Before HIM cornered the market in Finnish goth metal, Helsinki’s The 69 Eyes had the elegantly wasted after-midnight look and sound nailed down. In 2009, as they geared up to release their ninth album Back In Blood, mainman Jyrki 69 sat down with Metal Hammer to talk sex, vampires and rock’n’roll.
Jyrki 69 is a stone cold rock’n’roller. He sits almost horizontal in the foyer of his Camden hotel sipping at a drink, cloaked in jet black denim and leather, all tousled raven hair and silver jewellery. If he wasn’t drinking it would be hard to tell he was actually alive. He is indeed one handsome, cadaverous motherfucker. He says that he enjoyed the party he was at the night before but adds: “When it was the 16th round of Jäger I knew it was time to call it a day. It was still as crazy as hell when we left, people bouncing off walls, girls standing on tables screaming.”
The rest of his bandmates have gone back to their home city of Helsinki, in Finland, but the frontman of the glam goth metal group, The 69 Eyes, has stayed on for an extra day to hang out with Hammer and hit numerous metal shows and clubs over the weekend. 2009 marks exactly 20 years since this cool rocker and his black-clad comrades first took to the stage with the mission to distil everything that they thought was righteous about music into one band. They contained the grave gothic melodrama of The Sisters Of Mercy, the glam rock of Hanoi Rocks and the thundersome ramalama of Motörhead.
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But surely, by rights a band of this vintage still trying to hit the big time, still dressing like something the cat dragged in (from Sunset Strip), should be an embarrassment, right? Like a Scandinavian version of Crème Brulee, the Eurovision wannabes from The League Of Gentlemen. Well, perhaps if they’d tried to change with the times the answer would be yes. They certainly didn’t add a fat man in a backwards baseball cap to their line-up in the late 90s. It’s hard to imagine ever seeing a photo of this band in massive shorts or luminous rubber ‘cyber’ gear. Instead they have remained 100 per cent dedicated to the cause of being louche, outlaw rockers.
When you spend time with them it genuinely feels like they don’t have a choice in the matter though. It is The 69 Eyes or nothing. They are certainly not rock chameleons. Jyrki sips at the Guinness which matches his colour scheme perfectly, as he sits insect-like behind aviator shades. When his countrymen Turisas and Finntroll are mentioned he shows his hand, albeit politely: “I’m not a role-playing games guy. I’m not about drinking beer and singing folk songs. I’m all about sex, blood and rock’n’roll. All of these role-playing game bands and folk metal bands with their drinking songs… well that’s interesting and they are from Finland but I don’t have time to get involved with them.”
He says that there are two strands that go through all Finnish music linking them to other bands: namely politeness and melancholy. He expands: “HIM, Nightwish, Amorphis, Hanoi Rocks they all have this tuneful melancholia… this is why we had to go to America to record our new album, so we could get fucking hard, full of attitude and in your face. There is a massive difference between the Norwegians and us. They’re Vikings aren’t they? We were afraid, hiding from them in the woods while they burnt and pillaged.”
When asked to choose which ingredient out of sex, blood and rock’n’roll is the most important to the group he is adamant: “Sex. For me, sex has always been very important in rock music. The number one reason to be in a band. The Beatles were a very anti-sexual band but the Rolling Stones were pure sex, so you can guess which one is my favourite. The same thing with Guns N’ Roses versus Faith No More, or The Stooges vs Pink Floyd. When rock’n’roll started it was all about sex. Nothing else. The rhythms wake up that lust. It’s all about the mystery and the sex and the stuff that happens after dark.”
So when he is asked if he doesn’t dress up as a caveman because it would interfere with his chances of bedding a hot gothic girl, there is the merest hint of a smile and nod by way of an answer.
It would be wrong to suggest that the group have remained exactly constant, of course. Their new album, Back In Blood (their ninth), is certainly a much ballsier affair than the preceding efforts, Angels and Devils.
“To make a new record we needed a change,” he says. “For the last 10 years we had made records with Johnny Lee Michaels but this time we wanted to work with someone else. Matt Hyde wanted to work with us and he really liked my voice. As an outsider he could see the band differently from a guy who had been working with us for 10 years. And he kicked our arses. He told us, ‘I know what kind of record your fans want.’ His roots are in classic rock – Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, that kind of stuff. He said we were not dangerous- sounding anymore. There were too many keyboards and it was too well-produced.”
