Children of Bodom
- Story by J. Bennett
- Photo by Jimmy Hubbard
Decibel travels to Helsinki to interview Finnish metal virtuosos Children of Bodom and returns four days later with a frozen ballbag, a shitty tattoo and a permanent hangover
Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but we left our desiccated liver on the floor of a sauna in Helsinki. Or maybe it was a metal bar. Or one of the city’s many overpriced pubs. In any case, it’s been nearly three months since Decibel returned from the Finnish capital, and our head is still swimming with drink. We arrived on December 5th after 20-plus sleepless hours of air travel and proceeded to the nearest watering hole for a couple of quick nine-dollar beers. Within minutes of bellying up to the bar, Children of Bodom’s semi-infamous cover of Britney Spears’ “Oops… I Did It Again” comes blasting over the house sound system. The look on the bar maid’s face is that of someone who was hearing the song for the eighth time in the last hour and a half. And yet, it’s almost like Helsinki had been expecting us.
December 6th is Finland’s Independence Day, and Helsinki—population just shy of 600,000—is a ghost town. Day doesn’t break until about 9:30 a.m. this time of year, and there’s no sun to speak of—just a pale gray gloom that lasts until about 2:30 p.m., when the sky begins making its inexorable reversion to quasi-permanent midnight. However unsettling it is to look out a window at 9 a.m. into the icy face of total darkness, it’s about 50 times creepier when you’re in a city the size of Boston and the streets are completely empty. Finland declared its independence from Russia on this date back in 1917, and pretty much everyone (and we do mean everyone) in the entire country has taken the day off ever since. Rasputin, storied Siberian mystic and arguably the last Russian to have any real fun during the tsarist era, had been dead less than a year. The Bolsheviks had marched on Saint Petersburg just two months earlier, installing Lenin in the Winter Palace so the Russian people could enjoy 74 years of breadlines, censorship and brutal oppression. Sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the 90th anniversary of Finland’s emancipation from Mother Russia’s cold, withered teat, Decibel saw three out of five members of Children of Bodom naked.
There were maybe eight or nine of us altogether. Bodom guitarist Roope Latvala, keyboardist Janne Wirman, bassist Henkka “Blacksmith” Seppälä and a handful of English, German and French journalists (plus one lanky American) had retired to the sauna at Restaurant Uunisaari after a massive salmon feed bolstered by untold quantities of Finnish lager and glögi, a mulled wine made with cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. We had descended upon Uunisaari Island in the Gulf of Finland, the eastern arm of the Baltic Sea, to hear Bodom’s sixth and latest full-length, Blooddrunk. Sweating one’s bag off in the sauna is a longstanding Finnish tradition—if Wikipedia is to be believed, there are two million saunas serving the country’s five million inhabitants—but the advisability of sitting in a room heated to 175 degrees Fahrenheit after drinking about 400 beers is questionable, at best. And yet there we were—the foreigners cloistered in towels, the Finns casually airing out their junk. Latvala went to the locker room to get another beer and suddenly reappeared in the hallway shouting at all of us in Finnish. He was hoisting a bottle in each hand. From that distance, maybe 15 feet or so, his garbage looked like an albino Tootsie Roll perched atop a discolored apricot. None of us foreign folk could translate the words he was saying, but we understood his meaning perfectly. It was Go Time.
At least two of us had been anticipating this. Earlier in the day, we’d been surveying the Gulf’s decidedly choppy and hostile surface with a journalist from England’s Metal Hammer when a figure emerged from the Uunisaari sauna. We watched in disbelief as a slight man in a Speedo plum-smuggler and a bathing cap walked the length of a 50-foot dock extending into the Gulf.
“He’s not doing what I think he’s doing,” Metal Hammer offered.
“I’m pretty sure he is,” we replied.
Sure enough, the dude dropped into the Gulf—the Baltic Fucking Sea—despite an average December water-surface temperature hovering at just above freezing. It was like watching someone commit an incredibly slow, painful suicide. Meanwhile, Wirman slinked up silently from behind.
“You guys are doing that later.”
“Maybe you will be,” we shot back. “But there’s no fucking way I’m going in.”
Just four short hours and a virtual alcoholocaust later, we were all naked out on the end of the dock. When it was our turn to jump in, we hit the unforgiving Baltic brine tits-first. It was instantly sobering. Our testicles retracted into our body cavity like scared turtles. We lasted all of 30 seconds before we began shrieking like an eight-year-old girl, flailing desperately to get a handhold on the dock and haul ourselves out. When we finally did, Wirman handed us a beer and a towel.
