The 69 Eyes
Songs Are Eternal

25.09.2012

Some of my colleagues like to present this man as a kind of mysterious figure. They say that his favorite interview time is midnight, that he likes to give dubious and even provocative answers and that the band’s concept of “Helsinki vampires” transcends the boundaries of stage and art. What can I say – it is the second time I’m interviewing Jyrki69 of Finnish gothic metallers The 69 Eyes, and even though one of this interviews was indeed at midnight, I see the man quite differently. What I see behind this sweet and dark voice is the person that is really dedicated to the music he’s doing, that really believes in his art and in music in general, and you want to speak about him being different or special, that’s primarily because he’s passionate and talented, and not because of some mystical entourage, most probably attached to him more by the press than by himself. And even though you can’t deny the fact that the mystery aspect does earn the Helsinki Vampires quite a portion of their fans, it is still the songs like “Brandon Lee”, “The Chair” or “Lost Boys” that built their career. The new record called “X”, which The 69 Eyes are just about to unleash, is said to be return to their sound of the early 2000s, and we could not pass by the opportunity to find out directly from Jyrki what made the band take such a dramatic turn…

How’s the weather in Moscow, Roman?

It’s pretty cold and windy, autumn is setting in.

Ah, the Night Watch time!

Night Watch time?

Yes, like in the movie, “Night Watch”.

You like this movie, don’t you?

Yeah. We have a song called “Night Watch” on our previous album, “Back In Blood”, which was about the movie. Actually we only played it once or twice and only in Moscow. The rest of the band really thought that we should play it on our tour, but I sort of limited that to Moscow, because that’s the place to play it.

Have you read the book “Night Watch”?

I’ve only seen the movie. Hey, come on, the book is like “The Lord Of The Rings”, these books are pretty long. I have it, a few fans have given it to me, so I have a few copies from the fans, but unfortunately I haven’t read it yet.

The movie is very different from anything else. It’s like “Kalevala” and a vampire story mixed together. I guess, “Kalevala” is similar to some Russian tales, but for me that’s the only thing that I know. It’s very different, and I think there should be more fiction coming out in that style. I know that he [Sergey Lukianenko] has written three books - or even more, I guess? It’s a very interesting future.

Let’s now discuss your new record, “X”, which is already the 10th in your career. Does writing new songs become easier or more difficult for you over the years?

The motives are very different now. The 69 Eyes is our favorite band, there’s five guys who’ve been playing in this band for over 20 years, and when we do records, we try to create our favorite music – nobody else is doing it, so we have to do it ourselves. Now when we are having the 10th album out, I was thinking, “What is the motive to do the new record?” The 69 Eyes is not like your regular metal band which releases an album every second year as an announcement that the band is coming on tour, and then the band plays probably one song from the new album, and the rest of the set are old school classics from the 80s. When we release an album, it’s because our fans want to hear new music, and our fans also want us to play new songs in our set. Of course, they want some classic 69 Eyes songs, but they also explain us to play new songs. That’s the main motive to make the new record, and, as I said, we like what we’re doing. We think we’re the best band around, and that’s the reason why we do the records.

Another inspiring factor in making the new record was that when we had the previous album out, three years ago, people were still buying physical CDs and downloading the music, but nowadays people don’t even download music anymore, they stream it online. If this is the situation, it has to be a really good piece of music so people will be patient enough to listen to it. It’s just a waste of time, energy and even natural resources to record music just because of getting some 40 minutes full of material.

As it’s been said, music business is doing really bad these days, people don’t buy records, but the truth is that people want to hear good music, and that’s hasn’t gone anywhere. If you think of the recent success of Adele, everybody bought that album, because it has good songs, it’s good music, and the need for good music hasn’t disappeared. It’s just that maybe music hasn’t been good enough, and that’s a part of the crisis – at least that’s what the situation is for record companies.

