The venue where the interview took place was not very sexy: one small and not very well illuminated room close to the showers of Jäähalli, where the ice hockey players can get rid of the sweat after hard matches. The singer looked tired, most certainly with hangover after the previous night show in Helsinki, but he kindly answered my questions for half an hour before getting ready for the show. After their second album, the Swedish are getting a huge number of female fans, since their “glamdeath” could be catalogued in the same league of sexy music as HIM. But a couple of hours before the show, Whiplasher does not look any glamorous at all in front of my eyes. I just see a tired guy trying to recover the hangover with a glass of wine, looking a bit sick while protecting his throat with a scarf, feeling bored if answering the same typical questions about his band and just showing more shine in his eyes when other issues are discussed during the interview far from merely music business. If I let my imagination fly, and I think about Ville Valo, and about how many fans, women (and men) would like to sleep with him all over the world, it is funny to think about the concept of glamour, don´t you think? Imagine that you would meet a rock star while peeing in the toilet, or while he would be wasted and puking in a dark corner…and…glamour is dead.
Probably, that is the good thing about music: just a theater, a big circus, pure fantasy that makes us evade for some hours from our worries. And certainly, the magic works for Deathstars, that with some more grams of make up on their faces are able to deliver a more than decent performance during the short time that they are allowed to play on stage. I stay to see the American band Korn, which is heading the night show. I have encountered feelings for them, since I associate Nu Metal with a period of crisis for my beloved and classic heavy metal. On the other hand, the band gives a good show and I can feel, mixed with the audience in the first rows, that people are really having fun. I can look back without anger to those years when bands like Korn irrupted in the metal scene and see that mixing some styles can be always healthier for the music in general. Nonetheless, it is something that my beloved Aerosmith did many years ago when recording Walk this Way with Run DMC.
In any case, if Ville Valo ever comes to the toilet to pee close to me, I will try to erase that image from my mind and just remember his glamour on stage. That is where the truly rock stars really belong to. For the rest of the occasions…we are all just human beings with tired eyes.