The Nightingales

In October 1991 a strange, funny little song called “Just Another Friday Afternoon” began to get airtime in a Finnish national indie radio-show “Räkärodeo”. The band behind the song was the Nightingales. The 7” single (b-side “I Read the News) was self-released by this group from Rovaniemi, Lapland, Arctic Circle. Naturally it didn’t make the charts, but many people in music business were curious; what was this unique sound? What was this band no one had ever heard of?
Bassist-singer and songwriter Marko Kantola and guitarist Jukka Pirttijärvi had been playing together in various bands since the early 80’s. Drummer Ari Mäkitulkkila had joined them a couple of years later. Pianist Jorma Pirttijärvi – Jukka’s twin brother – came along 1990 and the original line-up, the one that was to last for more than a decade, of the Nightingales was there. The band played their first gigs in and Rovaniemi and it’s vicinity. Actually Kantola and Pirttijärvi brothers had known each other since they were some four or five years old.
Jukka Junttila, the boss of a little Finnish record company “Hiljaiset Levyt” was brave or crazy enough to sign the band in 1992, and their second single “Poor Jimmy’s Birthday Party/Johnnie Ragtime and the Swingin’ Band” came to record shops in April 1992. The ultra-fast, jumping a-side gave coordinates for what was to come the following years; a honky-tonk piano combined to punk-guitars and mickeymouse-like vocals was something everybody wasn’t ready for. Were they serious when they sang, “Jimmy went to store and bought a machine-gun/Said it was time for him to have some fun”? The legend says these two songs were chosen to the single because of their long titles; the boys wanted to see if they fitted in the etiquette of an old-time 7 inches jukebox in their favourite local bar. The band began to perform around Finland, even getting some festival-gigs that same summer.
Soon it was time to make an album, which in itself was a dream come true for the boys; not many northern Finnish bands hade done that. “Pop-Gun Juggernaut” was recorded in Tampere, autumn 1992, by Jani Viitanen and released in January 1993. That same month the band made their first longer Finnish tour with two other bands from Rovaniemi, Jalla Jalla and the Greenhouse AC. Album got good, although contradictory, reviews and band gigged a lot. They got a chance to play in the most important venues and even many of the biggest summer festivals in Finland. Live-shows convinced also those, who didn’t know what to think about the album, and the Nightingales got a reputation as “the weirdest party band around”. Also were they called “Buzzcocks who think they’re playing jazz” or “David Bowie on Acid”. To this day it’s been hard to describe the bands original sound, not many have succeeded.
The follower of “Juggernaut”, “Circus Delirium” was recorded in Kemi, Northern Finland, in late summer days of 1994 by Tumppi Niemelä, but for various reasons it wasn’t released until autumn 1995. “Delirium” was more expressive but also more sinister and darker than its predecessor. The critics loved it; some even mentioned the Beatles in the same sentence (to the Kinks they’ve been compared from the start to these days). “Jonathan”, the final track of the album, was a minor hit and got good airplay. That same autumn the band played for the second time in Finnish showcase happening “Music and Media”, where the editor of “Melody Maker” saw them play and said “if they were from London, they’d be stars”. He also wrote a great review of the Tampere gig to his magazine. “Circus Delirium” sold poorly in Finland, but fairly well in Japan!
Co-operation with Niemelä, who engineered “Delirium”, had worked so well that the next release, a mini-CD of five songs, was also recorded with him in Oulu, April 1997. The mini was named strangely “Nostalgia for the Reptiles”. (God only knows what they had in their minds.) “Nostalgia” was perhaps not as impressing as “Delirium”, but again it showed some new sides of the band. “Here come Ron Coward and the Reptiles” was a humorous instrumental, “Rainy Day” a touching, fateful ballad, and in “Talent Show” you even hear impulses of free jazz. The title song and “Boozing in a Space Saloon” are still favourites in their live-shows.
Niemelä recorded the bands third full-length album “Radio Sense” in Tampere, summer 1999, again. If “Delirium” had been a hard bit to swallow for some, this was, well, really not an easy one. Among classic pop-songs like “In My Brother’s House” or the opening track “Never Killed a Man (Never Loved a Woman)” there were ear-breaking experiments like “My Head” that sounded something like a disco version of Motörhead, “Poet’s Son”, that made you wonder if this was a therapy orchestra of a mental hospital playing, or “That’s Not Funny Anymore”, some kind of soundtrack to an Bulgarian western. Even the “easier” ones were produced to sound as compressed and mean as possible. An important anecdote considering this album was that Pasi Pakarinen, the once-to-be guitarist of the band, played acoustic guitars on one track. A usual Finnish tour to promote the album was made in December, but everybody could see the band wasn’t as energetic and disarming as a couple of years before. Many of the gigs were drunken and lazy. Those days it wasn’t rare to Finnish bands to have a drink or two before the gig, but these boys looked like they’d invented the stuff. Sometimes the results were entertaining, more than once not. It was obvious the band was tired of being a cult one, appreciated by colleagues and critics, disparaged by media and big audience. Thank God they didn’t give up.
Millennium came and the “four wonder boys of Rovaniemi” were not getting any younger. The guys lived in different cities around Finland, got married and got children. Some even got real jobs like normal adults. The gigs that the Nightingales played between years 2000 and 2003 can be counted with fingers of a man who’s been working his life in the saw.
It had been clear since the beginning the band should try to get to bigger markets of Europe. Many times it had been close, but nothing had really happened before a German record company “Tug Records” signed a contract with the band in 2003 and released a compilation “Cartoon of a Band” in 2004. German press, especially fanzines, loved the album and university and alternative radio stations took it to their play-lists. That was just the stimulation the band needed. They made their first central-European tour (Germany and Switzerland) in autumn 2004. The clubs were small, but the band clearly enjoyed playing in new places after more than ten years of touring the same Finnish clubs. Even free alcohol didn’t prevent them from taking their audiences night after night. Even more important, Pasi Pakarinen started the trip as band’s bus-driver but came back as their guitarist. Pakarinen’s a punk-veteran, who had been a recording artist since the late 70’s. The following spring saw their next visit to Germany. This time the venues were bigger including two indoor festivals in Hanover and Salzburg and a dancehall one in Nürnberg, warming up Eläkeläiset.
Gigs in Finland were still rare and casual, mostly played in Rovaniemi where the band began rehearsals for a new album. In summer 2006 they made a short German tour playing as headliners in two little festivals. The two-hour show in Fürth was one of the best they’ve ever played. The set included half a dozen songs from the forthcoming album.
The new album “Sentimental Hospital” (Lord, where do they find these names?) was recorded in Tampere, autumn 2006, by old acquaintance Jani Viitanen, who had engineered the debut-album fourteen year earlier. The album’s released in March 2007. Compared to previous ones this new one’s better played and produced, still not losing it’s edge or the charmingly negligent attitude. Those who have heard it (I’m writing this in February) have been amazed of its more straightforward, guitar-based, rock and roll, compared it to T-Rex, David Bowie (again), the Kinks (again) and praised it as a future classic. That remains to be seen.