Author: fgt

Wardruna are about to turn the Royal Albert Hall from an Italianate marvel into a Nordic ritual landscape. Before that, though, JO QUAIL brings the kind of classical splendour this building was made for – albeit with a twist. The London cellist is a one-woman dynamo who, through the power of looper pedals, crafts entire symphonies from just one instrument. Rex introduces her singular style, stacking layers of noise and silken texture from her varied playing. She even adds percussion by smacking her cello. It sounds simple, yet her talent is proven by the towering compositions she creates, as well as the fact she’s the only artist doing this on this scale.

There are lots of misconceptions about WARDRUNA. Many view Einar Selvik’s collective as a Viking nostalgia fest – a reputation they’ve inadvertently played into by soundtracking Vikings and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. However, they pull influence from across Nordic history and Norse mythology, with the goal not of mindlessly celebrating olden times, but simply giving their traditions a voice in the modern age.

That desire to sustain ancient music in the 21st century drives this evening. Opening with Kvitravn, Wardruna walk onstage while video of a white raven is projected onto their plain backdrop. The seven-piece, including multiple vocalists and percussionists, then fill this grand venue with historical power, Selvik’s shamanic bellows bouncing off the balusters. That mythical quality is only strengthened by the spotlights in front of the band, which cast imposing shadows onto the curtain and organs behind them.

There’s no banter until the very end, retaining the mysticism, but beyond that the show is structured like a contemporary rock extravaganza. Selvik gets the almost customary solo acoustic moment with Voluspá, plucking his kravik-lyre while footage of his performance gets screened above his head. More cinematic pomp comes throughout the night, with two musicians taking up horns centre-stage during Tyr for a tribal display that casts another impressive shadow. Rotlaust Tre Fell later concludes in cataclysmic fashion, the blasts of drumming and near-overwhelming vocals abruptly ceasing with video of a lightning bolt.

The mix of the past’s music and today’s production crescendos during Helvegen. With a clap of pyrotechnics, the band light flame torches around the stage and bring their ritual to its dramatic apex. Selvik ends the night alone once again, playing the lullaby Hibjørnen, offering the denouement the Albert Hall needs after almost two hours of transcendent brilliance.

Wardruna’s aim is to prove the relevance of certain bygone ways, and tonight could not have been a more rousing declaration of “mission accomplished”.

Wardruna setlist: Royal Albert Hall, London – March 19, 2025

Kvitravn
Hertan
Skugge
Solringen
Heimta Thurs
Runaljod
Lyfjaberg
Voluspá
Tyr
Isa
Grá
Himmindotter
Rotlaust Tre Fell
Fehu
Helvegen
Hibjørnen

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Prog was delighted to present Carl Palmer with 2017’s Prog God Award at the Progressive Music Awards. Sadly the last surviving member of Emerson Lake & Palmer, the drummer has worked with some of the biggest names in prog and influenced many others. Ahead of the presentation ceremony he looked back on his career to date.

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When the greats of modern music reach pensionable age, it seems reasonable to expect everything to slow down a little. Enthusiasm for touring the world and churning out new music often diminishes as the years pass and energy levels inevitably start to flag. That’s how things work for most veteran musicians – but Carl Palmer is not most musicians. Now aged 67, the man who has conquered the music world on at least two separate occasions has never seemed less likely to ease off on the accelerator.

He speaks to Prog a matter of hours after returning home after an extensive tour with Asia (now fronted by Billy Sherwood, in the wake of former incumbent John Wetton’s death in January 2017) as main support to AOR legends Journey. Within days of concluding our conversation, he’ll be off again to play shows with his own current band, Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy.

He sounds like a man with no time to waste: he speaks quickly, eager to affirm how lucky he feels to have pursued his greatest love for the last 50 years. Above all, he sounds thrilled to still be making a living from playing the drums – something he was plainly destined to do.

“I don’t want to sound too blasé, but it was like a duck to water thing for me,” Palmer says. “I actually started off playing banjo when I was five, had a go on the violin when I was 10 and moved to the drum set when I was 11. My great-grandfather was a drummer. His brother was also a professional musician – he conducted at the London Palladium and was a Professor of Music at the Royal Academy. Their mother was a classical guitar player, so that’s where the line came from.

“I learned by ear to start with, but then I got a teacher and learned to read. My family thought that as long as you could read music, you always had a chance of getting a job somewhere. There was no thought of being a Prog God back then!”

