The 69 Eyes
Stories To Tell

14.12.2012

*** ARCHIVE ITEM - DATED 2004 *** This Finnish band’s visit to Russia about a year ago left numerous girls broken-hearted, and their dramatic rise to fame and breathtaking transformation from wild glamsters into romantic love metallers can be studied in college as an example of career intuition. With a new record deal under their belts and a new, heavier album in the making, The 69 Eyes are ready to make yet another step up, but before they do so, Russia’s Art Music Group offers you a chance to take a look back at the band’s beginnings and rise by reissuing the Finns’ entire back catalog and the latest “Helsinki Vampires” DVD. We got singer Jyrki on the phone to guide us along the winding road that The 69 Eyes have covered over the past 15 years…

(EDITOR'S NOTE - THE YEAR 2012: Those of our readers who have been following HeadBanger.ru for a long time are aware that the website was not born out of nothing. By the time it was established, all of our original authors had several years of experience with other Internet and print media. At that time we came up with a lot of materials, but, for various reasons, some of them are not available on the Internet at all at the moment, or are available in incomplete versions. The fifth anniversary of our webzine is the perfect moment to look back and put them online again. Why? First, because some of these conversations matter a lot to us personally. Second, we know that there is still interest in them on the side of our readers...)

What is the latest news from The 69 Eyes? When can we expect a new album?

We’ve been writing the record for almost a year now, and the recording started in the beginning of this year. We’re doing this album with Hiili Hiilesmaa, who you might know from his previous producing works with HIM, Sentenced, Moonspell and bands like that. And we’re also working again with our special dark force, producer Johnny Lee Michaels, who did our previous two records. It’s an interesting combination to use these two best possible persons. We’re in half of making the album, and the first single called “Lost Boys” will come out in a month, in the beginning of June here in Finland, and hopefully later on elsewhere else. And the album will come out in October.

How much does the single represent the sound of the next album?

As “Lost Boys” comes out in the beginning of summer, it’s like a summer party rock’n’roll kind of single. It just presents one part of how the album is going to be, because there’s gonna be a lot of really cool, maybe surprising elements on the record as well. We’ve been describing the music of the new album as “skull rock”, it’s more of a horror punk rock’n’roll record displaying our biggest influences such as old psychobilly and 1950s rock’n’roll. They’re not displayed musically, but elements of the energy, excitement and attitude are there.

Which label will release it?

It’s been a little secret for a while. We got signed to a major label at the end of last year. Before that we released our things in Finland only, and now a compilation called “The Very Blessed Of The 69 Eyes – Framed In Blood” comes out in Russia as well. After that we got signed to one of the biggest major labels, it’s actually a secret, but I can mention it. I think we can reveal it, because the single will come out in three weeks – we got signed to EMI/Virgin. It means there’s a lot of changes in the making of the record. Our previous label (Poko Records/Gaga Goodies) was big in Finland, but now as we’re on a major label, it means that new things are coming up. It, of course, shows up in how the record is done.

You recorded the DVD “Helsinki Vampires” at a gig in Helsinki in the end of 2002. Why did you choose the Tavastia Club for the recording?

I think Tavastia is the best rock club in Scandinavia. It’s been in the same place for over 20 years, and it’s a really cool venue. It’s a place I used to go to see some bands which made a big impact on me, like Lords Of The New Church, that was the first show I ever saw in Tavastia in the 1980s. It’s a legendary place, a lot of Finnish bands have started their career there. The 69 Eyes played there their second gig ever as well, and that’s where we got our record deal immediately. It’s been an important place for us to see bands, learn from rock’n’roll, and also play there ourselves, and it’s like our home cave, I would describe it like that. It was a good thing to do. We had just toured for the “Paris Kills” album (2002) in Europe, especially in Germany, where we played about 20 gigs the summer before that, so it was a good time to capture what we were at that moment. So it represents The 69 Eyes during the “Paris Kills” days.

In general, was this DVD easy or difficult to make?