Another thing was that we did a tour in Europe with two Swedish glam rock bands – Hardcore Superstar and Crashdiet. We headlined most of the shows, and I was thinking, “What will the audience think when we play our melodic and melancholic songs after these two bands”? Of course, we have our own rocking songs as well, but some of our most famous songs are these melodic and melancholic songs, and I was just wondering how that material would go to the audience. To my pleasant surprise, those melodic and melancholic songs like “Betty Blue” or “Dance D’Amour” were the most popular songs in our setlist, it seems like the audience respected that material the most. When we started to create a new record and write new songs, it was in our minds, “Let’s concentrate on that side of us this time. “Back In Blood” was our Hollywood-made album which had this aggressive American vibe there. Let’s go a little bit back this time and have this melancholic and very melodic side of ours as the main thing when writing songs”.

Songs just come and go, our guitarist writes the songs by himself, and then he e-mails them to me. There are different kinds of stuff that he comes up with. He actually comes up with full instrumental songs, and then I listen to them and pick up those for which I come up with the chorus and the lyrical idea already the first time when I listen to them. So I started to pick up the songs which are most melodic and had the most beautiful vibe to them, and at the same time, a couple of years ago when we already started writing, I was actually splitting up with my girlfriend. When I was writing the lyrics, the emotions that came to the songs were, of course, related to this split-up. Lyric-wise, the songs became really personal, which is a new thing for me. There are real things and very real emotions in the songs.

Songs come out of nowhere when our guitarist writes them. We don’t communicate, I don’t tell him something like, “Oh well, I feel sad…”, and the next day there’s an e-mail in my mailbox with a sad song, and I’m like, “Yeah, thanks buddy!” (laughs) No, he writes songs that can be very aggressive, Motorhead-sounding, and I’m like, “OK, garbage can”, and then there comes something touching, beautiful and melancholic chorus, and I’m like, “Hmm, this sounds promising”. We write a lot of material for the album, but as we decided to do the record with the Swedish producers, these two guys called On The Verge, we wanted to have… People like certain songs of ours, like I said already – “Betty Blue”, “Dance D’Amour”, “The Chair”, “Brandon Lee”, these very melancholic melodic and gothic songs, and we wanted to go back there and make even better stuff. That was to me the inspiration, that was how we ended up with the 10 songs that we have on the album now.

Why did you decide to work with On The Verge and go to Stockholm to record this time around?

We’d been co-writing some songs with those guys for our earlier records. After the last album was done in Hollywood, I really wanted to go somewhere else again. And we’d been hanging out in Stockholm a lot. When the band started, first we played all the clubs in Helsinki - that wasn’t many, there were probably like three or four places. Then we played the biggest cities in Finland, and that wasn’t too many either, there were probably five shows somewhere else than Helsinki. Then we were thinking, “OK, let’s go up the road, let’s conquer the world”, and the closest place to go those days, in the early 1990s, was, of course, Stockholm. We started to play there, and we played there regularly and made a lot of friends. We’ve been hanging out there a lot - actually I don’t go out in Helsinki at all, it takes 45 minutes to fly from Helsinki to Stockholm, so if I go out on a weekend, I’d be going out to Stockholm. I’ve been there a lot recently.

We’ve never done a record in Sweden, so it sounded like a perfect thing to do a whole record there, make this record our ‘Swedish record’. What comes to my mind when I think of Sweden is, of course, pop music like ABBA, and if you turn up a regular radio these days, half of the songs, half of the biggest hits in the world are written by a Swedish songwriter or are mixed or re-mixed by a Swedish producer or DJ or something like that. That’s where most of the pop music comes from these days. If you think bands like The Hellacopters, or Backyard Babies, or Europe, or Hardcore Superstar, or Crashdiet, they have a similar kind of pop sensibility in writing choruses of their songs. That was something that we wanted from Sweden – from Hollywood we got the American aggression, and if we were to go to Stockholm to make a record, we wanted to make as memorable songs as ever, and also complement them with hooky choruses. We know how to do that really, but Swedes can help us to make them even better. That was our idea. We can write very melancholic music, and that’s something we kind of borrowed from you guys – melancholic melodies in our music are thanks to you guys in the East – and our sound is a combination of those two things.