Convinced he was destined to make a living as a jobbing drummer, Palmer began to pay his dues as a member of the orchestra at the local Locarno club. Although increasingly entranced by the somewhat rowdier guitar-based music that was starting to grab the world’s attention, his apprenticeship was firmly in the realms of trad jazz and ballroom dancing.

“I’d play Glenn Miller one night, formation dancing the next, then Latin night, and then my favourite, which was Top Of The Pops night. I’d get the chance to play all the stuff I’d seen on TV the week before – The Kinks or whatever it was. I’d been working for eight months or so, playing in traditional jazz groups and blues groups, but I’d never really been in a band with guitars.”

He remained blissfully unaware of the glories to come as he made his first steps into the world of bona fide rock’n’roll. In 1964, he spotted a ‘drummer wanted’ ad in the local paper and decided to give it his best shot, heading straight to the local ballroom where The King Bees were holding auditions.

“I was late, actually!” Palmer chuckles. “The ballroom was just a 15-minute walk from the house in Birmingham, but when I got there they’d finished the audition and were packing the equipment away. They asked if I still wanted to try out. They gave me a pile of 45s and said, ‘Do you wanna take these home and learn them?’ So I went back and put the records on and they waited for me. I came back and played through everything they wanted and they were amazed! But it was very easy, to be honest. I didn’t understand the drama! So that was it. I joined them and played with them right up until I left school.”

With the rock’n’roll bit between his teeth, he soon made his next step towards the big time. In 1966, fresh from having a No.1 hit with his version of The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Time, London’s finest rock’n’soul singer, Chris Farlowe, was auditioning for a new drummer. Barely through the school gates as his final term ended, Palmer admits he fancied his chances, but was still pleasantly surprised to strike gold again.

Our agent would say, ‘I was going to pick your money up for you!’ and he was going to pocket an extra £200… I saw all that from a young age

“I have to admit it was a really easy start for me. I left school on the Friday, had my audition the next Wednesday at the Bag O’ Nails in Kingly Street, and by the following Friday I was somewhere in Germany, playing with Chris at the Star-Club in Hamburg. That was my first real professional job. I think I had my 16th birthday in Germany. I was playing with people like Dave Greenslade, Albert Lee… These were great players, so it was a brilliant way to start.”

Five decades on from those formative days, Palmer’s reputation as one of the greatest drummers of all time is almost equalled by his reputation for taking care of business. Famously clean-living – he claims never to have smoked or drunk a pint of lager, let alone indulged in anything more illicit – he looks far leaner and healthier than most of us will (or do) at 67 years of age, and has clearly benefited from having his eyes wide open throughout his career.

“I remember the first time I saw the way things really worked,” he says. “Agents would give us a contract stating one sum of money. I’d go with Chris Farlowe to see the promoter and Chris would pick up an extra £200 on top of the agreed fee, because that’s what the promoter had was on his contract. Then our agent would come in the back door and say, ‘Oh Chris, I came up for the day to see you… I was going to come and pick your money up for you!’ and obviously he was going to pocket the extra £200. So I saw all that from a young age. It was a proper learning curve and I enjoyed every minute of it.”

Hell-bent on earning himself an unbeatable CV, between 1967 and 1969, Palmer was a member of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, starting with a US tour that followed the band’s sudden presence at the top of charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Torn between taking a punt on something new and sticking with the more secure Chris Farlowe gig, the still-teenage drummer once again considered himself a very lucky boy.

“I was a bit apprehensive about going to the States with Arthur Brown,” he admits. “But it was a good offer, so I said to Chris, ‘Look, I’ve got this opportunity; if I go and I don’t like it, can I have my job back when I return?’ It was a bold move – but I figured that you’ve got to try!

“He said, ‘Yeah, you can, but you’ve got to find me a new drummer and he’s got to be really good!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can find someone,’ and that was the first job that I handed to my mate John Bonham. He jumped at the chance because it was a regular job that paid 40 quid a week.”

After two years playing drums for a man with (if you’ll pardon our French) a flaming helmet, Palmer felt it was time to move on; and, ever the pragmatist, he took Brown’s keyboard maestro Vincent Crane with him and formed Atomic Rooster.

The underground prog rock movement was still in its infancy at that point, but both Palmer with his new band, and Keith Emerson with The Nice, were making waves at a critical moment in music’s evolution.

In 1970, after building up a sizeable following in the UK and northern Europe, Atomic Rooster started work on songs for their second studio album; but destiny had other ideas.