He stops and slams his drink down: “Before, if you hadn’t seen us live, you might not know that we have a really great rock drummer. Now you can really tell!”
It is even more impressive to note how stable The 69 Eyes have remained when you think about how much in the world of rock and metal has changed. They formed round Jyrki on vocals, Jussi on drums, Bazie and Timo-Timo on guitars and Archzie on bass in 1989 when the power of Jack Daniel’s- and-hairspray-fuelled rock was strong. The Cult were still a force to be reckoned with; the Sisters Of Mercy had just discovered Meatloaf’s producer Jim Steinman; while hip youngish gunslingers Danzig and Guns N’ Roses were in full bloom.
The 60 Eyes began life as a glam metal act, influenced by their neighbours and forebears Hanoi Rocks and international acts such as Pretty Boy Floyd. But it was when they started to incorporate gothic and classic rock elements that they began to forge their own hybrid sound. Their breakthrough album came nearly 10 years later in 1990 with Blessed Be, a record which is still seen by many as their major statement.
But now, it is Jyrki who feels like his time in the sun has arrived: “Matt Hyde’s production style is very hard. He was very tough and he squeezed all of the blood and the tears out of us. When we actually went to LA it wasn’t like rock’n’roll fantasy camp it was more like a concentration camp! But that’s how he got a 20-year-old band to finally bloom. We’re now in full bloom!
“I’m proud of it,” he continues. “We’ve been playing for 20 years this September and we could have put out some kind of lukewarm compilation like anyone else would do, but instead we came up with this impressive, exciting new album. We’ve always been about the image to a certain extent, the gothic look but now more than ever it’s just about the music. Well, that and the vampires.”
Ah yes, the vampires. No chat with our Finnish friends would be complete without a discussion about our fanged fiends. Jyrki raves about a giant bag of vampire films he has bought from HMV and mentions seeing recent oddities such as pre-teen, Swedish vamp romance Let The Right One In and cult French movie Lips Of Blood. He says that one particular song off the new album, Hunger, was based on the erotic early 80s horror of the same name featuring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve but, despite trawling video stores and DVD rental shops while they were recording, they couldn’t find it anywhere. Eventually Matt Hyde rang him in desperation: “He said, ‘You need to do the vocals again man. They suck.’ I had to go back to LA but by this time he’d found the film and we just left it running on a big screen while I was singing. And this time we nailed it.”
Back in the real world, there are no such things as immortal beings who have long incisors though: there are just bands who are long in the tooth. The 69 Eyes are not immortal beings, staying forever young, feasting on the blood of their victims. And even though the rock lifestyle is the best way of abdicating the boredom of adult life – just look at Lemmy – they’re obviously all dudes of ‘a certain age’. Why should some young guy who wasn’t even born until after their first ever gig take them seriously?
Jyrki seems unfazed. “This is our mission,” he states, simply. “This is why we are still hungry and why we still want to push the band – exactly because of this 20-year-old. Because they haven’t heard us yet! There are people out there who have space in their hearts for The 69 Eyes and we won’t stop ’til we’ve found them!”
The singer’s youthful enthusiasm for his role as a rocker is infectious and he describes his life in the same way a suburban 14-year-old dreaming of the lifestyle on the road would. “You know, just recently I was at Download,” he says, “and I opened up the door to our portakabin and just outside our door was David Coverdale, Joe Elliott and Brian May telling each other jokes and then Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top passed by! It was like watching TV. What else do you need? This is what it is all about.”
Undeniably it helps that around the globe the band have their devotees; the most notable of whom is Bam Margera, who befriended Jyrki a decade ago while the pair were in Paris. As well as being mates, the Jackass has directed two videos for them, including the recent Dead Girls Are Easy.
“We’re in his latest movie, Where The Fuck Is Santa?, which is filmed in Helsinki. We’re party friends but I really like what he’s doing. It was great getting to do another video with him – it was so much fun. I can’t think of anything more fun than going to Bam’s castle for a few days to film a rock video with hot chicks. Playboy.com was the first place to show the video for Dead Girls Are Easy. I was psyched. I was sending messages to all of my friends saying check this out playboy.com/69. How cool is that? Everything is all about living rock’n’roll dreams and living the life.”
And with that, he finishes his drink and dissolves into the rainy London night, continuing the eternal search for rock’n’roll mayhem.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 196, August 2009
