Out of the blue [UK]

A month ago, nobody in the Uk had heard oh The Rasmus. One huge single later, they being touted as european rock’s next superstars. Say hello to the surprise hit of 2004.
Lauri Ylönen comes in black, from follicle ti footwear. Tickled by the smoke from a half finished Malboro Light he appears like a photo negative, a film noir still that might easily be framed and hung in the corner of this angular and fashionable Shepherd’s Bush hotel bar. Only the green glass of the bottles of expensive European beer and Lauri’s blue eyes add colour to the white leather sofas and wooden, black tables.
You have to learn in close to hear what he’s saying, squinting youe eyes as he dances through a sentence. Lauri Ylönen’s words have a light and musical quality to them, like the gentle tinkle of a music box. The words themselves also leap and cavort whether he’s talking about something that happened to him when he was at school or something that happened to him 10 minutes before he arrived. There’s also a touch of the conspiratorial about his tone. Given the way ho speaks, Lauri Ylönen sounds like a double agent who’s about to reveal himself.
There’s something about his look, too. He’s not what you’d call a god-looking man, not conventionally. As he talks it’s difficult not to smile at the thought that, if he had a shaven head, Ylönen would look and sound like Gollum. But it’s a striking look, if not charismatic. Thin and pale but obviously in reasonable health, it takes a little while to realisethat this man is not quite what he first appears to be.
Fishing through the almost remarkable story of his band The Rasmus’ ascent to European dominance, the frontman finds the place where it all began; the place that allowed it all to begin.
“It was our decision not to sing in Finnish”, he says. “All the other bands, they sang in Finnish.”
And why do you think they did that?
“I don’t know”, he says and then stares with a look that has an answer written all over it. And then he gives you an answer. “I suppose they had limited ambitions.”
And you?
But this time Lauri Ylönen just smiles.
And you would smile, wouldnt you if you were in his position right now? Turn your back on The Rasmus for five minutes and something else has happened, something else has propelled them skyward. Unnoticed to the point of perfect obscurity as little as three months ago, today the band are not so much household names as a household sound.
“In The Shadows”, the first single from their new album “Dead Letters”, looks set to break the UK top 10-perhaps even Top 5- with some ease, after being placed on optimum rotation on both Radio One and London’s XFM, as well as making the Number One spot on Kerrang! TV. You might sniff at this of course, since a posse of friends and family each with three pounds to spare is enough to guarntee your CD single a mention on “Top of the Pops”. But people are also responding to The Rasmus in terms that might be less fleeting than this. For one thing the venues for the band’s April tour have been upgraded, from small clubs to large clubs and, in some cases, theatres. “Sold Out” signs are almost guaranteed already.
All of this you might call an overnight success. Only that’s not true by a long chalk. For one, like their fellow countrymen HIM, The Rasmus (a name which has no Finnishe trabslation, rather it just “sounds good”) are alreadt successful in many parts of Europe- Scandinavia, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain. “Dead Letters” (released this week) is also the band’s fifth album; it arrives here in their 10th anniversary year. This despite each member being only 24 years of age. In terms of precocity, Lauri Ylönen makes Tim Wheeler look like Tony Lommi.
It Began, naturally, at school in Helsinki. The school had 600 pupils in it, only 580 of which didn’t want to grow up to be ice hockey players in the NHL. Of this 20, Lauri Ylönen was one. The misfits, as they tend to do, sought each other out and soon Ylönen had banded with Ereo Heinonen and Pauli Rantaslami, bassit and gutarist respectively. They were joined on the drums by Jaani, also a schoolmate. This prototype band cover versions ranging fromStatus Quo to Metallica.
The group were 16 when tehy signed their first record deal, and 16 when they released their first album, “Peep”, in 1996. It was played on the national radio, with listeners ringing un saying how the songs were great, thinking they came from a new international act. All the while The Rasmus were still practing in Pauli Rantasalmi’s parents’ garage, still being driven by Mr Rantasalmi to gigs, their gear loaded on the roof. Under the radar, the band gathered their fans.
And they continued to gather them. Through albums such as “Playboys” and “Hell Of A Tester”, with a singless of purpose that meant replacing their drummer – Aki Hakala now sits on the stool – when original sticksman Janne asked for the band to take a six-month break (Ylönen: “I have always made living from music, even if I was just eating tins of tuna fish for weeks on the end. There was no way I was gonna stop”). Their fourth album, “Into”, went pan-European and pandemonium has now met “Dead Letters”. The Rasmus had number one singles and number one albums all over the continent. The Rasmus had real success.
And now they’re here.