This was the idea of the record company to put out this DVD, and I wasn’t too much interesting in making it, but I thought, “What the hell? Why not?” It’s a good thing for a documentary case. The main thing in this DVD is the show, it’s a live DVD, and everything else on it - our old videos, some other clippings and photos - is just extra material. Actually my favorite section of the DVD is a short documentary, some footage of when we were filming the “Wasting The Dawn” video. That was pretty much what The 69 Eyes is, it’s a mixture of comic books and movies and everything like that, and it was a really special and magical moment when we did that video during the winter of 1999. I’m really happy with that video, and it’s a really underground thing in many ways, it had a lot of my ideas there, and Ville Valo from HIM was acting as the ghost of Jim Morrison walking around on a cemetery. I really like the small documentary of those times, which is on the DVD. The guy who did the video made this clipping as well, and so it has the real sounds, for me it’s like a memory of those days. And I also read somewhere that people were a little bit disappointed with that documentary and with the report from Russia, which really made me laugh. Last year when we were in Russia, I had a really old-fashioned film camera with me and I was supposed to film something in Moscow, but the battery went down (laughs), so the filming is extremely short. But I mean, those days in Moscow were a real trip, it was the first time ever for us as persons and, of course, as a band in Russia, and this short clipping is supposed to be kind of trippy and dreamy, so that’s why it is how it is. And when I read somewhere that somebody was really upset and was complaining, “Ooh, it’s not a documentary at all,” I’m like, “Come on!” There are just some moments of our lives on there, and I think it’s really nice. The gig is what it is, and it shows what The 69 Eyes were half a year after “Paris Kills” came out, and the other stuff is extra. It’s a nice package, and I think it’s a must for every goth rock fan.

The DVD is out only in Finland and in Russia at the moment. Are there any plans to make it available worldwide?

Well, I would like every record or whatever we do to be released worldwide, but sometimes there are things I never seem to learn, I don’t understand why the record companies don’t want to release stuff. This is weird, everybody’s interested in the DVD, but for some reason the record company - now I can talk bad about our previous record company – never put anything else out anywhere else. I don’t know, maybe they wanted to keep us a secret. (everybody laughs) We’re dangerous or something! But it’s cool that the DVD finally comes out somewhere. Honestly I think it comes out in Europe as well sooner or later, I think Nuclear Blast is going to put it out.

Wow, that’s a cool label!

Yeah, it’s really cool. You could guess by now that we’re no longer with Roadrunner (this label released the last three 69 Eyes albums on a license throughout Europe – ed.), but it’s cool to have stuff out on Roadrunner and then Nuclear Blast. These are classic labels. But EMI/Virgin are not bad either, they rock!

We’ve heard that you had one more DVD called “Wasting The Dawn” in 1999…

Oh yeah, actually I forgot about it! When we did this video in 1999, DVD as a format was a brand new thing. These days everything goes really fast, but just think that some things didn’t even exist a couple of years ago! When we did that video, they had never released anything on DVD in Finland before, so it was the first ever Finnish DVD product. I haven’t even watched it, I guess.

So what’s on the DVD? Only this “Wasting The Dawn” videoclip?

I don’t know. (laughs) I don’t care really.

Your entire back catalogue has been re-released in Russia recently. Why did you decide to do this? Previously you were unwilling to re-release the early albums outside Finland…

Well, it’s not “unwilling”, it’s just that this time they paid enough to our record company, that’s the reason. (everybody laughs)

You recorded the albums “Savage Garden” (1995) and “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” (1997) with Timo Tolkki of Stratovarius as the producer. How was it like working with him? And why did you choose Timo to handle the production duties? He’s more famous in the metal scene than in the glam rock scene…