In addition, there is a couple of friends “visiting” on our album, for instance, a couple of guys from Crashdiet, and Gemini Five are singing some backing vocals on our records, and on this record as well. We wanted to make it our “made in Sweden” album. But the most important thing is the music there. With these producers, as we knew how they work, we’d done co-writing with them over the years, we wanted the record to be very musical, very full of music – very beautiful songs and very hooky choruses. And of course, the band’s playing is most relaxed, fuller than ever, with a full heart. I think the songs are very touching. Some of them are rocking, there are rocking guitars and everything as always, but the choruses are rising to a new dimension. We know how to write fucking great songs, but now we’ve made them even better and more beautiful.

By the way, do you think that each album requires a specific producer that will handle it in the best way, or are you still searching for an ideal producer?

We did earlier albums like “Blessed Be”, “Paris Kiss” and “Angels” with the help of Johnny Lee Michaels, who became part of The 69 Eyes. He became a member of The 69 Eyes, he was playing on the records, he was singing on the records, he was arranging the songs with us. Our band needs that kind of producer. On The Verge did the same – they are playing on the album, they arranged the songs with us, they are singing on the album, they became new members of the band. We don’t have one guy who is an instrumental genius, who writes everything and teaches that to the rest of the band. We create everything more or less together, so we need a producer like this who will make it even better. If you think of The Ramones when they did an album with Phil Spector as a producer – The Ramones always wrote their songs, but when they were in the studio with a producer, the producer brings something else to the music.

Can you say a few words about your cooperation with Kat Von D? She is famous as a tattoo artist and as an ex-wife of Nikki Sixx, but not many people know that she can sing…

She’s an old friend, and I was actually asking her already when we were recording “Back In Blood” in Hollywood to do something for the album. We needed some female whispers, and I was calling her one of the nights, like, “Hey, why don’t you come to the studio to do something”? Unfortunately, she didn’t have the time then. Now she is going to do some music in the future, because she is a classically trained pianist, and she’s gonna have a record out. She was visiting Helsinki, and she just mentioned that she was starting this music project, and she said, “Well, it would be fun to do some music with you guys maybe once”. I had never thought of doing a duet with anyone on a 69 Eyes record before, but at that moment we actually had a song for which it could be good and interesting to have female vocals there. The song is called “Rosary Blue”. Immediately I said, “Hey, wait a minute”! I jumped into a taxi and drove to my home and I e-mailed the song to her right away. She said, “Wow, this is really good”! She came down to Stockholm to record it, and we did it together. It’s a really magical song, it’s really beautiful, and I think it’s gonna be a hit, even though there are many songs on this album which also can be hits.

“X” is your second album for Nuclear Blast Records. Before joining Nuclear Blast, you tried it with EMI/Virgin, but your cooperation lasted for only two albums. Why did you decide not to continue with such a big label?

EMI/Virgin was great for us here in Finland and in some other countries like Germany. But I think big labels have had their difficulties over the last decade, and that was a turning point for us. I don’t think we are a big enough band for such a huge label, so when some other artist, like Kylie Minogue, had her album out, of course, they were promoting that and forgetting about ours, at least in some countries. Before that we were on Roadrunner Records, which was a really good home for us. Now we are with Nuclear Blast, and I think they are the best record label in the world at the moment. Everybody who’s worked there is a die-hard music fan, and we at The 69 Eyes are music fans, too. We are not a business rock band, we just do this because we love to do it, and there is nothing else. Nuclear Blast is there same, people are working there because they love metal and rock music. It’s a perfect label for us, and I’m so excited – they’re doing such great things with this record already.

