Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

music
.........................................
Lordi
Eurovision’s scariest winners
“It’s not easy to find a person who would say ‘eh,
Lordi, I think they’re quite ok’,” says Mr Lordi,
frontman of the 2006 Eurovision winners. “It’s usually
either ‘oh, that band fucking sucks, those idiots,
those rubber-masked clowns’, or they just love us.”
While fans of Lordi are “super loyal and fanatic,”
the costumes mean that many people “will not
give a fair chance to our music… The image is our
blessing and our curse.
“It’s a more extreme version of my own idols - Kiss,
Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister - with quite a lot of
the horror genre/monster image in the mix.”
Mr Lordi, whose childhood dream was to be Gene
Simmons, started his band in 1992, and even then
was singing in English. “For me, English has always
been the only language in rock and roll.”
The next ten years were a “really frustrating”
period, in which Lordi were unable to get a record
deal, as they refused to change either their sound or
their look. “Like any teen, you think you’re the king
of the world and know everything about everything.
When the labels were telling me that I should do
this or change that, I got really mad… Whenever I
had some negative response, I would not ever send
them anything again.
“The main problem for the labels was that the music
and the image didn’t match, they thought. Two
of the labels said the music is alright but you have
to lose the image, the image is so stupid, it doesn’t
fit the music at all.
“Or they said the image is cool but you’ve got to
start playing death metal, because the image is
way too hard for your poppy music. We refused to
change either of those things, and they were invited
to take it or leave it, and usually they left it.
“It took ten years for the first people to actually see
that this poppy 80s-oriented hard rock, with this
kind of extreme image, actually could work.”
Did they at least spend those ten years building up
a good live fan base? “No, actually not. I thought,
from an early stage, this was the kind of band that
should not be watered down by performing in small
pubs and clubs. My plan was that when we started
performing, it had to be in decent venues, and the
people who came, they had to be willing to pay for
the ticket because they wanted to see us, and hear
us, and they had to know the songs already.
“Against the wishes of the record label, we put out
the single first, then the video, and waited for, I
don’t know, four months before the album came
out. Only when the album had gone gold, that’s
when we played our first show. It was sold out.
People there wanted to see the band, and they
already knew what we looked like and how we
sounded. That was my plan, and it worked.” SR
Lordi, Mon 6th April, Concorde 2, 7pm, £18.50
....45....