My First Band: Five long time best friends who love to make music and travel the globe with it

Photo: YLE

The UMK 2017 final is on Saturday and Im ready for these guys to take me to paradise *wink wink*. Here are Anttis answers:
Name: Antti
Birthday: May 15th
Height: 181cm
Favorite color: Red
Favorite food: Involtini de Melanzane or Aurbergine rollups, it’s an italian veggie dish.
Shoe size: 10US
What do you do in the band? I sing and write lyrics
3 things that make you happy: Running, singing and sleeping
What’s your strangest talent? I can run for many hours and breathe fire.
What is the strangest thing you have in your room? A russian doll that looks like our keyboard player Heikki
What are you really good at? Singing
What are you really bad at? Numbers
Childhood idol: Jay Kay of Jamiroquai
Childhood memory: Catching my first fish with dad.
Celebrity crush: There’s been many and still is Björk, she was the first real deal.
Tell me something no one knows about you: I could spend hours just by watching trees in the wind.
What would you do if you could stop the time? I’d travel the world and marvel the present moment.
Favorite movie: Inception
Favorite TV series: That’s a really hard one but I’m picking up Curb Your Enthusiasm
If you were a girl for a day, what would you do? Defend other girls
What is your guilty pleasure? Potato chips, that’s my weak point for sure.
Name a song that never fails to make you happy: Eurythmics: There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)
Can you teach me some interesting words in finnish? My top1 finnish word is ‘warmer’, in finnish ‘lämpimämpi’. It’s just feels great in your mouth! The other great word is 'screaking', ‘kirskuva’. There are lots of words in finnish where the word and it’s phonetics really describe the action of the word itself.

Hello Antti! How are you?
Thanks for asking, I’m just great. Just woke up and the UMK final week has just started, nervous in a good way!

How would you describe the band?
We’re five long time best friends who love to make music and travel the globe with it. Some of us have known each other from childhood.

How did you meet each other?
It goes all the way back to high school times. I guess we all were into the same kind of music (Pop, Funk, RnB, Prince, James Brown, Jamiroquai etc.) and decided to form a band. We did covers at first but straight at the first semester we ended up playing to this big freshmen’s party that was in Tavastia (a legendary rock venue in Helsinki). The place was sold out and that experience gave us confidence to start writing our own music!

You are one of the participants of UMK 2017. How did it all begin?
We were writing songs for our upcoming album and at the same time we realised Yle was searching for songs for UMK 2017. We had just written Paradise and just decided to send the song. Participating UMK had been on our minds before but the timing of the contest or the music we wrote would always seem off to us. This was the perfect song and and the perfect timing.

“Paradise” is the title of your song, what’s the story behind it?
It’s not exactly what I’d call a story song, but like always, there are real life events that inspire the song. For me, this one is definitely a relationship song, where the storyteller wants to kiss and make up after a petty argument by doing something good to the other half. An act of love if you will. There’s been also some pretty wild lyrics interpretations by the ESC fans and they’ve been fun to read!

Describe the song with 4 words:
Fun, sexy, honest, playful

What can we expect to see on stage for the performance?
Well, we’re first and foremost a live band. That’s our forte in this contest and in general. So the performance will be based around the traditional way of bands performing songs. However, what I’ll be doing in the performance is something different that is usually seen in pop/rock bands performances.=)

We rehearsed the performance yesterday at YLE as Krista, the Grand Dame of the UMK and dancers from the dance crew were watching it and they went just nuts seeing our performance. I got a good feeling about it!

Tell me about the official video of “Paradise”:
We wanted to keep it simple 'playing performance’- type of music video. There’s also another story going on with the help of this great dance couple, who are actually a real life couple as well. We wanted them to have that real chemistry between them and I think it really shows. By accident, we ended up shooting the video in the same high school the five of us met back in the day, so it was kind of sentimental moment altogether!

What do you like about Eurovision?
I love the amount of feeling and enthusiasm that’s surrounding the whole universe of Eurovision. It may be a cliche but seeing how music and performances bring the people together is an important european phenomena to me. I remember as a kid staying up late and watching the song contests although it was a school day next day. Watching them has always been a habit of mine.

What do you dislike about Eurovision?
I’d love to see the Eurovision songwriting evolve to a direction where the personality of the song counts as much as the performance does. Especially in the lyrics department. There are lots of great and in a good way, weird older eurovision songs that also have lyrics that speak to you. My personal favourite perhaps is I Treni di Tozeur by Franco Battiato from 1984. It’s wonderfully a weird song, performance and lyrics and that’s what makes it magical for me.

Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word:
Sauna: Home
Nightmare: Resident Evil-games (??????=D=D=D=D=D))
+18: Afterparty
Bacon: Heartburn
Stage: Possibilites

Thanks to Antti for the interview. I cant wait to see what their perfomance! All the best in UMK!

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