First we drift from a café after the closing signal to continue the interview at a 24-hour gas station. As the Johnsons finally get the idea to go outside to improvise the music sample Ärsyke desires to hear, something very fundamental is crystallised in the course of the evening. This city knows their name from the sides of posts, railings and dustbins, from the yellow stickers that have appeared during this spring and summer – and it seems that they make music that belongs precisely to these spots. Don Johnson Big Band lets you hear the beautifully ugly details of the city, the roadways, lift shafts and the ventilation pipes.

It isn’t too surprising that half of the band, keyboard player Johannes Laiho and the master of wind instruments Pekka Mikkonen study architecture. The songs of DJBB’s debut album, Support de Microphones, are architectonic and cinematic, a musical landscape structured around the sewer network of drum loops. Even the rap texts of vocalist Tommy Lindgren focus on the rapid-rhymed structure. It doesn’t feature the traditional storytelling progressing from the beginning to the end, it doesn’t involve girls, boys and fancying, but it is a mass of words that sometimes covers the songs with almost harsh facades. “Allow me to reiterate my concern for the bitter fate/of poverty-stricken cities you choose to discriminate/how inconsiderate to set a rate to eliminate/a culture you gave root to you now disintegrate,” Tommy formulates in the first minutes of the album.


It’s possible to fear at first that the produced material calculatedly crafted by Johannes and the guitarist-drummer Kari Saarilahti, and polished by Pekka’s lingering flute and saxophone melodies as well as with Tommy’s confident lyrics, might verge on excessive coolness; serve as all too perfect background music for trendy bars. Johannes admits that the band’s music also attracts people only interested in boosting their own street cred, but comments it merely with: “What can you do if they dig it.” The entirety is in any case much deeper: that much soon becomes obvious.

When asked about the early stages of the band and the forming of their musical style, Johannes throws back a surprising question: ”Have you ever been to Nanking?” The records by the mother country’s easy listening artists playing year after year in the Chinese restaurant at Kalevankatu street certainly embed themselves in the memories of all visitors – and according to Johannes, they have also inspired DJBB. Similar stories – another example of which might be the fact that, as it turns out, Kari has an almost complete collection of Yngwie Malmsteen albums, par one (”Yngwie’s art gives me strength”) – tell about the multi-dimensionality of the Johnsons’ foundations and, above all, about the humour that can be found at the core of everything.

”We’ve tried to keep our humour as something not too clever or too obvious,” Johannes emphasises. ”The humour is mostly connected with the fact that we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously,” Tommy adds. These might be the key points of the Johnson concept, as the band itself refers to its aesthetics.


So, for DJBB, humourlessness isn’t a requirement for musical ambition, but on the other hand, allowing humour doesn’t necessarily call for putting on comical wigs as a sign of having fun. The gestures may in the least be almost unnoticeable as is shown by Kari’s description of one of the two excellent cover songs on the album, the classic What a Wonderful World: “The Johnson concept manifests itself in the Wonderful World in the middle of the song as a beeping that is Morse code for ‘KILL KILL’ in reverse.”

In other words the concept is subtle irony – boldly extended to cover also the band itself. In this respect DJBB stands out in the turn of the century atmosphere: now, when even the least media and advertising agencies have woken up to using irony as a fun tool in giving off a witty image of any old brand without never really having to argue anything about anything, it’s about time to let the phenomena that actually expose themselves to critique to come forward.

The gig at Motti restaurant in the early autumn illustrates DJBB’s attitude well with this respect. At the end of a convincing set of groove, they could afford to serve Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis as the last encore, accompanied completely surprisingly with a Salvation Army style guitar-maracas-tambourine-combo – Tommy even sang first with a Gallagheresque British accent, then like Elvis. In writing the solution may seem simply inconceivable, but when heard, the sincerely emotional show had an air of warm absurdity which made the crowd, huddled up in a tight ring, to sing along with their cheeks glowing like at a Christmas party. Real credibility comes out when people aren’t needlessly worrying all the time about losing it.



Photos: Aino Huovio