- We never had a considered plan to start a band and make a record. We got to know each other through school and our studies, then we started to make music together, and little by little we realised that we had enough songs to make an album. We thought that we'd break even if we could sell a couple of hundred records to our friends. It really took us by surprise how things started to roll after gigs and good reviews.

The singer and rapper of Don Johnson Big Band, Tommy Lindgren, looks both confused and enthusiastic. In three years, the album Support de Microphones, which the young schoolboys from Helsinki made by themselves in 2000, has become one of the cult classics of rhythm music in Finland. In addition, the album combining hip hop, jazz, pop and a little bit of everything else has been an amazing commercial success - despite the fact that the guys first sold the album straight out of their backpacks and its entire marketing budget consisted of a few posters pasted on electric boxes in downtown Helsinki. With its total of almost 10,000 sold copies, Support de Microphones is probably the best-selling self-released album in Finnish music history.

Now the band that made its name with the self-released album and diligent touring is rising straight into the Finnish pop elite. The new album, Breaking Daylight, is an even more disarming package of multi-cultural influences and spirited effort, and it has aroused even higher hopes of considerable financial results. The record is released by a major label (Universal Music) and the first single, One MC, One Delay, has already become a radio hit.

So far, Tommy Lindgren has been well known only in the music circles, although he has been in the public eye also talking about his day job as spokesperson for Amnesty International. Many are already expecting the quick-witted and charismatic Lindgren to become the first "everybody's favourite star" of Finnish rhythm music.


- Our audience is very heterogeneous. For example, our music may be categorised as hip hop, but some of our listeners are quite clearly people who would never admit to liking hip hop. I think it's a natural result of the fact that all four of us are so different in terms of our taste in music that the resulting mixture is extremely schizophrenic. In that respect, our new album has made us feel really relieved and happy. It's a kind of a one-band compilation. It's almost as if each track is played by a different band.


- It has influences from the cultural heritage of black rhythm music including hip hop, jazz, blues and certain features of soul. And everything else for a couple of hundred years before that. Live play has enhanced the entertainment aspect of our music. It probably isn't such a major factor on the album, but playing live demands good floor-fillers. After all, live gigs are played to make people feel good and have fun. At live shows we're all about entertainment and making people dance. We have no burning desire to always be as non-commercial as possible.


- We think about ourselves more as music lovers than as musicians. Nevertheless, the important thing about music isn't brilliant playing or brilliant compositions but a certain energy it radiates. We're rather mediocre players that somehow get away with it. But the audience has to see that the band is having fun, and then it will enjoy itself. It would be totally insane to make music without thinking about the listeners. Maybe that energy and enthusiasm and joy attract all those different kinds of people who come and listen to us.


- Well, maybe, yes. It's true that at times we're almost annoyingly presentable and house-trained guys. But it also leads to quite confusing situations. When our musical background isn't very pop but sometimes even rather experimental, it feels weird to read fan letters sent to the Ilosaarirock music festival where someone says that Tiktak (Finnish mainstream girl band) and Don Johnson Big Band were the best of all. But in the end, it's all positive. On the other hand, I'd like to see that for the music, it's pretty irrelevant that we come from happy middle-class families and have even got into higher education.


- No, it's not. But I hope people can still hear that we're rather serious about making music, and at times there's even a fair amount of rage in it. And I'd like to think that our music can also be outspoken, that it can shake people up. That kind of music doesn't necessarily have to emerge from awful suffering or be born of shit.


- Yeah. And more generally, it all traces back to the age of romanticism and the white middle class' illusion that all great art is born of suffering. When it comes to hip hop, a lot of new and extremely creative music has been created in inner cities, in conditions where the social situation is an important basis for the culture. But naturally it doesn't mean that those kinds of conditions are a permanent requirement for the music if people want to promote it and refine it all around the world.

- We've been aware of who we are and what we do ever since the beginning. It'd be absolutely crazy to think that we're something we're not. It's much more productive to focus on making music that somehow sounds and feels like us. In a way, the most natural way of combining different cultures is not doing it intentionally but stumbling onto it by instinctively doing our own thing.


- This band would no doubt be around, and I would be doing this rap thing, even if I hadn't gone to USA as an exchange student. On the other hand, it was a very special year for me. I went to stay with a Jewish single-parent family in Southern California where my younger brother became one of the most important people in my life and my mentor in all things jazz-related, for example. Yeah, that year meant a lot to me. But if we're considering about my relationship with Americanism and American culture imperialism, I feel at ease, 'cause I think that our music is very Finnish.

- Then again I've learned to realise that there are many Americas. I take a totally different view of the culture the European-American middle class is force-feeding to the world than for example of hip hop or '70s jazz or other more marginal American cultural phenomena. Even though that culture too would spread around the world, I don't see it in the same way as a sign of cultural imperialism. And the fact that I for my part promote that kind of music here doesn't necessarily make me part of the American crusade. An album exactly like the one we've just finished could never be made in the United States. In the end, it involves a lot of local values.


- Well, we clearly are a Helsinki-based band. When we started in the music scene, we went to see a lot of Giant Robot gigs and surely took many influences. At the moment there are a lot of really cool bands in Helsinki. It's great that Quintessence has completed their record, Nuspirit Helsinki has released an album, and there are a plenty of new interesting projects ahead.


- That is a threat, yes. And I'm sure there are many professional musicians who have to play a fair amount of gigs they're not too excited about.


- I don't know if it sounds at all convincing, but I do always try to say that my day job is a day job and my music job is a music job. I'm just beginning to grasp the full scope of all the things that can be said in song lyrics, for example, and figuring out how to find my own voice and tell people things with songs. I'm not comfortable with the idea that all songs are opportunities to grab the megaphone and start preaching. That is yet another reason why I keep my roles separate. I wound up with Amnesty long before the band even existed. Both these things have just grown bigger and bigger in my life. I doubt that anyone in our band is opposed to my values or views, but those values are hardly the foundation on which we want to build our identity as a band. After all, we are more of an amoral entertainer than a project aiming to save the world.


- Well, that's the key thing right there. If the message is an essential part of how a band does things, then so be it. Our approach is based more on individual songs. We think about the thematic each piece calls for. It's more important to have your own attitude towards things. It doesn't matter how big the issues are, or how mundane, going to the store or the war in Iraq, you have to express them your own way.


- Of course it has been influenced by the leftist song tradition. But it might also be that pop culture has a sprit that responds to the more general materialistic and self-centred view of the world.


- That's true. And as a consequence it has its own more marginal counterforces that criticise also the values and outlook on life plugged by mainstream hip hop.


- With a deep sigh… On one hand it's leftist, but on the other hand it's also quite vague. It's so hard to form a conclusive opinion of so many things, so why even waste time trying? There are times when I think no values are absolute, except at the moment you're campaigning for them. Passivity and indifference are among the things I'm against. Doing something, anything, is always better than doing nothing at all.


- Of course, and I believe in them too. On the other hand, it's a relevant question whether the values campaigned for by Amnesty, in China for example, go together with what is best for the consumerist culture and western corporations. Discussion on European and Asian human rights, on individuality and communality, is a very relevant and far too big of an issue for me to answer. But it's an important discussion for Amnesty. Then again, the values at the core of Amnesty's work are pretty self-explanatory: They deal with the physical and mental integrity of people and of human life. They're a good starting point no matter where in the world people are.



Photos: Okko Oinonen