolji album. A zanimljiva stvar u vezi Laurija jeste i ovaj zajednicki intervju sa Tarjom, iz casopisa Rock sound (izdanje za oktobar 2005).

Shy from the witchburners
Bashful, secretive types, Lauri Ylönen and Tarja Turunen seem unlikely rock icons, but as their stars carry on ascending, it’ll be hard to shy from the glare, never mind the witchburners…

“Every time someone comes up with something new there are people who are afraid of them”. Lauri Ylönen.
Anyone would think that Nightwish’s vocalist Tarja Turunen and The Rasmus’ frontman Lauri Ylönen had known each other for years. We’re in the boardroom of a grand Helsinki hotel and rock sound’s snapper is testing the two Finnish stars’ tolerance by first asking Lauri to try to put a rose in between his teeth and then by asking Tarja to rely on Lauri holding her as she leans backwards in full-on classical waltz mode. She looks understandably doubtful but Lauri is suddenly full of enthusiasm. “All right,” she consents, tentatively leaning backwards into the diminutive frontman, “don’t drop me!”
In fact, although their careers have run parallel for the last eight years, they’ve only met once before this. Both bands became successful in Finland long before breaking out to start taking over the entire world. But, until recently, the idea of Finnish rock being popular elsewhere was unheard of.
“It seemed quite impossible,” agrees Lauri as we sit down at a long shiny table at the back of the room. “But at first we were young and stupid and we just wanted to go like hell. Our record company even suggested that we should sing in Finnish to sell more albums here. It put us down many times to realise that there was no support from the industry and there was no industry for countries outside of Finland.”
“There were not many Finnish bands – everyone was listening to pop or Iron Maiden and things like that when we were growing up,” says Tarja. “For us it happened after the second album. But because the music is heavy metal we never thought it could get that big, to have the situation that we’re having now where our albums are selling more in some countries than there are heavy metal kids! Finland is now a country that people are looking out for. They are now interested to know what is happening in our music. They are starting to understand that, ‘Hey! There is a small country near Russia and we have music on our own!’”

Dirty Business
It might be a cliché, but the music Tarja speaks of very often seems to be tinged with goth. Maybe it’s because of the dark shadow cast by Russia in the east, the long winters or the national myths about witches and other monsters. The Rasmus’ latest album ‘Hide From The Sun’ is almost as hooky as its predecessor, but there’s still a dark core, while Nightwish’s love of opera manifests itself as much in the fascination with tragedy as it does in Tarja’s amazing voice.
“My hometown was very near the Russian border, like 20 kilometres away,” says Tarja, “so all the time I had that influence, you know seeing the everday life at the border and how things worked there. It was not that easy.” In what way was it not easy? “To see the… dirty business,” she hesitates. “To see the dirty business going between the countries, the criminality and the drugs and the whores.” What, coming over from Russia?
“Mostly,” nods Lauri, “but going the other way too. This is a country in between the rest of Scandinavia and Russia, so it comes though on the way to Sweden, for example.”
There’s a camera recording the interview for a Finnish DVD and everytime they say anything that might, possibly, be controversial, Tarja looks at it nervously. For some reason, this seems to be a touchy subject too. Nightwish and The Rasmus have both reached the stage where they’re household names in Finland and they were recently lauded by the government for their contribution to the economy. Maybe this had made them more careful of what they say. At one point Tarja tells rock sound about how she was teased at school, as the sensitive kid learning classical piano, but apparently even that’s hard for her to talk about.
“It’s kind of an… arrrgh! burning topic,” she groans melodramatically. “There have been these local newspapers asking about it and I haven’t been willing to talk about it here because of the problem I had with a guy… But I can’t tell you about that either!” There’s an awkward pause as everybody looks at the camera.
“I was never really teased,” says Lauri. “We had a small group of friends but it was very tight because we were different to most people because of looks and also music taste. Before we had bands music was bringing us together already.”
So its not just a recent thing that The Rasmus divide the world into lovers and haters – with the haters most famously represented by the bottle-throwers at last year’s Reading Festival. “It’s always been like that,” says Lauri, matter-of-factly. “I remember right back in the beginning we were playing some new songs to our friends and they said to us, ‘You can’t play that, that sounds so 80′s!’ and were were like, ‘Exactly!’ It’s good to have something like that.” “Something unusual!” agrees Tarja.
“No offence,” says Lauri turning to Tarja, “but it’s the same with your band. You get some people who like it and some people are like, ‘What is that!’”
“Of course!” she says. “You get some people who want to classify things all the time. I’ve sort of dragged all these classical people who’d never listened to heavy metal before over to our music. They are listening to Nightwish and now they are going to heavy metal festivals or rock clubs. Of course some people in the beginning, when they heard me singing this kind of music, with this voice of mine they thought ‘What is she trying to do?’, because it was so new to them.”
“But you’ve definitely kept the classical thing, which is unique,” says Lauri supportively.
“And that’s something I want to keep. I’m doing my classical music tours, for example, so fans are coming to my concerts at churches where they’d hardly ever go otherwise, and I’m very happy that I can do that.”