“The first track we did was Tomorrow Night, which was a big hit later on,” Palmer recalls. “But during that period I got the call from Keith Emerson’s manager, Tony Stratton-Smith, who asked if I’d go along for an audition. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got my own band and it’s doing okay…’ but clearly I ended up joining Greg Lake and Keith, which obviously wasn’t such a bad decision!”

Palmer seems ferociously enthusiastic about almost everything in his non-stop, pulse-driven life – but his love and admiration for the music he made with ELP is patently on another level entirely. Happy to embrace their unofficial status as standard-bearers for prog’s greatest excesses, but equally determined to celebrate the overwhelming quality of classic albums like Brain Salad Surgery and Trilogy, he recalls those heady days of world domination with palpable fondness, stating that playing with ELP was “a dream come true, basically.”

“I’d always wanted to play classical music but I didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” he explains. “I didn’t know how to go about it until I bought an album by a French piano player called Jacques Loussier. He used to play in a trio with bass and drums and they’d play Bach in a jazz format. I really enjoyed that. When I met Keith for the first time, he’d already started adapting classical music, but I honestly didn’t think I was going to be in a band with him down the line. Eventually I got the chance to work with him – so ELP fulfilled a musical dream.”

Given the way music and pop culture were evolving in the mid-70s, with disco and punk dominating airwaves and column inches, ELP’s initial, stuttering demise didn’t come as a particularly great shock to the world at large. After 1978’s borderline calamitous Love Beach, the trio went their separate ways, a decision Palmer maintains was the only credible option.

“We never argued about money; we never argued over women or over equipment; we only ever argued about music,” he avows. “But we’d had four unbelievable years and made five really big albums, and there was nothing left, really. It was all over by ’79. When the punk movement came in, we took it badly, like, ‘Oh dear, no one wants us any more!’ We’d never been through the school of hard knocks. We didn’t know what it meant to go out and really have to work hard at it.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer would, eform twice in the decades that followed their initial flurry of chart-ravaging hugeness. Even diehard fans might struggle to conjure much enthusiasm for 1992’s patchy Black Moon or its even less appealing 1994 follow‑up In The Hot Seat, but that earlier catalogue of groundbreaking brilliance was never likely to be surpassed. Besides which, everyone is allowed to make mistakes, and over 50 years, even Carl Palmer has dropped a clanger or two. Who dares to recall 3 and their 1988 album The Power Of Three or, even more amusingly, Palmer’s first post-ELP project, the undeniably woeful PM?

Radio had become very corporate in America… you’d only hear ELP or Pink Floyd at two in the morning! Asia fell into a space that was ready to go

“Oh, that was absolute rubbish – I’m not going to hide from that one!” he roars, recalling 1980’s wildly misguided 1:PM album. “It was rubbish and I got it wrong. The problem was, I like classical music and I like pop music but it’s a terrible combination to be involved with. I like tunes, I can’t help it. That’s why ELP covered it all for me. We had the classical thing but we also had some really pretty tunes that got radio play. With PM, I went into just playing tunes and it didn’t work. I also broke the rule and ended up playing with all American musicians… and it turns out we do think differently! So yes, that was a complete disaster.”

The achievements and sheer bloody‑minded uniqueness of ELP alone would be sufficient – but such is Palmer’s unwavering intensity and remorseless get-up-and-go that he deftly repeated the trick in the 80s, conquering charts all over the world with Asia.

Still clearly affected by the death of John Wetton, he speaks glowingly of the chemistry that sparked into life when he joined forces with his late friend plus guitarist Steve Howe and keyboardist Geoff Downes in 1981. “Yeah, that time it was with English guys and so we had a lot of commercial success! We still had that proggy thing in there but when it came to the tunes, they were so good; and the production was so great, I could really appreciate the beauty of it.

“Radio had become very corporate in America. They wouldn’t play long prog pieces in the daytime, so you’d only hear ELP or Pink Floyd at two in the morning! Asia fell into a space that was ready to go and I’m very proud of it.”

While we’re sauntering along memory lane, it’s a good opportunity to ask about Palmer’s rarely-celebrated collaboration with Mike Oldfield on 1982’s classic Five Miles Out album. One of the more surprising team-ups in prog history (it’s genuinely hard to imagine the quiet and reclusive Oldfield clicking with the verbose and energetic Palmer, but evidently they did), it led to the stunning Mount Teidi, an exquisite meeting of minds named after a volcano on Tenerife, the island the drummer called home for nearly three decades.