Yeah, but you have to remember that it was a long time ago, so Stratovarius wasn’t anything like it’s now. I think they had the new line-up just coming up, and everything started to happen a little after we did the two records with Timo. We’re talking about the mid-1990s now. Everything was coincidental, and I like this, it’s always been like that. This time I was getting drunk at the house of my friend, Roope Laatvala, who’s now playing guitar in Children Of Bodom. He used to have parrots in his house, I don’t know if he still has them, but sometimes they let the parrots fly around the room. So we were boozing there, and to get away from the parrots we went under the kitchen table (everybody laughs), and there was a guy sitting under this kitchen table. I asked, “Who are you?” And he said he’s from this band called Stratovarius. I said, “OK, is this the band where this guy called Timo Tolkki plays?”, because it was known that he had some kind of small recording studio where he was recording demos of beginning bands. I was just laughing – it was like, “Do you know this guy, he’s in your band?” And of course, it turned out that he was Timo Tolkki himself! (everybody laughs) At the same spot I said, “OK, let’s do some demo recordings,” and we made the deal under Roope Latvala’s kitchen table. I think it was in 1993 or something like this. We started doing something together, we recorded some demos, and it was really cool with Timo, he really helped our band in many ways. He developed how we sounded and he really cared about the band, so I owe him a big “thank you”. He really put himself in the production of these two records, though the budgets were pretty limited and our capabilities were pretty limited, but he believed in our stuff and he helped us a lot. Maybe a couple of years later I was really disappointed with the albums, and I even thought that he destroyed something, but after all these years you can see everything in a different light. So all the respect for Timo! The funny thing is when we were recording “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” he brought his daughter for a visit to the studio. She was a little kid then, and now his daughter is a big 69 Eyes fan, she’s a real gothic teen girl, it’s kind of weird! It’s scary how fast time flies. We’re of course friends with the other Stratovarius guys as well, and I’ve seen Timo recently. We’re playing at the same festivals where Stratovarius will be doing their two last shows. I guess everybody’s gotta be fucking drunk, that’s for sure! (laughs)

In general, how do the producers influence the music of The 69 Eyes? The albums that you recorded with Johnny Lee Michaels sound very different from everything else that you’ve done…

The producer, in Timo Tolkki’s case, was recording the stuff and mixing the record, but he wasn’t any part of the real production, such as helping compose the songs and stuff like this. He was more like an engineer and making sure that the record is done. In Johnny Lee Michaels’ case, he is the person that every band needs, a real producer who goes into the songs, cuts the song into pieces, offers his own ideas and makes the song happen. It took fucking long for us to find the right person, and Johnny Lee Michaels was exactly the right person. He cared about the songs, he cut them into pieces, he arranged them again, and the rest is history, the rest you can hear on the records. He really made a big difference. It was a long road to realize that being in the band and doing records is something else than making an album as just an excuse to tour and party hard next year. Of course, the change happened in us, we got interested in doing the music this way, and meeting and starting to work with Johnny Lee Michaels was a really important factor that defined how The 69 Eyes sound these days. The same thing continues with the new 69 Eyes album – again we have arranged and pre-produced the songs with Johnny Lee Michaels, but this time the overall producer is Hiili Hiilesmaa, so the sound will be harder. We wanted the last record “Paris Kills” to be pretty soft, to have a lot of synthesizers and kind of dark poppy old 1980s Paris influences, and that’s what it is. But now with the new album we are back to basics, there’s more rock’n’roll, more horror, more splatter, more blood and sex.

Why did you re-record the old song “Velvet Touch” (originally off “Savage Garden”) for the “Blessed Be” CD (2000)?

That has something to do with Timo Tolkki. It’s a gothic song, and on all our early records you can hear a bit different kind of style. I wanted “Velvet Touch” to be in the vein of Sisters Of Mercy, but Timo Tolkki didn’t get it, because he’s not into goth stuff. I was a little bit disappointed and pissed off, because, for instance, the piano, which was there, you can hardly hear. It was a really cool song, and it’s a vampire story, so I think it deserved to rise again, it was worth giving it a second chance. That’s why we were kind of trying out how it could be with Johnny Lee Michaels. I like both versions, they’re a little bit different, and of course, my vocals have changed through the years. But what the hell, it’s a cool song!

Are there any plans to re-record any other old songs?

No, I don’t think so. I mean, on the first album (“Bump’n’Grind”, 1992) horror movies were a big influence, and there’s some horror-movie-influenced songs and things like that, but… I think the records are really classic in many ways, I know there’s a lot of people who really like “Savage Garden”, because it was the only glam rock record which was done in 1995. Those were the days when everybody was expecting the third Pearl Jam album, and we were one of the very few bands that were keeping that kind of rock’n’roll alive. The records are cool, and there are cool songs, and I think those versions can stay what they are. I’m more interested in writing about different things than just repeating myself. For instance, the movie songs are pretty cool, but I love to write about other things, too, it would be boring to repeat the things that I wrote when I was 21 or 22 and totally fucked up by life, like you always are at that age. And that’s how you should be, enjoying maybe too much… but I survived!

