Lordi frontman reflects on harsh fan reaction to band’s Eurovision victory

Lordi‘s leader, Mr. Lordi, discussed the band’s impending participation in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest grand final in a recent interview with Chas Byrne’s Rock Show, which is broadcast on Portsmouth, UK’s Express FM radio station, as per Blabbermouth. On Saturday, May 16, in Vienna, Austria, the Finnish hard rock band that won Eurovision in 2006 with the song “Hard Rock Hallelujah” will play. As part of the event’s 70th anniversary, they will reportedly play alongside other musicians in the grand final interval act, which will be a “celebration” with a number of “Eurovision all-stars” singing classic songs from the contest’s past.

I guess they are having us old winners there to perform, which is nice, and a nice way to celebrate our 20th anniversary of the victory too.

Mr. Lordi responded as follows when asked if he gets bored of his 2006 Eurovision victory or if he has accepted it as a natural aspect of his identity.

No. The Eurovision itself, I have nothing negative to say about Eurovisionitself. It’s a good, fun TV show — well, because let’s face it, that’s what it is: it’s a big TV show. I guess it’s the biggest TV show in Europe. That’s what it is, first and foremost, for me — it is a big TV show, with a lot of viewers and a lot of attention all around Europe… Everything that we’ve gotten through Eurovision is all positive, but we have had some negative side effects of winning the Eurovision, but that has nothing to do with the Eurovision itself.

Being a metal band, if you will, or a rock band or whatever you wanna call it — I would call us nowadays already a classic rock band, depending on how you wanna define the genre that we’re playing — being a rock band or a hard rock band or a heavy rock band or a heavy metal band or whatever genre you wanna label us, in our genre being in Eurovision is something — or not anymore, but it used to be something that is a sure way to brush away all your credibility as an artist [laughs] in your genre, and we didn’t realize that — we really didn’t realize that. So we had a few years after the victory where we were actually suffering from that because we were considered as ‘that Eurovision band’.

And then you realize that there were a lot of people who thought that we are a band that was only formed because of Eurovision and for Eurovision, and the song was written for Eurovision. And no — none of that could be further from the truth. I mean, none of the elements in what we’re doing or what we did in Eurovision was done for Eurovision, if you know what I mean. It was all done organically and naturally of the art that we’re doing — the song, the performance, everything — and it just happened to have a forum like Eurovision.

And the backlash that we got was pretty interesting. And looking back, it was quite cruel to have that from your own camp of people, meaning the metal people, that the metal people in some countries and in some circles were the first ones to attack us, and saying that, ‘Oh, LORDI’s a joke.’ ‘Ah, they’re meant for children.’ Ah, it’s a joke. It’s not real. Ah, silly, stupid rubber monsters.’ So they wouldn’t take us seriously in a way. And, of course, that kind of thing, it hurts — it really hurts you as an artist.

I mean, those daggers, they go deep in your heart — they really go deep. So that kind of a thing. But then, years go by, time goes by, and then all of a sudden it’s not like that anymore. But there were a few years after the victory that we were suffering from that, from the backlash.

Mr. Lordi agreed with host Chas Byrne when he pointed out that Lordi’s Eurovision win opened the door for other hard rock and metal bands to compete.

Yeah, I think so. I think that’s fair to say. From my opinion, I guess so, yeah. But many people don’t remember that almost half a decade before we went, there was already Nightwish that was entering the Finnish competition.

Mr. Lordi also mentioned the 50/50 balance between professional juries and public televoting in Eurovision voting, each of which contributes equally to a nation’s overall score.

Yeah, Nightwish tried, I think four years before us already. They tried, but they couldn’t qualify from Finland, because the televote, they would’ve voted Nightwish to be the Finnish representative, but the jury, the Finn jury gave them, like, zero points and somebody else went instead.

When asked what he believed to be Finland’s “changing point” that made it possible for a band like Lordi to represent the nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, Mr. Lordi responded as follows.

Protest. For the Finns to vote us was… Because when we went through that, it was an invitational contest — I mean, a competition that year. We were invited. We didn’t even have the slightest thought ever that we should go to Eurovision — that was something that we never even thought of — until we were invited for the Finnish competition.

So we were, like, ‘All right. Well, okay, let’s go.’ And we, honestly, blue-eyed and all innocent, we thought, ‘Okay, we just go there for the Finnish competition. There’s no way we can win the Finnish competition, but we will just get some free P.R. on national primetime TV. There’s no way we can win [beat] this other artist in Finland. But, hey, our new album is coming out, so we just get some free exposure on national TV in Finland.’ And, to our big surprise, the televote, we won it by a landslide from the Finns — we won it so clearly.

But once again, the jury did not; the jury didn’t give us really [laughs] that much value, the Finnish jury. But by that time, when we knew that, ‘Okay, we’re gonna go there,’ we already knew that if we go to Athens, to the actual main event of Eurovision, we have a good chance of qualifying in the top five or minimum top 10, which would have been the best Finnish ranking ever. We knew that — that is just mathematics; we knew that that’s probably gonna happen. But in February 2006, we were still thinking that, ‘Okay, we have no way of actually winning the Finnish competition.’ That is a much, much, much, much more difficult mountain to climb.

Mr. Lordi stated this when Byrne pointed out that Lordi scored 292 points at the 2006 Eurovision, which at the time was the greatest score in the competition’s history.

That might have been a little bit of a surprise, but the winning itself was not that big of a surprise because we just calculated, because this was the first time Finland ever sent an artist that was already known outside Finland. That had never happened before. And most of the cases, in all the countries in every year, the artist that goes to represent any respective country, any country, the artist is not known outside your borders of your country. So it doesn’t matter what track record you have back home, how many platinum albums you have home, because you are zero, you are nobody, nobody knows you. So we were in a very special position, going to represent Finland then, because we already been touring around Europe in the metal clubs and metal festivals and rock festivals and rock clubs for three or four years before we went.

So we already had a fanbase around Europe in pretty much every country. So we knew that we will bring our own voters, the people who would not normally watch Eurovision, or at least they wouldn’t admit that they’re watching Eurovision, and let alone that they would vote, but that year they voted not necessarily because they would be fans of Lordi, but because they’re fans of the genre. Our German record label at the time, Drakkar Records, they did an amazing campaign, they did a really good job of [promoting], to the metal clubs around Europe, that ‘I vote for Lordi’.

They made the stickers and the pins, and so all the metalheads, even they would not really be into Lordi as a band, but as a metalhead, for many people, it was their duty to vote for Lordi in Eurovision — as a protest. Like, ‘Okay, hey, we’re here, metal people. We’re here.’ So we already knew before we went to Athens that, ‘Okay, this is pretty much something that most likely will happen. And let’s just see how big are the numbers of the metalheads of Europe. And it turned out to be that, well, yeah, the biggest points ever by that time. So we brought in our own voters, in a way.

Mr. Lordi explained that in the twenty years following Lordi’s victory, no hard rock or metal performers had won the Eurovision Song Contest.

That kind of thing — it’s funny to think of it — that thing could only happen once. Because Finland, after that, has sent two other artists years later or a decade later. They sent The Rasmus, which is very, very well known around Europe. They sent The Rasmus and a song that was written by [noted pop and rock hitmaker] Desmond Child. And I don’t think they even went into the top 20. So that whole thing didn’t really work for them. So I think that only worked once. [Laughs]