Burn Baby Burn
After an awkward start things seem to be going so well that rock sound has a clumsy go at musical matchmaking. And immediately regrets it as they look at each other like two teenagers being pushed into a date by a well-meaning auntie.
Would you like to sing in other bands? Like The Rasmus say? “I get offers all the time,” Tarja replies carefully, “and people contact me all the time. It’s really hard for me to see which is the way I should take. It is important to think about the future and the line that I want to make, and I have been doing some things that I shouldn’t have done! (laughs)”
What things? “Things that weren’t too clever, but I don’t want to say! (laughs again) But it was all experience and I needed to do it all the time.” “It has to feel really right,” says Lauri slightly more encouragingly.
Rock sound reckons it could work…
“It could!” he agrees “Like the things we did with Apocalyptica (on the single Bittersweet). That felt so natural, because it came from behind a tree (mimes appearing round the other side of a tree) as we say in Finland. It was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to sing on this album anyway, both of us, so let’s go together’, and that felt just right.”
Another similarity between the two bands is their obsession with myths and legends. Nighwish founder and main songwriter Tuomas Holopainen is a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and The Rasmus have been inspired by ancient Scandinavian stories on ‘Hide From The Sun’
“We have great stories! Very scary ones,” says Lauri.
“All those witches!” agrees Tarja. “Oh my God! But I only got to know them now, like, later on. Hey don’t teach them to kids in school anymore”
“I’ve been reading the history of Scandinavia,” says Lauri. “I’ve written a song on the new album (Lucifer’s Angel) which finds a connection between when they used to burn witches in the 16th and 15th century. I think these people were just good people. They wanted to help other people and change the world. They came us with a lot of new visions and people saw them as a threat and freaks and they had to kill them. I think the same thing is happening but it’s just covered up now.”
They don’t actually burn people anymore…
“Of course,” he agrees. “But everytime someone comes up with something new there are people who are afraid of them.”
So do you think you’d have both been burned as witches if you’d been around in the 16th century?
“Oooh!” laughs Tarja, “I’m going to have to think about that.”
Lauri looks like he suspects a trap. “I don’t think so,” he answers dryly.
“But we are definitely people from the north,” says Tarja. “We want to believe in these myths and these kinds of things. We want to believe that we are hugging the trees and getting the power! We want to believe that!”
Do you hug the trees?
“I have a summer place by the lake,” says Lauri dreamily, “and there are no neighbours and I have a boat. It’s very common in Finland.”
So do you metaphorically hug the trees or literally?
“For me it’s like rehab,” Lauri dodges the question. “I go there after a tour and it takes me about 10 minutes to relate to my childhood because I spent my childhood there. Everything is so safe. It’s very important to have a hideaway place like that.”
For two such private stars it’s going to be difficult to deal with becoming massive in countries where people are a bit less cool than the Finns but, now the rest of the world’s caught on, it’s something that both The Rasmus and Nightwish will have to get used to.

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