Ole: Would you please be so kind as to introduce yourselves?
Tapari: My name is Tapari Venska, I’m the bass-player, for this time.
Onni: I am Onni Varis. I’m the keyboard-player, this time.

Ole: And the other guys? Who are they?
Onni: The drummer for this time is Kristian Voutilainen and the other keyboard player is Petteri Halonen

Ole: What was your impression of the concert?
Onni: Sehr schön. It was great. We were playing as we used to play, when we were touring with
King Crimson in 1969 („?!“ - Ole ). We played rather well. I played two wrong notes, but it will be taken off my salary.
Tapari: I played excellent all the time. I didn’t make any mistakes. No mistakes, at all.

Ole: How long have you been on tour, until now?
Tapari: Seven days. (brooding) That was a guess. We have played in Cologne, Saarbrucken, Bamberg, Hannover, Essen, Leipzig und Berlin.
Onni: This is Berlin.

Ole: How come that you speak German that well?
Onni: We are speaking English now.
Tapari: We have one guy, who speaks German.
Onni: Most Finnish persons learn as a second or third language German, Deutsch or French (laughing) ... I mean, Deutsch, English or
Tapari: or Russian!
Onni: One of us lived in Germany. It’s the accordion ... I mean, the keyboard player Petteri Halonen,
who is good in talking. Most of us understand what German people speak.
Tapari: I don’t understand a word.
Onni: I mean, most of us.
Tapari: Oh, I’m not „most of us“!
Onni: Yeah, we’re four persons, and one idiot... So we four understand German, so we can say „most of us“. I mean, we can learn, but we don’t have to speak German in Finland.

Ole: Most people talk English.
Onni: Most people in Finland speak Finnish!

Ole: Oh, really?! (grinning) – What about your relation to Germany? One of titles is called Heil Humppa. Is it kind of ironic?
Onni: We have been touring here since 1996 and we never rehearse for a record or anything. Every time we meet, it’s on tour, so we write most of the lyrics on tour. Heil Humppa is one those tour-songs. I don’t want to explain about Heil Humppa. It’s a nice song.
Tapari: It’s a song about love and peace.

Ole: Really? I have Finnish friends at home. I can ask them...
Onni: OK, I can explain. Heil Humppa is a song about a Finnish person first time abroad in a foreign country, unable to speak a foreign language, in the middle of a dark gloomy forest he finds a hut. He looks inside through window a he sees Nazis dancing around the campfire. And the Nazis eating Sauerkraut and sausages.
Tapari: Great story about love and peace! (laughing)

Ole: What about Dummkopf and the lyrics: „Heil, Du schönes Mädchen“
Onni: This is a song about a mentally retarded person, who loves to have sex with

Ole: ... a German girl?
Onni: Everything, even German girls.

Ole: What about your relation between humppa and punk? Your concerts seem to be some kind of punk-concerts...
Onni: I think, we are a punk-band, who is playing hardcore with keyboards or accord eons or what ever.
Tapari: And with a simple rhythm.
Onni: We have only one band in common, which is all our favorite – but ELÄKELÄISET – that’s The Dead Kennedies

Ole: What about your song Humppasonni (a cover version of HIM’s Join Me). Did you ever show it Ville Valo?
Onni: Yeah.

Ole: Yes? And what did he say?
Onni: He loved it. And why not? The funny story about our cover-songs is, that our record-company has record-store in Helsinki. We were struggling to make the album called Pahvische and we haven’t had enough songs. Our record-company called us and said „We have these The Rasmus guys around the shop. Could you make a Rasmus song? We have Lauri, the singer, here on the counter, paying for records.“ And 15 Minutes later, we had the lyrics for the song Falling. And it’s the same with Stratovarius on the same album Pahvische and The 69 Eyes.

Ole: 69 Eyes?!
Onni: Yeah, we were playing at the Turku-Festival in Finland, we shared the same dressing-room as Finnish people do: We had one cup of tea and one biscuit. We asked: „Can we make a cover-version of one of your songs?“ and they said „OK“.

Ole: Which song did you do?
Onni: We did Brendan Lee and of Stratovarius we had Hunting High And Low.

Ole: What’s striking about Finnish music is that they are such a lot of strange sounding bands, The Choir of Screaming Men for example or this multitude of dark bands and even you.
Onni: The situation have changed during, I think, the last five years. Five years ago, many bands tried to copy the successful artists like Rammstein, and then suddenly, most of them thought: „OK, we’re in Finland. It’s a totally different atmosphere. We cannot copy and paste all the time, so everything changed within maybe one year. So we have bands like Cleaning Women, who play kind of techno-music on things people use to clean their laundry, and Mieskuoro Huutajat - the Screaming Men
Finland is such a small market. So there is not so much pressure to succeed, to get another record. You can make one failure, two failures, but if you make a third failure, then you’re out. But you can make experiments with your music, that’s why you get such a weird music from Finland.

Ole: Is it possible, that the music-scene in Finnland is kind of closer together than in any other country?
Onni: We have so little clubs in Finland, I think maybe ten or twenty. So you often get packages of middle-class bands to fill a one thousand people arena, which makes it easier to arrange gigs with bands from different directions. People are not so one-track minded and the bands travel in packages. In Germany or any other country, where you have twenty-million people to listen. So you can fill one club with a techno-band and another club with a band playing rap. But in Finland you don’t have it that way. You often get a package of three bands, so that the fans are forced to listen to techno AND rap. It kind broadens the mind of the buying audience.

But now I’m sorry, we have to leave.

Ole: All right, then. - Kiitos!

4/2004 © Ole Arntz • Eläkeläiset •