One of the things with this album is that when I sang my vocals I knew that this record is gonna be really the best we’ve ever done, and it was amazing already then. Of course, when I heard the final mix complete with keyboards and backing vocals there, the impression was even stronger, I was actually crying when I was listening to it. It sounded so incredible and most of all, I was touched by the fact that we, the five guys, are playing over 20 years in this band, and we still do it because we believe in this, and we’re humbled to do this music for the people who believe in us. That was the moment when I actually had tears in my eyes. When I heard this record, the only thing that worried me was how to make sure that all the people who have been listening to and enjoying The 69 Eyes will have a chance to listen to this record. What if this record will be buried by more important albums which come out at the same time? What if it comes out, and people don’t even notice it? That’s the only thing that still worries me. Of course, music is eternal and it doesn’t go anywhere, and it doesn’t matter if people don’t recognize or fail to find this record right now. Time doesn’t touch our music at all, every record we’ve done is timeless stuff, and also is this one, but at the moment I do hope that people will have a chance and time to listen to this record, because it’s really important. There’s something there that will probably set them on fire one more time and touch them deeply. 

By the way, how have you and Nuclear Blast managed to prevent the new record from leaking to the Internet? It’s two weeks before the release date, and it’s not yet on any file-sharing platforms.

One of the things about the way we did this album was that we didn’t do any demos and we didn’t play any songs to anyone – seriously! We have Nuclear Blast around the world and also Sony Music here in Finland who are releasing this album, but we didn’t play any music to anyone until it was ready. We didn’t have any record company people listening or giving comments, we just did this record by ourselves. The first time they heard it was about a month ago, when the actual record was ready. That probably also gives a very good picture of how we are trusted, how the record industry trusts The 69 Eyes that we always bring out quality material. We knew what we were doing, and we didn’t have time to let anyone else interfere us – we just did the whole album, and a month ago we handed it out, like, “Here’s the final record”. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it hasn’t leaked as well.

I guess you get asked this next question a lot, but it may be very interesting for me and our readers. How did you become a UNICEF ambassador? What are your functions in this capacity?

I had a chance to spend springtime in West Africa, in Benin, which is actually the African voodoo country, when I was writing the lyrics for our “Demons” album (2004). I got this kind of scholarship from the Finnish-African Cultural Association to go to Benin to write lyrics for that album. I spent that spring there, and after coming back I mentioned in some interviews that I’d been there. So UNICEF got interested due to the fact that some rock guy had been in West Africa, and they coincidentally had a campaign against child trafficking at the same time. They asked me if I would like to say something about the situation in Benin in their campaign, they offered me to print my quotes about that situation, and I did. They were really satisfied that I was involved, and after that I was involved in a couple of other UNICEF campaigns. After a couple of years they asked me to become a goodwill ambassador, which is the ultimate honor for me. I’m in the position that people are interested in what I’m doing, and if they’re interested in what my favorite vampire movie is, they might as well be interested if I’m involved in such a charity organization. It’s a little thing to be involved and to be part of that, but on the other hand, I think all of us have to be a little bit aware about how this poor planet Earth is doing. I’m worried about the state of nature, that definitely needs help these days, and my idea was that if the kids are doing alright, Mother Earth is also feeling fine. That was one of the reasons why I got involved with UNICEF, because I think I’m also helping the environment on part of this humanitarian organization.

I heard that when you were visiting Moscow, you were also involved in some charity event, like visiting an orphans’ home…

Yeah, it was about seven years ago. The 69 Eyes played in Moscow, and I was visiting this street kids’ orphanage, which is supported by UNICEF. This was really touching, of course. I hope my visit helped people to maintain that place and to keep it a sanctuary for the people who need it. That’s my humble hope – if I can be involved, and this helps other people, why not? At the state when you have a chance to do it, everybody should do it. And everybody can be an ambassador for UNICEF or any kind of organization, you just have to be involved. All of us can help other people and also help this planet. You don’t have to be a rocker or vampire! (laughs)

You have been to Russia quite a few times, you’ve played in Moscow and St. Peterrsburg, and I hope you have managed to see at least some of the city. What are your favorite places there? And how would you compare these two Russian cities with Western capital cities?