“Now you can say you’ve been to Finland.”
The rest of the night was a hellish blur that wound its way through two Helsinki metal bars before someone mentioned a tattoo shop called Legacy. We woke up two days later with the Finnish flag permanently scrawled on our middle finger.
BEHIND THE SHRED
Going into their 15th year as a band, Children of Bodom have risen through the ranks of their assigned Euro-metal contemporaries wielding a carefully-honed palette that fuses two well-established and already overlapping subgenres (melodic death metal and what we like to call “Scandi-thrash”) with blazing neo-classical chops. By virtue of their Scandinavian origins, extensive keyboard use and the twin axe liturgy of Latvala and vocalist/guitarist Alexi Laiho, they’re often lumped in with the likes of Dark Tranquillity and In Flames, but the former lack Bodom’s shredding bona fides and the latter don’t even have a live keyboardist. The interaction between Laiho and Wirman—who often doubles Laiho’s guitar solos on his keyboard—is in fact the defining characteristic of Bodom’s sound. “When I think of Bodom—no offense to the other guys in the band—I think of Alexi and Janne, because they’re always off on solos together,” says Slayer guitarist Kerry King, who toured with Bodom on 2006’s Unholy Alliance mega-tour alongside Mastodon and Lamb of God. “I’ve said this a million times, but those two remind me of [Ritchie] Blackmore and his keyboardists in Rainbow and Deep Purple. You don’t see guitarists and keyboardists just ripping like that anymore.”
Originally founded in 1993 under the patently terrible nü-moniker IneartheD by Laiho and drummer Jaska Raatikainen, Bodom began incorporating keyboards in 1995, on their second demo. A dude named Jani Pirisjoki tickled the fake ivories for the band until 1997, when Wirman swept in on a tilted Korg for the rechristened band’s full-length debut, Something Wild. Even now, it’s Wirman who ultimately provides the band’s sonic calling card. Strip the carnival keys from Bodom’s more recent albums—particularly Blooddrunk—and the music becomes considerably less distinguishable from the slick neo-thrash of Soilwork or even Lamb of God. “Keyboards are definitely a big part of Bodom,” Laiho agrees. “Some people might think it’s not metal to have keyboards, but I think it’s worked out pretty well for us. And other than Janne, there aren’t many keyboard players in metal who can actually improvise kick-ass solos. You don’t see that shit everyday.”
When we mention King’s Blackmore comparison, Laiho offers a different take. “That’s a pretty nice compliment, but we’re from a generation where Deep Purple wasn’t really considered the shit,” he laughs. “They were probably the first band to have that guitar/keyboard solo battle or unisound thing going on, but for us it’s probably coming from Yngwie Malmsteen and Jens Johansson. That’s where we got the influence.”
On the other hand, it’s Laiho’s well-deserved reputation as a fretboard berserker that seems to provide Bodom with much of their notoriety. Metal Hammer awarded him the Golden God Award for guitarist of the year in 2006, and it seems like you can’t wipe your ass with a guitar mag these days without running the risk of smearing Laiho’s mascara. He graced the cover of Japan’s Young Guitar, “magazine of the super guitarist,” three times in less than a year (Feb. 2005 – Jan. 2006) and in April of 2005 appeared on the cover of Guitar World alongside Zakk Wylde and Steve Vai. (In that same issue, Laiho offered up the world’s most cogent summation of prog-metal pretense-junkies Dream Theater when he said, “It’s not even music; it’s sports.” He later apparently realized the irony and half-apologized.)
Many of Laiho’s six-string peers and metal elders seem to agree that he’s earned his Young Axe Master anointment. “Every aspect of his playing is incredible, but there is just something special about Alexi,” says guitarist Doc Coyle of God Forbid, who toured the States with Bodom in early 2006. “Surrounded by shredders, he seems to trump all of the major players. I love his classical chops and exceptionally clean technique. It’s [not] just the crazy stuff; the solos are actually catchy. You could hum along to them. It’s cool, too, because he has actually changed his style up over the years. Now, his playing is more rock ‘n’ roll and unpredictable, not limited to the neo-classical construct. It’s almost like watching Dimebag play, where you get the feeling that he’s not even trying.”
