Welcome to Aitiopaikka, Nightwish drummer Jukka Nevalainen.
- Thank you.1. Soon Nightwish will release once again a new album. What does a musician feel while waiting for the reaction of the audience and listeners?
- It’s always a bit exciting to wait how people will receive it, but we’ve been making the album with a lot of piety, enthusiasm and emotion for over a year, Tuomas even longer. We’ve invested so much time, energy, dreams and hopes to it that it would be nice if people received it well, but it’s up to them. We’ll see what happens at the end of the month.
2. Your tour begins next year; the main part of it begins in spring. How does it feel to return in front of people?
- At least the enthusiasm to go on tour is big. The previous tour was so long and tough that we were happy to go on break after the final Hartwall Areena gig and it took surprisingly long after I started to want to go on tour again. But about half a year after that final gig we started to long for it again and started to discuss the new tour. But it took quite some time before we were able to release the album and now I’m looking forward next year.
3. It was a long break. If we don’t count recordings and rehearsals for the tour, how much did you play drums during those two years?
- I’m probably the drummer who trains the least in Finland. I’ve known for a long time that I should play a lot more often, but somehow other things have had higher priorities. So when we’re on a break, the sticks are mainly in the corner of my room. I train every now and then, but it’s mainly for fun. I rarely improve my playing skill in an organized, specific and purposeful way. But during the break I took an intensive one-week course from Kai Hahto, who is one of the best drummers in Finland. He taught me techniques and rehearsals which helped me improve certain weaknesses. And it seems to have paid off, so I haven’t been completely idle and void during the break.
4. I heard that you also practised jazz drumming. You have one song that requires a jazz drummer.
- That’s true. It was a completely new territory for me in drumming. It’s always fun to try new things and go to new territories. This time it was, maybe not a takeover, but at least an attempt to learn jazz playing. I’ve no jazz background so was a completely new world to me, and Kai Hahto gave me kindly a two-hour lecture which helped me get the brushes roll in at least somewhat correct way.
5. Did you even own brushes before?
- I had to buy them specifically for this. That’s how it went.
6. What else did you do during the two-year break?
- We got offspring. Our third child was born, a daughter. And it was great to have a chance to be at home during the early days of her life. But I ran our company in the meantime, which is my regular job. And I also have another company, EMP Finland, which is a mail order company. Running the business takes a great amount of time in a day.
7. You’re the chairman of Nightwish’s company Scene Nation. How much does that employ you?
- It’s seasonal job. Now when we are releasing the new album and have had recordings and other things, it has employed me a lot more. When we started the break after the previous tour, there wasn’t much activity in the company, just sending some bills and doing the normal paperwork. But releasing the album and starting the tour employs me every day.
8. How much do you have this administrative job during the tour?
- There are often new deals to make and the billing is the biggest task. We make some contracts during the tour and I have to check and sign them and handle the normal bookkeeping. Fortunately we have a talented bookkeeper who can do the calculations quite independently, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time and effort to that anymore. So running the company keeps me somewhat busy.
9. Does this take all your free time during the tour? So do you play with numbers in those evenings you don’t have a gig?
- I do it quite a lot on the road indeed. Fortunately today there’s usually an online connection available at the concert places. So whenever it’s possible, I open my laptop and check my email in order to find out what people want from us.
10. Album sales have dropped significantly from the best times and the role of fan merchandise has become bigger. How big part of your band’s trade is it?
- I have to knock on wood because so far the general dropping of record sales hasn’t affected our record sales a lot. And in fact, the best times of fan merchandise were about six years ago. During the past 2-4 years the sales of fan merchandise has dropped in Europe, and probably also worldwide. I think it’s now about one fifth of our trade while in 6-7 seven years ago it was one third of it.
11. A band of your size sells quite a lot of fan merchandise during the tour. So you can’t pack it all to the truck in the beginning of the tour. How do you reinforce the stock on the road?
