Pojat
This article originally appeared in NFH #22 in
the winter of 1992.
Pojat's bass player
Jussi Santalahti paints a picture of the Finnish club scene of two years ago. Rap bands.
Speed metal bands. And here are Pojat playing a whole set of Boys covers with lyrics
translated into Finnish and trying to make headway. Seems like no way they'd have a
chance, right? But with help from their spiritual mates Ne Luumaet and Luonteri Surf (not
to mention Klamydia), they've turned the Finnish scene on its ear and now it's to the
point where Jussi is ready to state that this summer will witness the entire country going
nuts for Ramones-styled rock and roll. Summer means festival time in Finland...each
weekend there are four or five outdoor festival around the country with several bands at
each. The sun's finally out, and out late into the evening every night, it's warm enough
to wear shorts and t-shirts, and everybody tries to cram a year's worth of living into
about 3 months. Pojat plays as many festivals as they can; usually there are about 5
really significant ones, and this summer one will stand out above all the rest because the
Ramones are due to play. Jussi thinks this festival will blow the dikes out.
Pojat (pronounced
Poy-ot) means "the Boys" in Finnish. The band was started by Jussi and Miika in
the spring of 1989 to have some fun in some university clubs. They played a short set of
Boys songs while singing lyrics translated from the original into Finnish. It wasn't meant
to become anything serious. But a funny thing happened...they found that this stuff was
really fun to play, so they recruited a permanent drummer (Manu Ojanen) and second guitar
player (Mikko Holmstrom)
"The first gigs
were in Helsinki and in Tampere", says Jussi. "Today we do some ten gigs per
month all over Finland. And that's really all over Finland...in the first year we mainly
played in clubs in big cities. Well, what's a big city in Finland...in Helsinki and Turku
and Tampere. But soon after that, about one year ago, we started playing in all kinds of
places, and during the summer we have many festivals here in Finland and we are playing in
some of them."
Though they still
play the occasional pizzaria, they don't play so many Boys songs anymore; now their set is
mostly their own material, which is of a similar style to the Boys or Ramones and rivals
either band for brain-eating catchiness. They keep three or four Boys songs in their
repertoire, of which they might play two in a typical gig. They also toss out a Ramones
cover now and then. Their Irti lp has one, "She Belongs To Me", which
evolves into "Siipi Lonksuu Niin", a translation chosen not because it makes any
literal sense but because the three Finnish words are pronounced in a way that makes them
sound very much like the English words. "We and Ne Luumaet were sitting in a bar when
the dj played "She Belongs To Me". We all agreed that it is a fine song",
says Miika. "So we decided to do it also by translating the chorus line directly to
Finnish. Makes hardly any sense but is still a fine song."
Irti is
Pojat's second lp; the first one is just titled Pojat. There's also two or three
singles...all I've been able to track down is the Irti lp, and I can say that it's
a great one without reservations. Twenty consecutive songs of catchy punk pop.
"It's a bit
difficult to explain what Irti means", says Jussi. "We thought when we
got the name and the album cover that it would be something like when you are stuck with
something and people thought that we are just another Ramones band and we have a straight
line to go that way, and we thought that that's not how it will be after this album. Irti
means something like "get away" or "get loose". Something like that.
One of the ideas was Jailbreak in English and maybe Jailbreak and the
Finnish word Irti has something to do with each other."
All the songs on Irti
are sung in Finnish, but it doesn't set things back at all...the good time feel of the
music has a pull that translates in any language. And it's gotta be helping Pojat's cause
in Finland to play this sort of thing in a way that Finnish kids can relate. For me, it's
a real kick to hear a song like the great Radio Stars hit "Dirty Pictures"
reworked with these huge guitars and strange words.
But as I've said,
their own songs, written in the same spirit, are as good as the classics they cover. Miika
translated the song titles for me and said a bit about each...for example, there's
"Sheenako Se Todella On" ("Is It Really Sheena"), which is about
Sheena (from the Ramones songs) coming back to Finland from California and wandering about
the streets of Tampere. Then there's "Hankeen Seisomaan" ("Standing In A
Snowdrift"), a anti-surf/summer song that Miika says he must have written while
suffering from a fever. Or "Thaimaa" ("Thailand") which has lyrics
that Jussi wrote to go with the Ramones' "Time Bomb", but they didn't like how
that worked out so they wrote new music around the words. It seems that a lot of their
song ideas come from extending themes in punk classics in this way. It's an effective way
to write a tune, judging from the results.
Strangely, although
the Ramones and Boys are such a strong influence if you ask Jussi what other music he
likes the first name that pops out is AC-DC. He'll then rattle off the Jam and Clash, but
then declares that he's very interested in 70s heavy rock. ZZ Top gets a mention. Very
unexpected given Pojat's sound. But then Jussi has to be broad minded as he works booking
bands in a pub. So when asked about the local scene he has this to say: "Of Finnish
groups, I don't know. I have no favorites. I have lots of things to do with music because
here where I'm sitting and talking right now I'm working here and I book bands and I have
to listen to all kinds of music. So about Finnish groups, there are good ones and there
are not-so-good ones as all over the world."
Jussi doesn't buy the
idea that Finland (and Europe in general) is suddenly experiencing the birth of a great
scene. "I think that all the time there have been good groups in Finland and Sweden
and all of Europe", he says, "but the possibilities to get to know about them
have been poor. Today the situation is better and you are interested in European groups,
to get in touch with them. So we know a lot about European groups today. Ten years ago
there were only two or four Swedish groups that came here to play and got a name here.
Today there are lots more and people are more interested in other music, too, not only
American and English rock and roll, but also European, French, German, Swedish and so on.
I'm sure that good bands have always existed, but today the situation is better; bands
send tapes and get in touch with other people."
The possibilities for
Pojat to cross pollinate within the European scene haven't been so great yet. Miika and
Jussi have played Sweden with a previous band, but the crowd was almost all Finnish
ex-patriots living in Stockholm with the result that they felt like they really didn't get
the foreign gig experience at all...it was more like they were still at home. Maybe that
will change as their music hits a wider audience. This summer they record a new single in
August and then a new lp for release in the beginning of 1993. In the meantime, they
prepare to unleash the summer of Ramones-punk on unsuspecting Finland. Good luck to 'em!