“Am I surprised?” wonders Ylönen. “No, surprised would be the wrong word. We have been working towards this from the moment we formed as a band. We sang in English, we kept at this when thing’s weren’t going so good, we worked hard. Obviously to see it happening in front of us is very different to how we imagined it happening, but surprise is not he word I would use.”
What would be the word you would use?
“I don’t know.” The look, this time, appears genuine.
Would you like The Rasmus to be more famous than you are at the moment?
“I suppose I would, yes.”
Is there a limit to the amount of fame you desire?
“That’s a very strange question.”
But…
Lauri Ylönen is smiling again.
There is something naked, something quietly ruthless about The Rasmus. Sipping a badly mixed Bloody Mary, Eero Heinonen will walk over to you at the bar and ask, “How big will this interview be?” by way of introduction. He’ll nod at the answer and say, “And that’s good, isn’t it? That’s a lot?”. Twenty-five feet away in the corner of the bar, Lauri Ylönen is midway through the fog of cigarette smoke. Twenty-five minutes later and it’s time for another handshake and another interview.
“Yes” says the singer, “I write most of the music”. “No” says the singer, “I don’t think being described as sounding like Euro-pop is a good thing”. “Yes” he says, “I am a control freak”.
How do you bandmates feel about that?
“Well” he says, “sometimes I guess the way I am means things get done. Other times I’m sure they’d rather not have me around. But…” and here he doesn’t really think about this… “not often”.
Ylönen mentions the press, mentions “doing” interviews. He says he always checks the magazines he’s scheduled to speak with, and that if he doesn’t like them then he will mix the chat. He says, again, that he likes to be in control.
But you’re not in control here, in interviews, where a journalist ultimately has the final word. I could say you’re the biggest dickhoad I’ve ever met and there0s not much you can do about that.
“No” he says, as firmly as he’s said anything so far. “But there is something I can do afterwords.”
What?
“If you did that, in a way that I tought wasn’t true, I would never talk to your magazine again”.

All of which makes The Rasmus quite interesting, quite unusual. Not so much fot their music but for them, their personality and his impulse. The idea that their tenacious and assiduous frontman would actually comb the music publications of Western and Northen Europe in order to blackball any he didn’t like the look of is remarkable, more in keeping with the tenants of Fugazi’s Ian Mackays than it is Ame Lee or whoever happens to be the face of the present. Also remarkable is not so much the exponential and immediate success of The Rasmus – we’ve been here before with Papa Roach and Evanescence – but the fact that they’ve done it in this way, that they’ve taken five albums to do it and that they come not from Orange Country, California, but from the frozen, industrial north. And without the looks of Ville Valo or the esoteric charisma of Rammstein. Because The Rasmus, really, have flown without either strings or, it seems, wings. And only they are the ones who appear unsurprised.
“We are a good band” says Lauri Ylönen. “We have been a good band for a long time. Now peole are hearing that. It doesn’t matter where we come from, it doesn’t matter what we look like, all that matters is what we are. We don’t care that we don’t fit into people’s little pigeonholes. If people can’t make sensee of us then that is not our problem. To us, it makes perfect sense”.

Ian Winwood
Photos: Steve Double

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