Interview

Just two hours before the show, right outside, breathing fresh air, Janne Wirman and talked about "Halo of Blood", the tour and the band. News and memories right here!


SBM: Hi! Thanks for answering our questions. How are you?
Janne: Oh I’m good! How are you?

Fine thanks! A little tired but fine!
How’s the tour going?

It’s long as fuck, we’ve been already on tour for six or seven weeks, and we still have five weeks to go. So this European leg is very long in total but considering all that, everything is really good.

And now that time has passed, what do you think about the work you’ve done on “Halo of Blood”?

Well it’s our latest record, I was happy with it; I think it got a pretty good reception with the fans and the media.

Actually it sounds like a little return to the roots. What’s your opinion about it?

Some people talked about the return to the roots but we never thought about it, it was not our goal, something we tried to do. But I hear some elements that I think that people think are the return to the roots, but like I said it was never intentional and it just happened like that.

Well we have “old” elements, for example the main riff of “Waste of Skin” which sounds clearly like “Needled 24/7”, so I think it’s more like a melt between two eras…

Yeah!

So have you worked differently on this record?

No… We went back to Finnish producer. Last time we had an American producer, so we went back to the same guy we’ve always had in Finland. The only difference was that we didn’t spend the whole time in the studio, a commercial recording studio. We just did the drums in a commercial studio, and the band has its own warehouse and we built stuff so we could record the rest of the stuff at the warehouse, which was kind of convenient because it’s within Helsinki area and as I said, we had enough professional gear to record everything over there so I think it was great!

How do you work all together we you compose an album?

Well Alexi writes the music and the riffs, so when he has ideas, we go to the rehearsal room and then we jam and try the ideas, arrange them… As a band. That’s how it works.

There is a particular song on this album: “Dead man’s hand on You” which is a kind of CHILDREN OF BODOM’s style ballad. How did you come to this?

Yeah it’s definitely the slowest song we’ve ever done; I think it was a good thing to do it. I think it kind of started as an experiment but then we found out that it works so we did it.
We knew that that song would have mixed reviews but when we play it live it gets very good reactions…

Yeah it gives fresh air, something new. “Halo of Blood” is the 8th CHILDREN OF BODOM album. When you stare behind and see the years that have passed, what do you think about the evolution of the band?

There definitely have been an evolution, the music and the sound have changed quite a lot, which for me is very natural because we started when we were eighteen and we were kids and we didn’t know much about everything. And also, for us, it was always very important not to try to make the same album twice even though there were good sales or good reviews for something, some albums we didn’t want to stick with any kind of format to keep the evolution going naturally and that’s what we’ve always done.

There’s a kind of fashion with metal band consisting in re recording old albums. Are you interested in this kind of thing?

No.

Definitely no!

No! (Laugh)

(Laugh) Ok so I’ll jump on to my next question!
Could we expect something new on this tour?

Oh yeah there are videos screens. We have never had this before and that’s really nice, and tonight the venue is big enough to put all of them. We have seven special screens that work as video screen and also as light pictures and I think it’s really cool idea, especially on the biggest stages where they all fit and it’s a very looking thing.

You might have used them in the “Zenith” in Paris few days ago. It’s a big venue, so how was this show?

It was great; it was one of the best shows on this tour definitely. Big crowd, great crowd, it was cool.

And it’s a great pleasure for French people because France has always been a part of the CHILDREN OF BODOM tours. What kind of relationship do you have with our country and the fans?

I remember that the shows and the crowds are always good. The band always really likes to play in France. In Paris there have been some problems with venues, sometimes we didn’t find the perfect one. One tour we play in this place which was simply too hot to play, and some other things.
One venue, back in the day, was cool but it burned down, I can’t remember the name, but in general we always enjoyed playing in France.

Nowadays the Finnish metal scene is very respected, with bands like Nightwish, Stratovarius, Sonata Arctica, Children of Bodom etc… That’s your opinion about this? The way Finland gets all these big bands?

I don’t know… I don’t have an answer to that; I mean it just happened to be the time and era because Finland has always had a lot of metal bands and it probably always will but it was just this time in the whole music industry and so when these Finnish metal bands really made it through and became bigger than just playing in Finland.

Yeah because now it becomes a kind of “blockbuster country”.

Yeah!

And what are the plans for 2004?

2014…

Yeah 2014! Told you that I was tired! (Laugh)

(Laugh) Hum, next year we gonna do, it’s not announced, the US tour, there’s going to be a world around tour, and for the Summer time some festivals in Europe.

Will you be at the Hellfest?

It sounds logical so I hope we could do Hellfest…

Ok so let’s wait!
Little question for you Janne, what about your other band “Warmen”? You’re supposed to release a new album; can you tell us a little bit more?

Well I have fully finish the record, it’s fully mastered, I already have the album but I don’t have a record deal right now and because the music industry is shit I might not want to release it via a normal record company anymore, so now I’m looking into this: my manager had this great idea about crowdfunding websites. So I would put the album on these websites and release it that way and I’m still doing some background work on this, but I still hope I can get it released within December of this year, but I’m a little bit running out of time. I hope but I’m on tour and it’s sometimes hard to take care of some business when you’re on tour. So I hope I can get it released within this year or definitely in January.

And will we have a tour later?

Obviously next year I’m going to be busy with COB… The last part of 2014 is fully empty now for COB, so there might be a chance of playing some shows…

And for COB, any DVD ideas or live record?

Not currently… Let’s see what happen next year because there’s still a lot of touring for us, but not on this European part, no.

Well I guess we’ve reached the end of this interview, so I let you the final words if you want to conclude or say something to the French fans.

I want to thank our fans in France for coming to the shows and buying our albums because that’s what keeps us alive and coming back to France. So thank you.

Thank you and good luck for the show!

Thank you!