Beat a Go Go

Sure, it had been a while since I'd seen a Viikate show, but the difference seemed massive. The biggest difference must have been the total absence of all sorts of blocks that those two helping hands, the basist Ervo and the guitarist Arvo, had before. Those blocks had been shot to hell when those two were made full members of Viikate. In all the Viikate gigs I have witnessed so far, Ervo had been totally without any expressions but now he took the center stage for a while and even smiled.


Together with Arvo, Kaarle forms one of the best pairs of guitarists I have even seen. Their guitars literally sing together and the moves those two do together on stage are.... dare I say it? Dare I? I bloody well do: Erotic. And every time somebody starts to talk about front men of any bands, I have to say that in Kaarle Viikate has one of the best front icons ever. Even a cynical-sarcastic married old man like me finds soft and fuzzy feelings in his chest when watching that sideburned man on stage. Such a handsome sight with his large black guitar.

And not forgetting the drummer Simeoni, who seems like an intimidating guy but every time gives out a sympathetic sort of feeling.

But anyhoo - Viikate has become a real rock band.

"We have now played together for four years," Kaarle ponders at one of the tables of the Tuska backstage bar on 18th of July 2005, while Accept is playing on the main stage. "We would be totally giftless, if we had not made any development at all. We could as well be playing punk. Not saying that there's anything wrong with punk," adds Kaarle when he notices that I am about to say something. "But punk as a music style is very restrictive and we do not want to be labelled as a one trick pony."

I tried to convince Kaarle that Viikate is quite a huge band in the Finnish scale, and that of everybody else from the band, Kaarle, as he's the front man, is the one who can be counted a celebrity. I continued bugging him about it for a while and all I managed to do was to get him annoyed. "I live in Lahti now and at least there no one bugs me. People do not come to pat me on the back at all. More likely it will be a pat on the kisser. Of course there always will be those negative aspects, when someone's seen a certain face playing on the stage and then sees the same face in a bar, so there will be some amount of blah-blahs. But it goes with the territory. But we've been kind of strict about what we will do in the public eye. You'll never see us presenting our wardrobes in some women's magazine. And I would not dare to do so. I have just moved and my wardrobe is pink. We won't touch anything that doesn't have something to do with the music. But if we now assume that we are 'famous', it hasn't brought any pressures when it comes to making music. What goes on a record still is the kind of music that comes out of our minds. To us, recording is still quite a short term process. We are very quick."

One indication of how popular Viikate is, is the fact that their records go to TOP40 lists and stay there for a while. But such popularity hasn't brought Viikate similar problems as has happened with Kotiteollisuus (the brightest star of Finnish-sung heavier music). The popularity of Kotiteollisuus has made record companies take to their roster a shitload of bands that sound uncannily similar as Kotiteollisuus. "Well... Yeah..." Kaarle starts and pauses to get his thoughts in order, "Maybe it's because those bands have some sort of sense of style and our music is quite hard to label and put in some box. Different genres do not know what to think of us. We are not heavy enough for metal people and traditional rock enough for traditional rock people and so on."

When they started their career, Viikate did not tour, but it's changed dramatically and now Viikate seems to be on the road all the time. "It's more or less sitting in a car. But as said, we've been together for about four years now, so nobody's face has grown too familiar yet. And we do not see each other all that much outside this band life. We all live in different towns and those other three members of the band - they have also real lives and that occupies them too."

Viikate has a quite well-thought-out stage presence and the movements they make with their instruments are well-thought-out, but Kaarle denies that they ever do anything "hard" or "rough" on the stage. "We just aren't anything like that. We have planned that we would make a new Viikate-shirt that says on the back 'Suomen tylsin yhtye' ('The most boring band in Finland'). So quiet and minimalistic this band life of ours is."

I did not dare to mention about the photos that can be found on their web site that give out a different kind of picture of the band life, one that can be found behind the stage lights.

Last summer, Viikate did a tour that is totally different from any other band in the world. Just look at this:

Sat 09.07 Seinäjoki - Tangomarkkinat (the biggest dance theme festival in Finland)

Sat 16.07 Kiuruvesi - Vihreät niityt (the biggest schlager festival in Finland)

Sun 17.07 Helsinki - Tuska Open Air Metal Festival

"They called us from the Tangomarkkinat and asked for us to fill up for Eläkeläiset (the world famous humppa-band that plays humppa-covers of songs you hear from the radio) and we said 'of course we will come'. It was one experience more and Seinäjoki was conveniently on our way from Rovaniemi to Tampere. One has to try everything else, then granny and folk dances!" Kaarle smiles. "But it was awfully frightening. We played outside the official dance happening where all the people were who could not get tickets to the actual festival. Nowhere else have we witnessed such a hangovered mess."

"Sure I would be interested in doing other music-related things too, apart from Viikate. It would be great to do a guitar instrumental record. Cooking is still close to my heart, it is not totally ruled out that I'll be a cook again some day. Maybe I'll do a cookery book. A rock cookery book!"

"As for Simeoni, I'm pretty sure that he will someday win a Jussi-award (the Finn equivalent to Academy Awards). It is only a matter of finding the money and people with the money. If we plan economically for Viikate for about five years ahead - movie projects take ten years. And as I said, Arvo and Ervo have lives outside Viikate too."

As always, it is good to take a look at the future. So, where will Kaarle and Viikate be within those mentioned five years? A long, thoughtful silence comes to the table, Kaarle looks left and down. Accept is doing their thing on the mainstage, VIP people are running for the last of their free VIP beer and pretty girls in skimpy t-shirts are selling test tubes filled with Jägermeister. "I would say were are at some festival and we will meet there again. Unless I have not fallen in depression and called it a day, because nobody understood us. But now, I'm pretty happy how things are. When we started I never could have thought we'll get this far and accomplish this much. Just this summer we have been a warm up act to Obituary in Nummirock, played in the same festival as Accept and maybe the best bit is being the warm up act to Entombed".

Nice to see a happy man.

Links:
Awards:
Academy Award - http://www.oscar.com/
Jussi - http://www.jussit.fi/
Bands:
Accept - http://www.acceptarchive.co m/
Eläkeläiset - http://www.humppa.com/
Entombed - http://www.entombed.org/
Kotiteollisuus - http://www.kotiteollisuus.c om/
Obituary - http://www.obituary.cc/
Viikate - http://www.viikate.com/
Drinks:
Jägermeister - http://www.jagermeister.com
Festivals:
Nummirock - http://www.nummirock.fi/
Tangomarkkinat - http://www.tangomarkkinat.f i
Tuska Open Air Metal Festival - http://www.tuska-festival.f i/
Vihreät Niityt - http://www.vihreatniityt.ne t/
Places & Towns:
Helsinki - http://www.hel.fi/
Kaisaniemi - http://www.domnik.net/helsi nki/fi/kaisaniemi.shtml
Kiuruvesi - http://www.kiuruvesi.fi/
Lahti - http://www.lahti.fi/
Rovaniemi - http://www.rovaniemi.fi/
Seinäjoki - http://www.sjk.fi/
Tampere - http://www.tampere.fi/
Programs:
TOP40 - http://www.yle.fi/lista/