Who came up with the idea for the cover artwork of the “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” album?

Somebody gave or showed me a really old 1970s or 1960s English porno mag, and I saw this picture in this porno magazine. I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool!” It was really groovy, and it started to haunt me. I have to say that I’m not into porno magazines or movies, I don’t need them, I don’t have them and I don’t care about them. But I saw the picture and it had some really cool styling. I borrowed the magazine for a couple of years to think whether I have some use for the picture, and I eventually used it on the cover.

Did you ever have any problems with distributors, local stores or press because of this cover?

No, no, they never ask me about the cover. Thanks for asking! (laughs) It’s the first time I ever speak about it in my life. (everybody laughs)

Your early photos are very much different from the later ones…

Yeah, I’m older.

No, not in this sense. On nearly every photo after the “Wasting The Dawn” album (1999) you are hiding your face behind your hair and sunglasses. What is the reason?

Oh really? Shit… (pause) That’s like a psychological question. I don’t know… Well, I was disappointed because every time we take pictures, it’s the same picture we took in 1991, and it’s weird. We don’t seem to get older, and I don’t seem to get older… (laughs) So I thought I have to do something, maybe I will play with the sunglasses or wear sunglasses in every picture.

And why did you have your hair cut?

Oh yeah, why did you come so late to check us out? It’s been 10 years since I had the longest hair in rock’n’roll. You’re late! (everybody laughs)

If we compare the albums “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams”, “Wasting The Dawn” and “Blessed Be”, changes in your vocals are quite noticeable. Who or what influenced these changes?

It’s really hard to explain, and I haven’t even analyzed it by myself. One of the things is I asked a pretty famous Finnish rock singer once if he had any advice for developing the voice, because I’m interested in developing my skills in every way. And he just said, “Drink a lot of alcohol!” First I was like, “OK, that’s bullshit”, but then I thought, “OK, that’s cool!” Maybe the conception of certain alcohol products can be heard in the change of my voice. In addition, I had a hobby cover band where we were only playing The Doors for a year or more than that, and we had some shows where I would only sing The Doors songs. That was pretty cool, and I think that taught me a lot. I just started to play with my voice, and it changed over the years, it has turned into what it is now. It’s funny, it’s actually getting darker and deeper all the time, not probably my talking voice, but the singing voice. It’s really interesting, it’s a thrill for me to follow how it develops. When you’re in your early 20s, your voice is like that, and through the years your testicles will grow, you experience a lot of things, too, so you can hear the life… my life in the change of my voice.

We would like to ask your opinion about some artists – what you think of them, whether you are interested in their music, whether they were an influence on The 69 Eyes. The first one is Alice Cooper.

That was one of the main influences when we started. We played some Alice Cooper cover songs in our set, such as “Eighteen” and “Be My Lover”, and we even recorded “Is It My Body”. The 1970s Alice Cooper is really influential, that was a really huge influence for us. I remember that when we recorded our first album, there was a room in the studio where you were chilling out when you were not recording, and we were watching old Alice Cooper documentaries there. It was a really important thing, that’s one of the main influences for The 69 Eyes.

The next one is Guns N’Roses.

That’s obvious, because that was one of the main reasons we started. The first time I ever met our lead guitarist Bazie was at some cool party at some person’s home, and that friend of ours was playing the “Appetite For Destruction” album, which had just came out. He had a guitar, and Bazie took the guitar and played Slash’s solos exactly along the record. I was really amazed, I was like, “Wow, how can somebody do that? That’s cool!” And then I started to think that if I ever put up a band, this guy could be in that band. One thing leads to another, and here we are, on the same track. I’m really waiting for the new Velvet Revolver album, I think that’s the most important record after the new 69 Eyes album, of course, which comes out this year.

Have you ever managed to meet anybody from Guns N’Roses?

Well, I met Alice Cooper 10 years ago, and I met Axl, but that was a long time ago. We used to hang out in New York a lot, in the first three to four years of The 69 Eyes we were in New York and Hollywood all the time. Those were the Guns N’Roses rock’n’roll years, and that’s why we were hanging out in New York every summer to go see the bands and have some really cool fun. I’ve pretty much seen everything and pretty much met everybody, when I was in the early 20s.

One more band – Dogs D’Amour.