“He’s [like the] Yngwie Malmsteen of extreme metal,” Behemoth guitarist/vocalist Nergal says of Laiho. “His guitar playing is very effective—it’s fun to watch. Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of this kind of music, but I definitely can appreciate his skills. It’s phenomenal. Some guys shred on their guitars and [can] be boring at the same time. Alexi beats the shit out of his guitar while entertaining the crowd really well. That’s awesome, I think.”
“Alexi is probably the best of the young guns,” Kerry King posits. “He’s done his homework, and it’s a joy to watch him play.”
A TALE OF TWO ROOPES
I think my favorite guitar dude right now is Alexi from Bodom. I think he’s the sickest shredder—he’s got tasty chops and he’s clean as fuck. And I think their other guitar player is the second-best shredder.
—Robb Flynn of Machine Head, from an interview recorded by the author on August 1, 2007
For one reason or another, Bodom possess an almost preternatural compulsion for recording cover songs. In fact, they’ve laid more covers to tape—without actually releasing an all-covers album—than just about any other active metal band we can think of. In addition to the aforementioned Spears jam, they’ve recorded songs by Slayer (“Silent Scream”), Sepultura (“Mass Hypnosis”), the Ramones (“Somebody Put Something in My Drink”), Poison (“Talk Dirty to Me”), Iron Maiden (“Aces High”), WASP (“Hellion”), Ozzy (“Shot in the Dark”), Alice Cooper (“Bed of Nails”), Scorpions (“Don’t Stop at the Top”), Andrew W.K. (“She Is Beautiful”) and Billy Idol (“Rebel Yell”). For Blooddrunk, they recorded four more covers for B-sides and bonus tracks in various territories: Suicidal Tendencies’ “War Inside My Head,” Stan Jones’ “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s version of Mickey Newbury’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” It’s no coincidence that these last two appeared in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 strikes ‘n’ gutters classic, The Big Lebowski; Laiho quoted the film frequently throughout our interviews for this article.
Perhaps the most significant of Bodom’s covers is their version of Finnish thrash commandos Stone’s “No Command” for the deluxe edition of 1999’s Hatebreeder. Roope Latvala was a member of Stone (as was former Amorphis drummer Pekka Kasari) back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and over the course of the band’s brief career, became an inspiration to many a young Finnish guitarist—including Laiho. “Roope definitely had a big influence on me, and he’s actually still one of my favorite guitar players ever,” Laiho enthuses. “Stone were one of the biggest bands in Finland at the time, besides maybe Hanoi Rocks. To me, Stone sounded even better than Metallica or Megadeth. And even back then, when Roope was probably about 18 or 19, he was a badass guitar player. He was a legend in Finland.”
Consider the fact that Latvala was not a member of Bodom when they recorded “No Command”—he replaced then-COB guitarist Alexander Kuoppala in 2003—and the cover seems almost prescient. However, Latvala was not actually Laiho’s first choice—he first extended the offer to Norwegian guitarist Kai Nergaard of Griffin. Laiho had co-produced the band’s No Holds Barred album, but Nergaard declined to join Bodom. Laiho and Latvala had already been playing together for years in the Finnish supergroup Sinergy, and at first, Laiho had wanted to avoid the member crossover. “I wanted Children of Bodom to be a tight-knit group—not one of those groups of dudes from 10 different fucking bands. But then Roope called me when he heard Alexander quit and offered to help us out with all the gigs we had lined up. So he joined as a session guy, but a year later he was still with us and it was like, ‘C’mon, dude—you’re part of the band.’”
When Decibel first meets Latvala at 3 p.m. on Independence Day, the first things we notice are the booze on his breath and the blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. His ruddy appearance and overall demeanor suggest the village lush from a rejected Canterbury Tale. His seemingly limited English—compared to his bandmates, anyway—only enhances one’s impression that he might be the guitarist version of Steven Adler. We soon learn that this is a cheap but convincing front, like that of the seemingly inebriated kung-fu guru who unloads a faceful of Zui Quan on a hapless Jackie Chan in Drunken Master. Or like the unassuming tenement dwellers in Kung Fu Hustle, who slough off their innocuous appearances to become ass-thrashing superheroes. The only difference is that Latvala does all of his slaying and punishing on six strings. And he actually is hammered. It’s rare, however, that someone outside of Bodom gets to see both the Sloppy Drunken Finn and the Total Shred Lord in the same night.