“I first spoke to Mike when I was putting together Works I with ELP, and we had a big, long piece called Pirates that I thought he could help with,” he recalls. “But then years later he said, ‘I’ve got something which I think you might like…’ so I went down [to Oldfield’s studio] and there it was – Mount Teidi was born.

“It was just a one-off thing and we never did anything else, but Mike’s a really nice guy. He’s extremely talented. He’s a loner and likes to come out when he wants to. He’s unbelievably professional and a great musician all‑round.”

It might be hard to believe, but Carl Palmer has yet another string to his multifarious bow. He’s been producing extraordinary, eye-frazzling artworks using drumsticks equipped with LED lights; it’s an endearingly eccentric sideline, and yet another way for Palmer to indulge his obsession with music and its limitless possibilities.

“It all started in ’73 when I started taping little light bulbs to the end of the drumsticks, with a little wire that ran down to a battery on the floor,” he says. “I got a photographer friend of mine to take pictures of me miming playing the drums, because you’d get all these flashes and arcs and shadows. He took some pictures and one of them ended up in the Birmingham Mail, and it was a fantastic picture. Roll forward about 30 years, they started to develop drumsticks where the tip was a little LED light, but every time I got a pair, they broke. They weren’t very durable. Roll forward another 10 years and they invented some that were durable. You couldn’t break them, the lights never went out and they were self-generating.

What’s helped me is playing with younger musicians. They’re so dedicated… It makes me cry sometimes, it’s so fantastic

“You can create some incredible canvases. So I teamed up with the guys at a company called SceneFour and I’ve had two art books out. We’ve sold a lot of artwork and I’ve raised over 30,000 dollars for charity so far.”

The most recent series of canvases that Palmer has created are a trio of tributes to Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and John Wetton, titled Welcome Back, Lucky Man and Heat Of The Moment respectively. It’s not, as he admits, a project he had ever wished to pursue, but it’s a great way to pay his respects to such esteemed colleagues.

Meanwhile, the music of ELP is alive and well and being belted out with some force by Palmer and his current henchmen, guitarist Paul Bielatowicz and bassist Simon Fitzpatrick, as Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy. As the only surviving member of the prog titans, he plainly feels a responsibility to breathe fresh life into the challenging and ambitious music that first made him a star.

“I’ve had my band since about 2009. Paul and Simon are both phenomenal players,” he says. “It’s instrumental prog rock with a kind of metal edge. You’ll either like it or you won’t. I think I’m more a delicatessen than a supermarket these days. I understand there’s only a certain amount of people that are going to enjoy what I do, but the ones who do enjoy it really love it, and that’s what it’s all about.

“What’s helped me is playing with younger musicians. They’re so dedicated to being the best they can be at their craft. It makes me cry sometimes, it’s so fantastic. That keeps me on top of my game.”

More than 50 years after first earning a crust with sticks in hand, Palmer remains an unstoppable force of nature. He ends our conversation by noting that, somewhat against the odds, the near-septuagenarian is still improving as a drummer; and as a result he’s enjoying himself more than ever.

“My philosophy is as simple as this: if I can improve, I’m gonna carry on playing and working,” he explains. “This is what I love to do and I’ve never had a proper job, if you know what I mean.

“If I can’t improve but I can maintain a standard, I’m gonna carry on. But if I can’t maintain the standard and I’m not improving, I’m gonna be gone and you’ll never get another interview from me again, because I’ll be out. I haven’t reached the stage yet where I’m just maintaining a standard, so I’m very happy. I think I’ve got another 10 years in me!”

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s. 

Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody has spoken about how Nirvana‘s first and only show in Belfast, Northern Ireland made him want to be in a band.

As a teenager, the first rock band that Lightbody fell in love with – “or at least the first one I’ll admit to getting into” he once told Rolling Stone – was AC/DC, but it was hearing Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind which “exploded everything”, and flicked a switch within the County Down schoolboy.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

With their fifth album Nine Lives about to propel them onto the world stage, the Von Hertzen Brothers told Prog about singing in sleeping bags, recording in a monastery and dreams of the Royal Albert Hall in 2013.

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“There’s my snare drum,” says Mikko von Hertzen, strapping a thin rail of bells to the side of his boot, holding it in place with what looks like a yard of gaffa tape. His brother, Kie (guitar, vocals), attaches a jumbled ball of small bells to his own boot. They walk off grinning and jingling. Jonne, the most reserved and youngest of the three, sits happily back in his chair, his bass low on his hips, a rumble of notes gravitating across the floor of the basement studio of the Future’s West London office.