- Fortunately it’s quite easy nowadays. We order the shirts and other products from European factories, so when we are on a European tour, it’s not hard to transport the merchandise by truck to the right city. We take certain amount of products with us in the beginning of the tour because we have two trucks on the tour and fortunately there’s enough space to take a great amount of fan merchandise with us. So we don’t have to order new stuff to every concert place. And when we see the demand, we order more products and they are delivered on the spot, so it goes smoothly.
12. You have a big crew on the tour. How many permanent and other employees do you have?
- I don’t know the exact amount. We should ask the management, which handles the gig arrangements. But I think the band and the technicians make 12 to 14 people. In addition to that, we have the crew that handles the PA, the lights and other systems, so that makes 40 to 50 people in total. And in addition to that, there is the staff of the local venue, so there are plenty of people working during the tour.
13. You’ve decided to have an own kitchen staff on the road. Why don’t you accept local food?
- We’ve had the kitchen with us in the two previous tours already. We’ve talked about it several times wondering if it’s too luxury, but we’ve calculated and pondered that we have to feed 40 to 50 people every day, and eating a Big Mac or pizza on every breakfast, dinner and lunch one month in a row isn’t a very reasonable solution. And the people in our crew have different schedules, so we are busy in different times of the day and it would be difficult to organize everyone fresh food. So having an own kitchen crew on the spot that makes the food whenever you need it, is a very good solution. And they offer a bit healthier food than Big Macs.
14. So they offer a vegetarian alternative for you every day?
- Yes they do. You can order and ask whatever you want and they take into account all special diets.
15. All Nightwish musicians, except the singer, have always been partners of Scene Nation. When will you accept your singer to become a partner in your corporation?
- When we started the corporation, Tarja was our singer and she didn’t want to join the corporation and decided to stay out of it. And when we hired the new singer, we discussed the partnership in the company, but at that point the company was so big already that it was difficult to take new partners because it would have required some trading of the stocks and the value of the stocks was pretty high. So it’s a necessitous situation that Scene Nation belongs to the four members of the band and the singer has an own company.
16. The concert tickets of your forthcoming tour have sold well. For example, half of the tickets to the Joensuu gig were sold in the first day. And the arena has the capacity of 7,000 people. And in Europe you’ve apparently sold tens of thousands of tickets. In Paris you will have a concert at a venue with the capacity for 13,000 people. How does the tour look like at this point? The demand has been so good in such an early phase.
- The venues are big indeed. Many of them are the same as on the previous tour, but in some places we’ve switched to peg bigger places. Based on the information I’ve got from agents and managers, the tickets have started to sell very well. Of course there’s still plenty of room available and I hope we get still more people to the gigs, but there’s still time before the tour begins. We hope that we don’t have to play to empty rooms. We’ll see how it goes.
17. You and the rest of Nightwish have toured around the world. What’s the most pleasant place to perform?
- That’s a difficult question because it depends completely on the venue, the audience and the atmosphere. All gigs are great in their own ways. There is no specific venue or place that would always have the best gig. And there is no trick that would make any gig successful. So it depends solely on the people, the venue and the atmosphere.
18. Are there still some places in the world where you’ve never had a gig?
- Yes there are. For example, we’ve never played in India or Africa. Sometimes we’ve talked about a concert in South Africa and we’ve received some offers from there too, but so far we haven’t been able to make it happen. It would be nice to visit South Africa and India. They may become our next new territories.
19. I’ve heard that you’ve relaxed your schedules a bit. Is it a good solution?
- Yes it is. On the previous tour we had about 200 gigs and it included some very intensive legs. So the group, every one of us, got really tired during that tour. We decided already then that the next tour will be easier. It’s better to have a bit fewer gigs and enjoy every one of them than work on the limit and get too tired. Now we intend to spend the next year on the road and perhaps have a few gigs in 2013, but that’s it. We won’t have 200 gigs this time.
20. How do you keep contact with our family on the road?
- Nowadays it’s quite easy with a computer and Skype, but of course it’s not the same as being at home. So we miss each other during the tour. But we’ve got used to it in these years and it isn’t a big problem anymore.
21. And it’s your job.
- Yes it is. It is work that sometimes requires being a month in a row away from home.
Thank you, Jukka.
- Thank you very much.
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