I also know that we have a lot of fans in other places of Russia, even in the very Far East. Sometimes people write from Siberia and ask us to play there. I know that our Russian fans are spread not only over St. Pete and Moscow. That’s very humbling for me, because it’s really incredible to think that somebody’s listening to our music in those faraway places. I feel somehow connected to there, and I wish that someday I will have a chance to visit those places as well.

When it comes to Moscow, the thing is that you have so much culture, and if I want to know something about it, I only see it on a very brief visit. It’s a great pity that we only visit Moscow very quickly, for only 12 hours, and then we rush somewhere else. To know more about your great country, I would need more time. I have never had the time to go to any museum there. Of course, in St. Petersburg, I’ve been in the Hermitage, and that’s beyond belief, but as to Moscow, I’m only hoping that someday I will have the time to go to a museum, not only play the show and rush away. In addition, I feel guilty with respect to our fans, because we always come there in a great hurry and leave immediately. I think we should have something like a signing session, because we would really like to meet our friends for sufficient time. They are the reason why we come there, but it seems like we come to play and then we escape to move to another place. I hope that someday we will have more time to hang out with our Russian fans. We say, “Be one of us”, so we wanna meet our Moscow vampire friends.

The only historical place in Moscow that I’ve been is the Kremlin, and that’s of course a very magical and exciting place. I think Moscow is the biggest city I’ve ever been in my life. Obviously I’ve been to Mexico City, Tokyo and Los Angeles, but somehow they don’t feel anything compared to Moscow, which is very huge, and it’s always on the move. It’s so much full of life, and it’s really exciting, and that’s why, like I said, I think “Night Watch” is a great movie, because there you can experience a little bit of Moscow. I think there’s probably a lot of movies of Moscow you have, but unfortunately I haven’t seen them. Moscow is a city that I really love and sort of miss it as well. There’s something mysterious and exciting in that city that I feel really connected to and that is very close to me. I wish we would have a chance to make a music video in Moscow someday or even do a record there. It would be very interesting to get that influence in our music, too. Actually I’ve just got this idea while we are talking. Let’s see what happens, I think it would be really cool!

As to St. Petersburg, it is really close to Helsinki, and the architecture is pretty similar once in a while. That’s like a big sister of Helsinki, and it feels more familiar, but Moscow is something totally different, it’s exciting and exotic, it’s a whole adventure.

In an interview that you did a couple of years ago you said that the 80s are coming back now, and the interest in music and movies of that era is on the rise again. In your opinion, what is the reason for that? Is there a problem with the contemporary music and culture? Why do people want to look 20 or 25 years back?

The answer is simple, and it has to do with our new album again. That’s because of music. If you think of, especially, metal music – as we are talking to HeadBanger – the majority of nowadays’ modern metal music is based on some drum sound or guitar sound or that sort of thing. But maybe the songs have been forgotten quite a bit. The 80’s bands always had the songs. If you listen to them now – and you will listen to them now, because they are played everywhere – they had great songs you can sing along. You can’t sing along so much to modern metal bands. Try to sing along to Meshuggah – they’re a great band, they’ve got great stuff, and this new metal in general has tons of great stuff, but 80’s bands are played and everybody goes to see their shows, because they want to sing along, they know when to raise their fists, and so on. That’s exactly the same with our new album, it’s totally based on the great songs, not only on the ideas of a rhythm or riff. There has to be a great song. Why the 80s bands are still the biggest bands is because they had the fucking songs. If you listen to the new Testament album (“Dark Roots Of Earth”, 2012), that’s fantastic, and Testament is the band which had always had great songs, and the new album is once again a classic with great songs, so it’s no wonder that the record is on top of the charts everywhere and is considered one of the best metal records of the year. Great records are coming out from here and there, but when it comes to the music that people will listen to after 20 years, the songs are what matters. Songs are eternal. Maybe the trigger drum sound is not that eternal in the end.

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

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Roman Patrashov
September 10, 2012
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