Oh yeah! Like Hanoi Rocks from Finland, this one is one of the greatest bands ever and a big influence. Dogs D’Amour are from England, but they started their career in Finland in the mid-1980s, and they were a big favorite of us as well. Later on, we were touring England in 1996, and we met Tyla, the singer of Dogs D’Amour. The band had split up by the time, but Tyla was playing solo shows. So we met him in London during our tour, and of course, he was our big hero. We kept in touch, he’s a really cool guy and a total gentleman. Years after he moved to Stockholm because there were no Dogs D’Amour anymore, but the songs are, I think, eternal, and we thought about inviting him to Helsinki and arranging some shows for him. So The 69 Eyes learned to play the Dogs D’Amour setlist and played one or two shows with Tyla as a backing band. This was in 1998 or something like this. That was really cool, to be friends and hang out with your hero, and we’ve been in touch with Tyla ever since.

The 69 Eyes have never had line-up changes. How do you manage to stay together for so long?

I still can’t figure out any reason why bands should have line-up changes, that’s, of course, one question. This has never been a business for us, this is our lifestyle, it’s an unholy relationship that we have, we are doomed to play together eternally. The 69 Eyes is a band that refuses to die, the band which goes on eternally or something like that, that’s why we are like the Helsinki Vampires. We are doomed to play together, but we are enjoying every year… not every second, but every fucking year. It’s been a great time, and we’ve been growing up together for fucking 15 years, it’s an amazing thing, and it’s something stronger that just a friendship, you know. There’s something magical in this union.

What do you currently feel when you listen to the first album “Bump’N’Grind”? Is it something you’re proud of, or would you like to change everything on it, if you had the chance?

Well, it just documents how Jyrki was when he was like 21 or 22, what the times were. With young gothic kids who have just discovered The 69 Eyes through “Blessed Be” and “Paris Kills”, it’s pretty hard to explain them our earlier records, what’s going on, but you have to remember what those days were when we recorded the album. Skid Row was No. 1 band, and there was no grunge yet, and we always wanted to sound contemporary, even though our influences were old bands like early Alice Cooper, Iggy & The Stooges, The Doors… We always wanted to capture the sound of the times, and we succeeded to do that. It’s pretty interesting to listen to that record, but I have to admit that I don’t remember half of the things. (everybody laughs) Seriously! It’s really strange, we’re always talking about these days, and we can’t remember many things. We were pretty wild guys!

Are there any lyrics that you’re particularly proud of?

Of course, on the upcoming album there are going to be really really great things. As to older stuff, “Brandon Lee” is a really simple song, by I really like the lyrics. My way to write lyrics is that when we’re demoing a song, I sing something, some words, and I don’t analyze them too much, I just make them rhyme, so that you can hear how the song sounds in the demo form. Later on, when I’m listening to the demo at home, I discover that I put out some really nice words just like that, right out of the blue. I don’t know where they come from, and I most likely always use half of them. And sometimes maybe a year later I learn what the song really means, what I mean with the lyrics, and actually it’s interesting when people come up with their ideas. They go, “It’s great that you’re singing about this!”, and I’m like, “Am I?” But that’s cool, it’s really great to write stuff that stimulates people to use their imagination. When we were recording the demos for “Wasting The Dawn” and “Blessed Be”, I was stimulating my rhyming sense with some alcoholic stuff, but I think it’s pretty funny. I remember when I was writing the lyrics for “Paris Kills”, I was at home and I was pretty pissed off because I had to go and buy some booze. I was like, “OK, let’s start to write them. Fuck, I would like to get some drinks now, but it’s writing time!” “Brandon Lee” is really cool, and also “The Chair” has cool lyrics in that sense. I was partying pretty wildly, and my then-girlfriend was really pissed off, like they always are. Once I was standing on a chair with a noose around my neck, in a really dangerous position, and she said she was not going to stand these crazy things for long, some day she was going to kick the chair under me. I was like, “Wow!”, I always like to see negative things in a positive light. OK, it was probably a miserable moment, but I took the advantage, and I put that into a song. So there was some use for that bitch.

Speaking about tour lyrics, some people over here who are not that good in English have asked us about the meaning of the line “Dance with me into the night / Under serious moonlight” from the song “Dance D’Amour”. What is “serious moonlight”? And we don’t know what to tell them…

Well, listen to David Bowie’s song “Let’s Dance” and you’ll know!

