In the late 1990s, Children Of Bodom did as much to put Finnish metal on the map as countrymen Nightwish and HIM. In 2013, late frontman Alexi Laiho and Janne Wirman looked back on the rise of these Nordic hellraisers.
Ask Children Of Bodom founder and frontman Alexi Laiho how he got the nickname ‘Wildchild’, and indeed, why he’s still using it at the ripe old age of 33, and he sniggers and says, “Actually I don’t use it these days, and it doesn’t appear on our album covers any more, but some people still call me that. I guess I’ve had a few crazy times over the past few years.”
You could say that. The career trajectory of Finnish fivesome Children Of Bodom has been a rollercoaster ride, but it hardly compares to the life experience of Alexi himself, who has been through more broken bones and bottles of Jägermeister than most of us would encounter in three lifetimes. How he’s made it this far is a mystery to us.
COB, now one of Finland’s bestselling metal bands and a Europe-wide force as well as in the UK and America, have humble roots at their high school in the tedious Helsinki district of Espoo, whose name is about the most amusing thing about the place.
“Espoo is boring in every single way,” says Alexi, looking back at the band’s early days. “It’s just another suburb of Helsinki: there’s nothing there, and nothing to do, so you have to find things to do. For me it was playing guitar and skateboarding. Most of us went to the same school in Espoo: me and our drummer Jaska [Raatikainen] started playing together when we were about 12 years old. Then a bass player called Samuli Miettinen joined us and we started playing covers – crappy versions of Metallica and Sepultura songs. We didn’t really know how to play, but we did it anyway. A couple of years later we started writing our own stuff.”
The band called themselves Inearthed and played pretty basic death metal, recalls Alexi. “We wanted to come up with a name that was death metal-sounding,” he shrugs. “We recorded three demos under that name: they’re surprisingly good for 16-year-old kids. The lyrics are a bit juvenile but by this age, we could play a bit. The music was death metal, but later we incorporated keyboards into them. I heard one of the songs a while back when someone played it at a party: they’re all over YouTube!”
Like all teenage bands, Inearthed rehearsed wherever they could, including a stint chez Alexi. “We rehearsed in my dad’s garage,” he recalls, “and later at a place where young people hung out which had a room at the back. We’ve moved around a lot since then, though. The one we have now is better than my dad’s garage, ha ha ha!”
A solid line-up first came together when Samuli took off for a new life Stateside. “The original bass player moved to the States and then Henkka [‘Blacksmith’ Seppälä] joined,” Alexi adds. “We’ve been together a long time now. We’re still good friends. We argue and bitch at each other every once in a while, but it’s nothing serious.”
A second guitarist, Alexander Kuoppala, and a keyboard player called Jani Pirisjoki were recruited and Inearthed were now in a position to make serious music. The group may have been in their mid-teens, says Alexi, but there was no shortage of ambition among them. “We always took it seriously,” he tells us. “Even around the time we recorded the first demo, we were practising every single day, for hours. We did that for years and years, rehearsing constantly. We were very serious about taking the next step forward. We sent our demos all over the place, to pretty much every single independent record label that we knew. We got rejected every single time.”
Finally, a small label (which had better remain unnamed, as you’ll see) took the bait and asked Inearthed to sign on the dotted line, which they duly did without realising what a crap deal they were being offered. At the same time, Finnish metal specialists Spinefarm offered them a much better contract, leaving the band in a quandary. As Alexi remembers, “There was one record company that we sent the demo to and signed a deal with, and it was a totally bad deal – but then we heard that Spinefarm were interested, so we just told the guy [at the first label] that we’d decided to break up, and then we changed our name to Children Of Bodom and went with Spinefarm. I’m sure he was pissed off, but you know what? Fuck him! The record deal he gave us was basically stealing candy from a baby. I don’t feel bad about it.”
As for the new deal with Spinefarm, fortunately the label were good eggs and didn’t rip their new signings off, Alexi adds. “We had no management because no one was interested, and we didn’t have lawyers because we didn’t have any fuckin’ money, so basically we just signed Spinefarm’s contract. They could have really fucked us over, because we were just stupid kids – but we got a fair deal.”
And so Inearthed became Children Of Bodom. For those not well-versed in Finnish social history, a popular Espoo attraction is Lake Bodom, which became infamous in 1960 when three teenagers were murdered while camping there. Calling the band after the murder victims might seem a bit tasteless with hindsight, but Alexi says that he’s never received any criticism on the subject.
“I’m not really sure how the name came about,” he says, “but Lake Bodom is near where we grew up. There was the whole story [about the murdered children] and somebody came up with the idea of using the word ‘Bodom’. We came up with different options before landing on the name Children Of Bodom. I was expecting to get some shit about the name, but nobody said a goddamn thing. Then again, we’re not afraid of it: if we’d had some crap about the band name, it would have been publicity, and good for us!”