The room is surprisingly full, and it quickly becomes apparent why when the three brothers break into an acoustic reading of River, from 2006’s Approach album. Mikko supplements his makeshift snare with a bass drum fashioned from a plastic case; he’s playing guitar and singing lead too – though that could be any of them. As soloists they’re beyond accomplished; together they’re out of this world. After three runs at River – all note-perfect – they cheerily set about rattling off Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, leaving the makeshift audience quietly astonished by their virtuosity; they seem able to easily hurdle most of Freddie Mercury’s somewhat testing high notes.

Heavy snow has set in over London as they settle into the Future boardroom, a corner office with tall windows looking out over the crystalline sky. While the UK’s in thrall to a smattering of the white stuff, the three Finns are less impressed. Kie glances out of the window: “You call this snow? This isn’t snow.”

The last time the Von Hertzen Brothers felt the cold was late last year on a short European tour opening for Opeth. Their latest album, Nine Lives – the first where they opted to record, engineer and oversee everything themselves – was running late. They’d overshot their self-imposed deadline, and consequently found themselves all bunched up in the back of their tour bus, wrapped up tightly in their sleeping bags, recording the final harmony tracks.

“It was a trial,” says Mikko. “We booked ourselves on tour with Opeth while we were still in the studio, so we were stressed over that. We couldn’t keep the deadline – we got delayed by a month.”

“We were singing in the middle of a snowstorm in Sweden,” says Kie, looking a little pained by the memory. “It was quite rough and stressful. Everyone had a day off, and we were in this freezing bus trying to get the vocals done.”

“It did work, but it was tough,” Mikko adds, “but we changed the way of doing things by recording the whole album ourselves, engineering everything ourselves, editing it all ourselves. We didn’t go to an expensive studio. We went to our rehearsal space and took more time with it, to have that more relaxed atmosphere, to feel that we weren’t in a rush – even though we were. That’s how you end up singing in a sleeping bag.”

I don’t think we have any songs where we go, ‘I don’t know why we did it.’ Maybe on the first album there are a few?

They’ve often publicly complained about the sound of 2008’s Love Remains The Same album. Was that a case of the deadline impacting on the final result? Kie’s sigh is audible and exasperated. “That’s a perfect example of the deadline messing with the final results. If only we’d had another two weeks to mix it, there could have been more finesse; more room for the songs to breathe…” He tails off in what seems like quiet frustration.

“The songs were okay though,” asserts Mikko. “I don’t think we have any songs where we go, ‘That’s a shitty song; I don’t know why we did it.’ Maybe on the first album [Experience] there are a few?”

There aren’t – and one listen to Nine Lives has you forgiving the Von Hertzen Brothers their tardiness. It might be their fifth record, but it’s the one that will likely introduce them to a new and more international audience. At home in Finland they’re as popular as ice hockey (so very popular indeed), with a slew of gold albums and even a Finnish Grammy for their second album, 2006’s Approach. Nine Lives is, if you’ll excuse the gratuitous hyperbole, something else entirely; a grand step up – if perhaps not the cohesive and more streamlined record they planned to make when they started writing it over a year ago.

“With every album you want to rethink or reinvent yourself in some way,” says Mikko, “which was the intention. Plus we hear all the time that our songs are too long. It’s not that we’re trying to be prog or complex, it’s just the way it happens. And then if a song is short, we’ll sometimes feel like it doesn’t fulfil us somehow; that there’s not enough dynamics, or the perfectionists in us think we can make it a little better with a little more tinkering. So eventually the album took the shape that isn’t that much different to what we’ve done before – even though we thought it would be much more different.”

Named after the stunning art that adorns the album’s cover, painted by acclaimed Finnish artist Samuli Heimonen – a fan who’s been known to work to their music – Nine Lives is, for all of Mikko’s protestations, a musical evolution. (Mikko: “We were thinking, ‘Is it too much to name your album the same name as an Aerosmith album?’ Not a great Aerosmith album, admittedly, but…”), Shorter, more concise songs outnumber the longer, more drawn-out pieces, though all are united by their depth, dynamics and sheer invention.

As with all their recordings to date, it’s unfettered by anything approaching conventionality in approach or thought. Inspired as a band by Boston as much they are by Black Sabbath, the Von Hertzen Brothers are equally unafraid to give as much credence to German composer Stephan Micus as their more rock-flavoured brethren.