In addition to lyrics, you’re also writing articles for Germany’s Orkus magazine. What are you writing about in that mag?

My writing thing started in the mid-1990s, when we were touring in Italy, where we got pretty famous. It was before we got signed to Roadrunner, and that’s because Italy is one of the countries which kept glam rock alive through the 1990s. Grunge never went to Italy, there was always this glam rock thing. So we were touring there, and a big local metal magazine, the editor of which was a friend of mine and a fan of the band, invited me to start writing columns for them. Thus I was writing for the Italian Psycho magazine for a long time, but in France a gothic magazine called Elegy heard about that, and three or four years ago they invited me to write for their magazine. OK, I started to write for this French gothic magazine, and then later on I met the editor of the world’s biggest gothic magazine Orkus, and they invited me to write columns for them. Now I’m pretty much writing for these two magazines, and there’s a couple of gothic rock books in Germany, they’re simply called “Gothik”, and in Part Two there are my columns as well. I’m not only writing about music, I’m putting out some ideas. Like you can hear, I have a lot of stories to tell, feelings to share, or maybe just love to stimulate people’s imagination. I write what comes to my mind. Recently I was writing about “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, if you know this series. I started to watch it on TV and I found out that it’s actually pretty cool. So I thought it’s pretty funny that I’m writing in their magazine, “Hey, by the way, Buffy rules!” (laughs) It’s how I see the world behind my sunglasses, I just write about things ranging from movies to books, whatever that gives me ideas. That’s something I really like, because I have something to speak out or give ideas on or raise conversations about, not only just music. And before the band I was an underground comic artist, I was drawing gothic horror rock’n’roll comics. I got pretty well-known, but of course, with the band you get more girls, so I left the canvas and took the microphone. But now I’ve been trying to activate drawing comics again, I’m preparing to release my old gothic rock comics from the 1980s, which I drew when I was 17 or 19. Maybe an album of these comics will come out at the end of this year. I do a lot of things in my life, I just don’t want to sleep or watch TV.

Yeah, that was going to be our next question: how do you manage to do so many things all at once?

You know, I’ve just got this hyperactive energy, I never stand still, I hate sleeping! If I’m not doing the band thing, I’m writing or drawing or maybe reading books. Now I’ve started a new hobby which is boxing. I’m not boxing against anything, this is fitness boxing, and I’ve also done kickboxing and things like this to keep me fit. I’m always on the run.

A couple of more questions about your early days, if you don’t mind. Who came up with the intro to the “Savage Garden” album? And who is Gia Jupiter who is doing it?

She’s an underground rock’n’roll tattoo artist from New York City, and she’s a really old friend of mine. She used to work as a phone sex operator, so I got this idea that maybe we could use her skills. She had a kind of sleazy voice, and it was funny to put her in there, so that the song explodes after her sleazy talk.

You teamed up with guitarist Andy McCoy for recording a song (“Vietnamese Baby”) for a tribute to New York Dolls. How did you get to know him?

Andy McCoy was living in Hollywood for many years. One day I was actually walking to my home and I heard some voices, somebody was shouting, this was like 1994. Wow, ten years ago… Anyway, I looked very different and I was dressed very glammy, so I thought, “OK, there’s some asshole shouting insults.” Then I turned around, and it turned out to be Andy, who had just arrived from the airport. The same day that he moved from Hollywood back to Helsinki he met me by accident, and he asked me straight away, “Do you want to sing in my band?” I was like, “Wow, this is cool! But I’ve got my own band, so what should we do?” We played a show with Andy McCoy at Tavastia later that summer, and he also gave us a song called “Wild Talk”, which is on the “Savage Garden” album. Later on our bass player Archie and drummer Jussi recorded a full album with Andy under the name of Briard Revisited, it’s a great record. After that we just thought about doing something cool, and we were asked to do this song for the Japanese tribute to New York Dolls. Who could be better to play Johnny Thunders’ guitar than Andy McCoy? I really hope that they will take him to this New York Dolls reunion. You might have heard that David Johanssen is playing one show under the monicker of New York Dolls with the bandmembers who are still alive. They were supposed to have Izzy Stradlin from Guns N’Roses to replace Johnny Thunders, but Izzy is not going to do that, so I really hope that Andy is going to do that.