Keyboard player Janne Wirman joined just as COB began recording their first album, Something Wild, in 1997. “The songs were already written when I arrived,” says Janne. “Children Of Bodom looked like a really cool band to be in. I was only supposed to stay for that first album, actually, but I ended up staying.” As you’ll know if you’ve seen COB live, Janne is as much of a headbanger as either of the guitarists, playing his keyboards at a slanted angle. Why? Because it’s more metal that way. Chuckling at our suggestion that he might have invented heavy metal synth playing, Janne explains: “I guess I wanted to play keyboards like a guitarist plays guitar, and the slanted keyboards make sense because they’ re easier to play.”
Like the rest of the band, Janne had to work at a rubbish job all day in order to pay the bills. “I was a janitor at a school,” he recalls. “Actually it was really easy, because all I had to do was open the gates in the morning and close them again in the afternoon!” Alexi, meanwhile, had a job erecting tents at outdoor events, which might not sound bad if you’ve never seen how massive those things are...
Perhaps the effort of doing a McJob all day and rocking out at night explains the sheer exuberance of Something Wild, which Spinefarm released in 1997. “I like the energy of that album,” says Alexi. “To me, it just sounds like young dudes who want to crank out metal. It has good vibes, even though I wasn’t an experienced songwriter at the time. Some of the arrangements don’t make any sense, but then again, it was back in the day: death metal songs had wacky arrangements anyway.”
Once the album was out, COB hit the road, first for a Finnish tour and then across Europe with the Swedish death metal band Hypocrisy and German black metallers Agathodaimon. The road was where COB were born to be, says Alexi. “I fuckin’ loved it from the first second! First we just toured Finland, and then we did our first European tour in early 1998. We had a blast, it was so much fun. Was it debauched? Definitely – you can only imagine! Free beer everywhere, and you play a show every goddamn night... We’ve basically been on the road since we were 18.”
Having grabbed the European metal scene’s attention with their blend of death metal, power metal and straightahead heavy stuff, Children Of Bodom recorded Hatebreeder, a noticeable step up in sophistication.
“You can hear the improvements in the band between those two albums – in the songwriting and the arrangements. It was a real leap forward for us,” says Alexi, who also remembers the release as the point when he could finally stop working day jobs. As any budding musician will know, playing music is the easy part: actually paying your bills with it is much more difficult – a fact which Alexi has always appreciated.
“When Hatebreeder came out, that’s more or less when I stopped working other jobs,” he says. “All I ever wanted was to make a living out of music, and I’m so happy about it.”
Although the third album, Follow The Reaper, on which COB experimented with their sound, was a respectable effort, it wasn’t until 2003 and Hate Crew Deathroll that COB made a serious impact. Solid touring in Europe had consolidated the band’s fanbase and a world tour beckoned. “Hate Crew Deathroll was our breakthrough album. We found our sound and our place in the world,” says Alexi.
Although that same world tour claimed a casualty – Alexander Kuoppala, who was replaced by Roope Latvala after citing a lack of enthusiasm for the touring life – nothing could stop Alexi’s hate crew now, and in fact the band even decided to spark up a little controversy by recording a metallised cover of Oops, I Did It Again by Britney Spears.
“We recorded that cover during the Hate Crew Deathroll sessions,” sniggers Alexi. “It was a fun way of freaking people out. We love doing covers anyway, and it was so much fun for us to do a Britney Spears song instead of metal songs: it was more challenging and more fun.” Predictably, a whole bunch of headbangers failed to see the joke. “Man, it was amazing, the reactions we got out of people. A lot of kids were super-mad at us, but I think most people understood the joke.”
Having built up serious momentum, COB were on a roll in 2005 when they released their next album, Are You Dead Yet?, although Alexi noted some moderate whining from people who resented the similar title to the previous year’s Aren’t You Dead Yet? album by Swedish thrashers Carnal Forge. As he says now, “It was a coincidence. I heard about it afterwards and I was like ‘What are you gonna do? The damage is done.’” This last sentence is also pertinent in the light of a bruising encounter between tarmac and Alexi’s skeleton, when he broke his shoulder after a few sherries one night...
“Before we started writing Are You Dead Yet?,” recalls Alexi shamefacedly, “I broke my wrist when I was drunk and acting like an idiot. I was standing on a car roof and it was snowing, so slippery, and I fell and smacked my head on the concrete. I used my wrist to break the fall. I had a cast on for six weeks, so I couldn’t play, which sucked. I started writing songs, though. The good thing was that we’d just got back from the road, so we didn’t have any shows left. If you had to break a wrist, that was the time to do it!”
