Chapter 9.3

Chapter 9.2 - Index

The affected bands initially tried to ignore it, but then the media started to make it big, and some days later they realized they had to do something to defend themselves, so on April 12th a video was uploaded to Youtube showing Ville and Hari Joensen, of Týr, saying they had nothing to do with that ideology they were accused to belong to, and that runes had existed for hundreds of years. Also, Moonsorrow posted a statement on their website saying basically the same thing, and also explaining that the lyrics of “Luopion veri” come from an ancient Finnish legend that’s told to small children and the S has that shape to match the rest of the letters of the logo, and they did not intend to change it. (Both the video and text statements can be seen HERE.) Some people in the forum said they were following their game and the best

Kivenkantaja UK

to do was to ignore those accusations; Marko answered: “It's not that simple to just ingore them. Since they obviously have power to cancel the shows in Germany (Impaled Nazarene's tour in 2006, they cancelled about 7 or 8 shows in Germany!), we really cannot risk anything in Germany (a country where our main markets are business-wise) nor anywhere else. Of course we in the band think also that this whole thing is ridiculous and we don't want to think about it too much”. Henri spoke in a more general sense: “Trust me, it´s not business of money which keeps us defending ourselves here, as I got that impression of Marko´s text. Simple as it is- we just want no-one to harass our band- activities on absolutely non-factual accusations. Even though we have different political views within our band, we have never been taking any stance into any direction whatsoever as a collective group”. I don’t know if they had more similar problems besides the BIFFF accusations, but I think in the end they didn’t have to cancel anything. Some months later, Mitja told his thoughts: “That false propaganda was all over the press in Germany. And just one guy behind it all. […] The scale of it was surprising. Some words can mean so different things in different countries. If you use the word “national romanticism” in Finland, everybody links it to the arts and to a specific era when Finnish artists started to seek the aesthetic values of Finnish nature, language, etc. as a source to their art. If you say the same words to a German, he will most definitely link it to Hitler and far-right nationalism!”.

In September, the then recently created British subsidiary of Spinefarm, simply called Spinefarm UK, re-released Kivenkantaja, on 22nd to be precise. Besides the original album,

Mexico posters

this edition has a slightly different cover, the picture being the same but adding the logo on top, a bit distorted (that’s what the label happily called “extended artwork”); a booklet with more pages, including some photos, a few words by Ville and a couple of articles by the owner of the label; and finally, the most juicy feature is a bonus CD called Thunder in London with three songs recorded live in the label’s presentation concert in London the 8th of April of the same year, where they shared stage with Kiuas and Children Of Bodom. One of the articles of that label guy says the rest of the concert will be released at some point in the future, but Marko was clear on that: “No it won't. There were too many tech problems during the first half of that gig so only 3 last songs were good enough quality for the release”. Later, the rest of the albums were re-released too, one by one, without any extras.

The rest of the year they basically toured. In autumn they went to North America again, visiting Mexico for the first time. When I read they were going to León, my

Fireee!
Montréal (left) - Helsinki (right)

heart turned over, until I saw it was the Mexican León. On November 21st, in Montreal, they played with fire-eaters (or whatever they’re called) on stage during the first and last song. As they hadn’t rehearsed (“what could happen anyway, it's just fire you know”, said an ironical Ville), the girls danced for longer than the band expected, so they ended up playing an instrumental version. On December 31st they finished the year with a gig in the club Nosturi, in their hometown Helsinki, sharing stage with Korpiklaani and Kiuas and including, for the first time, pyrotechnical machines. There are very nice photographies of both concerts in www.shutterblast.net.

To be continued... some day!

Sankaritarina
(live in London 2008 - official recording)

Chapter 9.2 - Index