One hit wonders? [UK]

The Rasmus were the success story of 2004. Now they’re back – but can they ever escape the legacy on “In The Shadows”?
The Rasmus know what you’re thinking. They know you’re waiting for them to fall on their faces and sink without a trace. They know you want their moment in the sun to be behind them and for them never to be seen again. Good riddance. “Everyone wants to say we’re one hit wonders,” says bassist Eero Heinonen. “There are people out there who want us to fuck off and who will say our new album is shit. We have enemies who hate us. We know that.”
The Rasmus also know they were last years success story. Privately, they even call ‘Dead letters’, the album that propelled them into the charts and mass consciousness, “The success album”. They were as suprised as anyone that it was last years biggest rock album, selling over 300,000 copies in the UK alone. They know that because of their sudden chart success, lots of people don’t take them seriously.
They also care deeply about what they do and take people’s critisms to heart, often painfully so. They can’t figure out how playing music can generate so much resentment. It means that, despite the mammonth record sales and the vast world tour, they say last year was one of the hardest periods they’ve ever had to face.
And now they’re putting themselves out there again with a new album. Are they mad?
The band are sitting in a cafe near to the karunan church, just outside Helsinki. It’s a rural paradise with parkland and lakes stretching for miles around. Birds chirp in the background, water laps the shores and squirrels are so friendly they’ll jump on your knee. At the moment, they really couldn’t care less about any of it because they’re talking about last year and the pain it put them through.
“I’d be lying awake in a hotel room all night,” says singer Lauri Ylönen. “All these weird things were going through my head; all the times people told me they hated me. It’s very human to forget all the people that pay you complements but to remember the people who hate you. Maybe one in a hundred people were telling me I was shit. Those are the people that would go round and round in my head.”
He’s a nervous person when faced with an interviewers microphone, twitching, shaking and clasping his hands together. It’s clear he doesn’t like people to delve into his feelings too closely, often saying he’d rather let the music do the talking for him. In stutters and starts, what emerges are the emotions caused by ‘Dead Letters’.
Obviously there was happiness and vindictation that they had finally broke through after 10 years of trying. But there was also absolute despair, crashes from towering highs to end-of-the-world lows.
“I began to loose it towards the end of the tour,” says Ylönen akwardly. “I just wanted to be alone. I was so tired and was just walking from the hotel room to stages I’d never even seen before. I was lost at my own shows. In some ways getting so much attention so fast was really hard to deal with. We were recording, working and touring ‘Dead letters’ for three years. In those three years, I felt like I got six years older – mentally and physically.”
The rest of the band were unsure how to deal with Ylönen at that time, preferring to stand back and hope he’d be alright.
“We’re Finnish, we’re inward people,” says Heinonen. “Whe Lauri was down, it was osmething very personal and private. We don’t say things like ‘I feel like crying’. We just go somewhere and deal with it. We don’t bother other people with our problems.”
The reason for this introspection is that The Rasmus take what they do enourmosly seriously. They discuss they’re music with the utmost passion. They’re always talking about how they could be better, how they can push themselves to the absolute limit and how they can completly realise the sounds they want to make. They’re also very proud of what they do, in some cases to their detriment.
“We like to think really big,” says Ylönen. “We tend to be over-confident about ourselves, which can work against us and is irritating to some people.”
It means that, when they went into the studio to record their new album ‘Hide from the sun’, they banished all thoughts of their last year. They tried not to think of the success they’d had and tried to record an album that, in their eyes, pissed all over it’s predecessor. The temptation to repeat the formular that saw ‘Dead Letters’ storm the charts was intense. “You can get paranoid when it all goes so well,” says guitarist and the main songwriter Pauli Rantasalmi. “You really freak out about what you should do next.”
So now they’re talking about ‘Hide from the sun’ in terms of a new beginning, a huge step forward and something that, according to Ylönen, has, “a better veariety of music and has more to chew on”.
Given the confidence, though, what happens if it bombs, if you really are one hit wonders?
“We don’t worry about it,” says Ylönen. “If that happens then we go back to the rehersal room and write another album, and another one…”
“If it happens,” adds Heinonen, “Then it will make us want to fight for our right to be back up there. It will make us want to proove to people that we deserve it.”
IT MAY be easy for people to dismiss The Rasmus’ music as a fleeting fad (“I can understand why people think we’re a pop band,” says Ylönen. “we’re melody driven, we were all over the radio and our pictures were everywhere – that happens to pop bands more than rock bands.”) but, as people, they’re genuine, interseting and passionate. Later that night Ylönen and Heinonen take us on a club crawl around Helsinki. First stop is a traditonal Finnish restaurant. Ylönen orders the local delisacies – reindeer and elk mostly – with pride, enjoying showing off his native culture. He also picks up the hefty bill without a moments hesitation. Meanwhile, Heinonen grills us about all kinds of music, from blues to metal to indie, jotting down the names off those bands he thinks might be interesting.
Later still, inside one of the venues the band used to play when they were starting out, Ylönen buys round after round, jabbering about what local bands we should see and signing frequent autographs for the clubs punters with honesty and grace.
The point is that, no matter what you may think of their music, The Rasmus are doing this from the heart. There’s not an ounce of cynicism in any of them and every moment you hear on their records is honest, passionate and sincere. You may not like the results of that but you can’t argue with the motives behind it.

“Eh, Eh!”
Lauri on that mega hit.
How did you write “In the shadows”?
“It started off as a jam. We were messing around during a sound check in Finland and Pauli played this great riff. It was a very spontanious thing. The “Eh-oh” bit? I had a few words ready but when he played the riff that just came to me.”

Did you know it was going to the stuck in everyone’s head for eternity?
“It does feel like that. I remember thinking it was really annoying when I sang it. That’s why we kept it in!”

Were you suprised it became such a big hit?
“Of course. It was a huge suprise for us. But, in a way, it was about time we had a hit because we’ve been doing this for over 10 years now. We only had success in Finland but, everywhere else we were playing in toilets. That song took us out of the toilets.”

Are you sick of talking about it?
“A little. But then I did write a sequel for that song on the new album (“Night after night [out of the shadows]“), so I can’t be that sick of it.”

Why do that?
“I was in a difficult place when I wrote “In the shadows”, but then it did something so positive for my life. It gave me some answers and some help, so it felt good to keep writing that lyric. It was like therapy.”

Share this article:

Tweet

Current&next releases

Latest news

© 2005-2005 The Rasmus Hellofasite | the Italian portal about The Rasmus | All rights reserved
This website is published under a Creative Commons Licence. It's strictly forbidden any unauthorized
reproduction partial or total of the layout and/or the contents.