More importantly than either busted arms or inadvertent title clashes, AYDY? was the biggest-selling Children Of Bodom album yet, widening the band’s appeal still more – and Alexi was rewarded in 2006 with a gong for Best Guitarist at that year’s Metal Hammer Golden Gods. Asked if he was chuffed by our recognition of his shredding mastery, Alexi exclaims: “That was awesome! Whenever anything like that happens, it’s always rewarding and flattering. I don’t see myself as the king of the guitar or anything, though. I’m still learning.”
Reluctant as we are to admit that anything is cooler than getting a Golden God award, the most impressive thing to happen to COB that year had to be Slayer’s invitation to join them as part of that year’s Unholy Alliance tour. By this time, Slayer guitarist Kerry King had become a vocal admirer of Alexi’s instrumental prowess, and the idea of the two bands playing on the same stage made sense.
But perhaps not when it came to Alexi attempting to match Kerry’s legendary drinking capacity. Asked if he partied with the Slayer co-founder, Alexi groans. “A lot! He drank me under the table so many goddamn times. It takes a lot to do that, because I can drink more than most people, but when it comes to Kerry King and Jägermeister, dude, there’s no way! I’m telling you, I tried...”
Keyboardist Janne didn’t get off lightly either. “Fuck, we drank so much Jäger with Kerry that I literally couldn’t touch it again for years! Those tours were amazing because they taught us so much about how a really professional tour operates at the top level.”
A few months after the Unholy Alliance tour, Alexi managed to pull off an amazing feat of self-injury, and this time in a deeply un-metal location. He’s laughing as he tells Hammer this next anecdote, but we dread to think how much it must have hurt.
“Ah, the infamous bowling accident,” he sighs. “I was drinking at a bowling alley and I slipped next to the bowling lane, because it’s really fuckin’ slippery and I was wearing those bowling shoes, which are also slippery. Some- how I flipped upside down in the air; I don’t know how it was possible, but I did a complete 180˚ flip and landed on my shoulder.
“That pretty much makes me the biggest fuckin’ idiot walking on this Earth,” he laments. “No one’s ever broken a bone while bowling. Ah well, shit happens, you live and learn...” Except he didn’t…
Blooddrunk came out in 2008 and once again, COB had stepped up their game. “The song- writing and performances had definitely developed again,” nods Alexi. “It was more professional, and we had taken it in a heavier and dirtier direction. I think it had the same sort of anger that Something Wild had.” You want to talk about serious touring? This time COB went for it with all guns blazing, playing at Download and Wacken and touring alongside giants of metal such as Slipknot, Machine Head, Cannibal Corpse and Lamb Of God.
In 2009, Alexi managed to fuck himself up again, this time in bed (the safest place it is possible for a human to be). We’ll let him tell the story in his own words... “Well,” he begins, “when we were on a tourbus, I always used to sleep in the top bunk, which was probably not a good idea to begin with. We were out on tour supporting Lamb Of God, and I guess I had climbed up there to my bunk one night and passed out, with one of my legs hanging outside the bunk or whatever. Then the bus made a really sharp turn and I just fell out. I slammed into the floor pretty hard. My shoulder was fucked up again, and this time I broke a couple of ribs too. I was like, ‘Not again!’ But we were supporting Lamb Of God, so I had to do it. I got some painkillers and played 10 shows with the broken bones.”
Ever broken a rib? Then you’ll know what Alexi went through. “I’ll tell you, dude, broken ribs are some painful shit: even breathing hurts, so imagine what it was like when I was trying to sing and scream!” he says. “I was in fuckin’ agony, seriously. It just got worse and worse, and in the end we had to cancel the last five shows. I sleep in the bottom bunk nowadays, by the way! I still go bowling, though.”
Janne tells us, with massive diplomacy, “It got a bit frustrating, having to cancel shows because Alexi had hurt himself again. You expect a bit of crazy stuff to happen when you’re on the road, of course. Anyway, he hasn’t done it for a while...”
After a covers EP, Skeletons In The Closet, Children Of Bodom released their most recent album, Relentless Reckless Forever, in 2010. “With each album, we’ve come forward as a band, and that’s all we ever wanted to do,” says Alexi. “With this album we’ve got to play countries that we’ve never played before, and I thought we’d been everywhere! We’re almost done with the touring cycle now, so we’re gonna do a bunch of festivals and club shows in the summer, and after that we’re gonna start writing new shit. For release in 2013? Yes, that’s the plan: we want to be a bit quicker between albums than we were last time.”
Does Alexi ever get tired of the album-tour cycle? “I never get sick of it, no,” he tells us. “Sometimes it gets exhausting, and it’s hard to get up in the morning and get to the point when you’re ready to play the show, but you just have to kick your own ass. And you get into the right zone as soon as you hit the stage. Being on stage and seeing the kids always wakes you up!”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 231 (May 2012)
