Nightwish on tour sierpień 2005 ??

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From Kitee to the ends of the earth and back: Nightwish on tour
Songwriter Tuomas Holopainen plans to use the upcoming break to work on band's new album
By Jarkko Jokelainen

Nightwish's keyboards player Tuomas Holopainen, 28, is embarking on a new working week. And as so often before, it starts from Terminal 2 at Helsinki-Vantaa International.
On Wednesday, Holopainen flew with the other members of the symphonic power metal band to the Wacken Open Air heavy festival in Germany. Friday they had an outdoor gig in Dresden, and on Saturday the band made a brief appearance at the opening ceremonies for the IAAF World Championships in Athletics, in front of a soaked but enthusiastic audience.
On Sunday night Nightwish joined Franz Ferdinand and the Dutch band Within Temptation on the bill at Ankkarock, a two-day festival in Vantaa.

Sometime at the beginning of next week, Holopainen will get home for a few days. Home is not in Helsinki, but in Kitee, a small town of 10,000 souls between Imatra and Joensuu, close to the Russian border. Kitee has been familiar to Finns for nothing much else besides a passable Finnish-rules baseball team and the local moonshine, known as Kiteen kirkas.
But that was then: now it is also known in some circles as the residence of three of the five members of Nightwish, since in addition to Holopainen, vocalist Tarja Turunen and guitarist Erno (Emppu) Vuorinen both have connections with the North Karelian town.

Holopainen will not have long to relax: soon the carousel will start once again with late summer and early fall tour dates that first take in Scandinavia and then spread the net wider to London, Bucharest, Mexico City, and Sao Paolo.
One of the dates on the calendar seems to be a small Norwegian village named Hell. This undoubtedly looks good on the back of a heavy band's tour T-shirt.

Hanging out in airport terminals is pretty much routine for Holopainen these days. Nightwish's current world tour has been on the road for close on eighteen months, and by mid-October they will have chalked up 150 gigs.
That is not of itself such an enormous number - after all, 60-something Bob Dylan has played around 160 gigs in the U.S. and Europe in the last year or so. But when you factor in the venues played and the distances travelled, the schedule starts to look rather gruelling: North and South America, Japan, Australia, and practically every corner of Europe.
"The one and a half hours of so you spend up on stage isn't the hardest part of this job", admits Holopainen. "What grinds you down is the waiting at airports, the early morning calls to catch the next plane, and the constant living out of a suitcase."
"Just to give you an example, last week we spent a total of five days going to and from one single gig in Portugal."

On October 21st, the tour ends with a sold-out gig at Helsinki's Hartwall Arena. Thereafter a lengthy break is scheduled, and the group only intend to return to the road in 2007.
"When I think about it, I'm amazed myself that I haven't noticed any sense of getting jaded and fed up with touring. Right now it feels as though there ought to be more gigs rather than fewer", comments Holopainen on the forthcoming sabbatical.
"During this tour we've realised so many dreams that had been hanging in the air. For me at least, Australia was a great experience, because if you want to go any further to play, then you need to go to the Moon."
"Ecuador was almost certainly the most exotic venue - we played in a bullring in Quito nearly 3000 metres above sea level. Completely nuts. We've come from Kitee and we play this sort of music, but we end up playing in a place like that."

In reality, the forthcoming break from touring will be felt more by the band's public than by the five members themselves. It's not like they are stopping work. Holopainen will almost immediately be getting down to tracks for the band's next album, since he is responsible for the compositions and the lyrics, too.
A CD's worth of tracks should be ready by the New Year, when the band will head off to work undisturbed on the numbers, before going into the studio to lay the album down next summer.
"I've got nothing else going in my life except music right now. It's become a way of life. All my thoughts, all my daily routines hook up in one way or another with music", says Holopainen. "I just can't be away from it for a minute."
"I think about new numbers in the plane, on the band bus, even at the breakfast table, but it's mostly all about collecting ideas at this stage."
"When the gigging stops, I'll get down properly to putting some numbers together", he promises. "Then it is really important that I don't have anything else getting in the way of the process. Just one concert date in the middle messes up my head for a week."

During the layoff from touring, Holopainen will be retreating to his home in Kitee, where all the band's original songs have surfaced in the corner of his bedroom, "in the same square metre of space".
"I was born in Kitee and I have no wish to move anywhere else. Nightwish's music would absolutely be totally different if I were living in Helsinki, for instance, and if we were a Helsinki band."
"Kitee, and above all the natural surroundings there, they've had a massive effect on the organics of our music. Besides, the whole band is bonded together with a kind of goodtime rural feeling."

Nightwish's most recent album, Once, has sold nearly a million copies worldwide since it was released in June of last year, but the songwriter is reluctant to shoulder the increased expectations that this success has brought.
"For me, it's really all the same whether this next album shifts half the number of copies of the last one, or twice as many", Holopainen insists. "The main thing is to produce a good album and take another step forward. Maybe the only thing I do carry around in my head as I'm thinking about new stuff is whether it sounds too much like something I've done before."
There again, he does admit that success has brought with it a measure of confidence in his own abilities.
"Even with the lousy sense of self that I've got, maybe it's gone up a notch in recent years. I must have done something right I guess, when other people seem to like it. And I guess I've also learnt to accept that there's no way you can please everybody."

Not everybody, perhaps, but a sizeable number. Once has sold getting on for 100,000 copies in Finland alone, a figure that is quite unprcedented for a heavy outfit singing in English. Holopainen suggests part of the explanation lies in the diversity and melodic qualities of the music, and a part is almost certainly down to the classical vocal style of front-woman Tarja Turunen.
"If we were just playing mainstream heavy, then you couldn't expect to shift that many records. Our music has got a lot more sides to it, and we pick up fans from all sorts of different spheres. We've got a few mums, secretaries, bank managers coming to gigs", muses Holopainen.
"I dare say that of the current Finnish bands, we've got - well, I wouldn't say it's the biggest following, but it is the broadest."

Holopainen still has one curious dream that has gone unrealised.
"We haven't yet managed to get into [the Finnish editions of] the Donald Duck comic books, not once", he says a bit sheepishly, revealing a deep weakness for the Disney comics. "They've had Anssi Kela and H.I.M. in there, but not us. As an diehard fan and Duckophile, I've been hoping and waiting for us to get picked up."

Ixion

Ja nie mogę czytać tych wywiadów sprzed "końca ery"
Teraz wydaje mi się to wszystko takie grane, oszukane :|

Teraz chętnie tylko posłucham co oni mają zamiar dalej robić, zamiast spoglądać w przeszłość co robili Sad

Patty

Ja też tak mam; ostatnio przyczytałam sobie kilka i zostaje jakiś taki dziwny dyskomfort, że mówili jedno, działo się drugie, a zrobili trzecie Confused

MacFly

Moim zdaniem oni sami mili nadzieje, że wszystko sie jakos jeszcze ułoży, sami grali przed sobą, odwlekali chwile, bo tak samo jak my nie chcieli tak naprawdę owego końca. Chyba, że i to to jedna wielka sciema Confused

(i ja w tym miejscu też zaczęłam się czuć mało komfortowo... ) cóż business is bisiness, show business, and emotions is emotions but show must go on...