“Roope? He’s a professional alcoholic,” Kerry King laughs. “The first time that dude came into our dressing room, he was totally falling-down drunk. He couldn’t even speak. He has problems with English, anyway, but it was pure comedy. He knocked over a bunch of shit on his way out, too. It was one of those first impressions that I’ll never forget.”
“I didn’t really know how good Roope was until we were on tour and he was warming up backstage with a little practice amp,” Doc Coyle recalls. “It was fucking insane. He doesn’t really do many leads live, but he was shredding like a beast. It certainly made me want to rehearse. As a guitar player, it can be a bit intimidating opening up for them because you know 60% of the audience are probably musicians with magnifying glasses on your fingers making sure you’re not fucking up.”
“Oh, yeah—the guitar police,” Laiho laughs. “They’re around, definitely. That’s just inevitable, so what are you gonna do? These are the guys who hang around the mixing desk—they don’t go into the pit or put their fists in the air. And if they do go up front, they’re just trying to pick up on any goddamn detail that you might have fucked up.” These are the same dudes who live to corner guys like Laiho and Latvala after a show for excruciatingly in-depth discussions about the finer points of sweep-picking. “I’d rather not have pointless chitchat about guitar playing when we’re trying to party after the show,” Laiho says. “There’s a time and a place, of course, but when I’m offstage after the show, I just wanna have fun.”
OPEN UP AND SAY … COCK (ROCK)
As a teenager growing up in Espoo, Finland, Alexi Laiho revered technical ability above all else, worshipping at the twin altars of Swedish neo-classical power-clown Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Frank Zappa protégé and Whitesnake/David Lee Roth guitarist Steve Vai (Passion and Warfare remains one of his favorites) while stoking his heavily mascara’d flash metal fantasies with a steady diet of Poison, Mötley Crüe and Skid Row. As the oft-repeated story goes, he eventually fell victim to the same hasty cultural reassessments that afflict the young truth-seekers who are inevitably drawn to the underground and then can’t reconcile their formative tastes with their new discoveries. Thus, as the Legend of Laiho would have it, when he got into black metal, he taped over all his cock rock cassettes with black metal albums. Today, seated at a long banquet table at Uunisaari, drink in hand, Laiho realizes the error of his ways. “I’ve had this conversation with so many people in other bands,” he says. “At one point or another, they were made to feel ashamed of the fact that they liked Poison. And then they grew up. When you’re 15, you want to be all evil and black metal. But I don’t even know a musician who wouldn’t love Skid Row, for example. And the same thing goes for Poison. C’mon, dude—it’s the best fucking party music ever. Well, maybe after Andrew W.K. But there are people out there who take things so fucking seriously even though they probably secretly like Poison anyway.”
Not coincidentally, Bodom covered Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me” as a bonus track for the Japanese edition of their 2005 full-length, Are You Dead Yet? and Andrew W.K.’s “She Is Beautiful” on their Trashed, Lost & Strung Out EP from the same year. In fact, it’s safe to say that Laiho has fully re-embraced both the music and the aesthetic of the genre he once spurned. These days, he’s rocking an entire wrist’s worth of thin silver and black rubber bracelets, black nail polish and full-on guyliner. “My sister, she’s three years older than I am, and she got into that whole thing. I’d listen to everything she’d listen to. And the guys in the bands all had long hair and wore makeup. I’m not trying to look like Bret Michaels or anything, but I’ve got eyeliner, I’ve got bracelets and shit like that. And that’s probably where it comes from.”
You can also file this calculated aesthetic throwback—which probably looks more like an open affinity for crybaby emo pap to the 15-year-olds who talk smack on Blabbermouth—under Things To Potentially Hate About Bodom, an extensive catalogue of which could probably be compiled by just about anyone who likes their metal over here and their dudes with mascara (or keyboards) over there. Like, way over there.
When Blabbermouth announced the posting of Bodom’s “Blooddrunk” video on February 19th, a thread of mostly positive and surprisingly semi-nuanced comments led up to the inevitable attempt at a zinger. “Nice fingernail polish and eyeliner,” quipped a user posting under the name BleakOutlook. “And the pink guitar goes good with their fans.”