We got access to this church where no rock band has ever recorded anything before, and it was really special to us

“I was living in India when I was introduced to Stephan’s music,” explains Mikko, enigmatically. “It was all so wonderfully contemplative. He went to the monastery on Athos Mountain and made an album about it [1994’s Athos]; the journey to the mountain, to the monastery, and it was very reflective, and, in a good way, spooky. I was reminded of this because we went to a monastery to record an a cappella song dedicated to our late grandmother, Katri Willamo.”

World Without opens with the three brothers intoning a haunting melody in their native tongue, cloistered in the monastery in Valamo in Finland by icons and artefacts that their grandfather had bequeathed the church after his death.

“Our grandparents collected icons and art from Russian Orthodox churches,” explains Mikko. “So we had a bond to this place – it houses something like 400 pieces from their original collection. We got access to this church where no rock band has ever recorded anything before, and it was really special to us.”

“It was amazing – it was the middle of the night and the full moon was high in the sky. It was very, very special,” adds Kie, nodding.

Mikko’s in something of a reverie: “We wanted to capture the space of the church, the sense of the ages; there is something very real to it.”

Were they close to their grandmother? “We were,” says Mikko. “She was a big lover of culture. She went to the opera and classical performances, and she was very into art and music. She never played, but she was very culturally enlightened. She made a big impression on us.”

It wasn’t just their grandparents who left an indelible mark; their parents started them early, enrolling them into musical kindergarten before they could barely read or write. “It’s singing and playing with music,” says Mikko. “We were very young. All the playing we did with the other kids was somehow related to music – the dancing, the games – my enduring memory is of it being really fun.”

When they were teenagers, their father would travel abroad for his job with an insurance company, and would always receive a hero’s welcome on his return; not least because of the Quality Street toffees and music – Queen, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd – he’d bring home with him. Years before that, he played with an instrumental guitar band in the mold of The Shadows called The Savages.

We were kids having dinner while people were boozing and watching John Mayall. People were like, ‘What are these kids doing here?

“They were good,” says Mikko. “It was ’63 or ’64, and they won the best band of the year competition in Finland. Before then they really didn’t have bands in Finland. In the early 60s you’d have a singer and the backing band, but then there was a shift, and my father’s band was one of the first to call themselves a guitar band. It was because of him too that we went to see people like Johnny Winter and Frank Marino when we were young.”

“You were 10 and I was 12,” recalls Kie, “and we went to see John Mayall with the Bluesbreakers. We went with our dad and our uncle. My first gig was Eric Clapton and then The Shadows came and played when I was about 11.”

“I think the Mayall gig was one of the biggest shows for me,” says Mikko. “The one experience I remember vividly. We were at the Tavastia Club in Helsinki, which is our home venue these days. We were really young and there was an age limit; we were kids having dinner while people were boozing and watching the band. We were eating French fries and people were like, ‘What are these kids doing here?’

“Our father spoke to the manager – he’s still the manager – who let us in. I remember it being so cool. Jonne was so much younger, so he didn’t get to go. But even now it’s quite defining; that was such a strong experience.”

The trio’s debut Experience was released in 2001. Its initial recording sessions were done in a hired house called Lonely Planet in India, where Mikko was living at the time. He still keeps an apartment there. That record aside, the band has never moved to record or live away from their beloved home city of Helsinki, let alone Finland. Is that why it’s taken them this long to gain real recognition internationally?

“It’s the eternal discussion,” says Kie. “Do we go somewhere with phones and computers off, and have two weeks with no interaction with the rest of the world? It could be a very good thing – but our families are there, our rehearsal space, our studio…”

We were talking to people in the UK and the US, and they all said we should relocate the band

“We had that discussion when Love Remains… came out,” says Mikko. “We were talking to people in the UK and the US, and they all said we should relocate the band. We talked about taking our stuff to LA or London, starting from scratch again and trying and make it work from there. But then we thought, ‘Let’s make another album, and let’s try to find a manager who knows what they’re doing.’”

They do appear to be remarkably patient for a band in this fast-paced business. “As long as there are songs that want to be heard, that need to be written, then we’ll keep going,” says Kie. “The music always comes out; it’s about the process. It’s not like we won’t be happy until we’re playing the Royal Albert Hall…”

Mikko smiles: “Though we’d really, really like to play the Royal Albert Hall.”

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.