Nosturi and other stuff

Thursday, January 1, 2009, at home.
So, we arrived safely at Helsinki-Vantaa on Tuesday afternoon, got all our stuff from the belt and headed whoever to where ever. Jonne and Valohomo drove to Lahti, Hittis went to his brother's place, Juho went I don't know where and the rest of us drove to Järvenpää to spend a night in hotel. Well, I only went there to spend a few hours before my girlfriend would come from work in Kouvola and pick me up and take me home to Tampere.

The next show was of course in Nosturi, Helsinki on New Year's Eve with Kiuas and Moonsorrow headlining. I've been talking at home so much about how good start for a day is a bottle or two red wine so we started our morning with red wine and almost missed our train to Helsinki. In Helsinki we walked to Nosturi and found out that we have nothing to do. We arrived a bit after 16 and we started really working at 20:10 with the soundcheck. It was of course nice to meet the guys from the other bands again but otherwise the afternoon was quite boring. Basically just sitting at the backstage or in the hall watching others working and trying not to drink too much.

The show itself was a good one. We played exactly the same set that we did already a couple of times with InEx so it went quite well. We know how to do that already. Audience was really good as well and it was really nice to see that most if not all of them were already inside the venue when we started which is not always the case with opening bands in Finland. I could easily spot a few old friends in the audience. A special mention goes to this English girl who we've met many times around UK already, last time was in London on the Finnish Fire tour I think. Apologies to all the friends who wanted to say "hello". We left to Tampere already during Kiuas' set.

So, 2008 is now past. Was it a good year? It was. We released a good album and did about 90 shows. We travelled around the world a few times, drank a lot of alcohol and Coke Light/Pepsi Max (Juho's department), made a lot of new friends, hopefully not many enemies, did a couple of successful longer tours, dozens of festivals and ended the year on a high note with In Extremo and finally with the Finnish audience in Nosturi. Thank you.

2009. The year for us is already shaping up. The first live appearances will be around mid-March. We'll use January well and rehearse the material for the next album. Recordings will start in the beginning of February and the release date is somewhere in September 2009. And of course there's the North American tour in April-May.

Have a good year!

The final results

Düsseldorf airport at around 11. The short InEx tour is over. It was a really nice one. I wish all the tours we'll ever do will be like that. I had already lost my trust that there actually is that thing called German punctuality, but I guess I have just been working with wrong Germans. Everything worked like a clock. We only had to take care that we start on time and especially finish on time and all the rest was someone else's problem.

The last show was in Leipzig in a venue called Haus Auensee.
I have no idea when it was originally built and what for, but it was a really interesting building. The stage for example had a really beautiful ornamented arc above it. It was quite nice except that at one point there was terrible smell of shit around the entire building but I can honestly say that it wasn't me!

Our show was like the others. The audience
was apart from a few members quite unaware of us. Every time when we started our set we got this blank stare for a while, then they started tapping their feet, later they start even clapping their hands and finally they are smiling and dancing. New fans! Yeehaw! Yesterday I even managed to see the start of InEx set so it was a success in that sense as well.

We were leaving quite soon after InEx set since we had a long drive to Düsseldorf. I didn't want to go InEx's dressing room right after they had finished so I couldn't really say thank you or goodbye, but their lead singer was leaving quite soon as well and he came to our bus to say goodbye and also said something about the plans for the next summer. We'll see what happens. Now the boarding is about to start. To the Batmobile!