Laiho says he’s doesn’t read the blatherings of message-board warriors anymore, but that didn’t stop him from writing a song about them on Blooddrunk. The track “Lobodomy” holds up the self-referential tradition Bodom began on 1999’s Hatebreeder with “Silent Night, Bodom Night” and continued with “Bodom After Midnight” (on 2000’s Follow the Reaper), “Bodom Beach Terror” (on 2003’s Hate Crew Deathroll) and “Bastards of Bodom” (from 2005’s Are You Dead Yet?) “The song is about being pissed off about making the mistake of going to our website and reading what people write up there,” he explains. “These little Internet tough guys are a bunch of fucking pussies. They don’t have the balls to come to my face and say this shit. That I would respect. But they’re hiding behind their goddamn computer screens being all tough.”
(For the record, the guitar in the “Blooddrunk” video is black with red trim.)
DRUNKEN HORROR, BROKEN BONES
First of all, it’s a REAL band. They fought their way up to the top. They also drink a lot, which makes them even more real.
—Behemoth vocalist/guitarist Nergal, via email, when asked about his impressions of Children of Bodom
As album titles go, Blooddrunk is not nearly as cryptic—or vampiric—as it might appear. The song that it shares its name with is Laiho’s reflection upon the various booze-related injuries he sustained in the last few years, a kind of high-comedic litany of broken bones for which he claims full responsibility. “The idea behind the song is being addicted to spilling your own blood, pretty much,” he says. “I mean, I used to be fucked in the head pretty bad. Years ago, I used to cut myself and all that crap. The song isn’t necessarily about cutting yourself, though. It’s more about being addicted to hurting yourself.”
In 2005, Laiho fell off the top of a parked car in Helsinki, splitting open his face and breaking his wrist in the process. “Me and Janne were out with some friends drinking and got totally fucking wasted on vodka and whatever the fuck,” he recalls. “We started out at someone’s apartment and then started walking to a bar. I jumped up on top of a parked car—don’t ask me why; I don’t even know—and it was snowing and slippery. I was annihilated already, and I slipped and landed on my face and wrist. It seriously could’ve been a lot worse. I could’ve broken my neck. I think I actually went out for a couple of seconds. When I came to, Janne was picking me up and my face was bleeding everywhere and my wrist didn’t feel good.”
In early 2007, Laiho was living out his perpetual Lebowski fantasy when he slipped over the foul line and broke his shoulder. “It actually happened,” he insists when we suggest that the circumstances reek of bullshit. “We were drinking white Russians and fucking bowling. It was the fucking stupidest thing ever. I was drunk, obviously, but I got a strike and I was celebrating and I kind of slipped and landed on my shoulder. And the fucking thing broke.”
At this point, we actually start laughing out loud. And then quickly apologizing. “No, no—you’re supposed to laugh,” he reassures us. “I was telling everyone that I’m probably the biggest fucking idiot in the world. I mean, who breaks bones while bowling?”
The rest of our conversation proceeds thusly:
Do you consider yourself accident-prone?
No—I mean, I’m not the guy who’s tripping over everything. But I have to do the craziest stuff all the time, and I don’t wanna be that guy anymore. In the end, I just wanna play, so I need to take care of my hands and stuff.
Have you ever considered taking out an insurance policy?
No, but I probably should.
Especially if you’re gonna be breaking bones all the time.
Yeah, and you know, I’ve been thinking about it lately. All this partying shit is fun and it’s OK to go totally fucking crazy sometimes, but I go over the top sometimes. And I think that I’m done with that shit.
You mean you’re done with breaking shoulders in bowling alleys?
[Laughs] Yeah. And falling off cars and shit.
I heard you went on a bender during the Blooddrunk recording sessions.
[Laughs] Yeah. I fucking worked my ass off just writing this album, but at one point it got really stressful for a lot of reasons, which obviously drove me to, uh… but you know, it’s not a problem for me. I know when to stop. Sometimes people tell me, “Dude, you should quit drinking.” But I can stop any fucking day I want. It’s not like I start drinking in the morning or anything.
How long was the bender—a week or two?
Six.
Clearly, Laiho prefers learning his lessons the hard way. By the end of the night at Uunisaari, he’s so fucking hammered that he has to be scraped off the floor by two of the female PR reps from his record label. Kerry King laughs when we recall this detail. “I’ve had him like that quite a bit,” the guitarist offers, “but he don’t need my help—he can do it all on his own. Those guys are no strangers to alcohol. But goddamn, those fuckers can play.”