We know that you had a fanclub in Japan in the 1990s. What is your current status in Japan? And how did the Japanese fans react to changes in your music?

Actually we still have that fanclub, and about two weeks ago the woman who is the president of our Japanese fanclub actually visited Finland and brought about 15 liters of sake. (everybody laughs)

Wow, cool!

Cool, sake rules! Anyways, as to our status in Japan, the records come out and so on, but it’s not a big deal. We have a strong fanbase there, but we’ve never actually been there. Hopefully one of these days we’ll go to play in Japan. It’s a pretty common thing – you earlier said that we refused to release records outside Finland, but it’s not us, it’s for some reason, it just happened that our record company played their cards that way. But it doesn’t really matter where you come from, if you’re doing music that interests people, and if you’re not going there, just like in the Japanese case, the Japanese fans come to see our shows in Helsinki. That also goes with the Russian fans and people from any other country. If we’re not touring near you, people are coming to see our shows here. It’s pretty common that there’s a lot of foreign people at our shows, and that’s cool.

In general, how many fans kept their appreciation of The 69 Eyes when you moved from glam to the gothic rock scene?

I think it’s a totally wrong idea that we changed overnight. We’ve always looked the same, had black hair and black clothes (hey, that’s not quite correct, just look at the photos in the “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” booklet – ed.), and we’ve liked the same music that we do now. We just discovered the sound and it took that long. And I think that glam rockers and the gothic people used to be pretty much the same people. If you like The Mission, you probably like Guns N’Roses, and if you think of the roots of the 1980s gothic bands like Sisters Of Mercy and The Mission, they have the same roots like us – Iggy & The Stooges, The Doors, Motorhead. When we were in our early 20s, we wanted to be a really loud and noisy band, and it was all about partying, but through the years the things change a little bit. If just took fucking many years to develop the band. But that’s how it works these days. If three years ago somebody would ask me, “Do you have any advice for young bands?”, I would say, “OK, do two or three records, and the things will start to happen, you’ll discover your own sound and your style will be developing in a good way.” But now I would say, “Play 10 years, and then it starts to happen.” It’s pretty sad news for the young guys, but it’s a fucking hard way, and then it happens.

How much violence was there at your gigs in the early days?

We’re not a hippie band, so people are moving and jumping around. (pause) In the early days we were playing at some biker clubs, and there were something happening. It occurs when the music has a raw edge, and it’s hard, so when some guys come to release their aggression, they might start to fight. But you know, we have different kinds of people, we’ve always had that – gothic teenagers and gothic old-timers, but there’s also psychobilly guys, metal guys, black metal people, rockabilly people, normal music consumers. There’s a lot of really different kinds of people, and that’s what I’m really proud of. My ultimate idea is to have all these different subcultures at your shows, that’s really great, because you don’t limit your audience to only gothic people or metal people or glam rock people. And that’s how it goes if you happen to see Depeche Mode, that’s what I really like. And if you go to see The 69 Eyes, you can tell from a long distance which people are going to see The 69 Eyes, and you can tell that you’re coming closer to the venue, because most of the audience are people who dress up for the shows. That’s also fucking cool!

Sure, we saw that at your gig in Moscow. By the way, what are your best and worst memories about your visit to Russia?

It was kind of dreamy. We came by train, that wasn’t pretty pleasurable, next time we will definitely fly. I’ve seen big cities, but Moscow is probably the biggest city I’ve ever experienced, and it’s really interesting. It was a great feeling, and we can hardly wait to come back. As far as I know, our friends Amorphis are playing in Moscow tomorrow or something like that. I hope we can come back as soon as possible, it’s a totally new world, and it’s great to see all these fans, a lot of beautiful people.

When can we expect you back?

At the moment we are planning that as soon as we release the record, we’ll come first to Russia. Maybe it will happen in October, that’s the idea at the moment, that’s what I’ve been told. Be prepared to put your sunglasses on!

The 69 Eyes on the Internet: http://www.the69eyes.com

Special thanks to Elena Ufimtseva (Art Music Group) for arranging this interview

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Natalie "Snakeheart" Patrashova
May 19, 2004
© HeadBanger.ru