On a cold March night in England, MetalTalk spoke on the phone to Mr Lordi, frontman of the band Lordi. There is a saying over here that if you talk a lot, you can talk for England. Well, Mr Lordi can talk for Finland. Normally, an interview slot runs for half an hour, but the Monsterman from Scandinavia was happy to natter away for an hour. If we had not run out of questions, we would probably still be talking right now. Hence, this interview is split into multiple parts.
It has been reported that Finland has more Metal bands per head of population than anywhere else in the world. Does Mr Lordi have an opinion on this?
“I have no fucking clue,” he says, “even though that is probably the most common question to ask a Finnish rock or Metal band, and I don’t know how the hell would you know. Some people try to be smart and say, well, because we have a long winter and there’s no sunlight, we’re in the darkness for months.
“But then again, they always forget that in the summertime, the sun doesn’t set at all. We have just pure sunshine. It’s like fucking sunlight twenty-four hours a day for three months. So it doesn’t really add up because I don’t think all the Metal fans are moving away from Finland during the summer, so that’s not it.
“I don’t know. There is something either in the cultural background of films or something in the genes in a way that comes from the father to the son. Maybe we like a little bit harder music or something in general, or maybe it’s in our blood inthat we like a little bit more melancholic music than, say, Swedes, for example.
“Swedes are considered to be very happy, and they are really poppy people in general, whereas Finns are more quiet, and we keep it to ourselves. We are more sad and we like minor chords more than we like major chords, which is how the whole folk music in Finland goes. Pretty much nine songs out of ten are written in a minor key, but if you go across the sea to Sweden, everything is written in major.
“But really, it’s probably a combination of things, and I couldn’t tell you if my life depended on it. I just don’t know why it is, but that’s the way it is.”
It is a busy time for Mr Lordi. The excellent Limited Deadition was released last Friday, and the Limited Tour ’25 First Deadition has just seen Lordi play two dates in Finland, before travelling to Poland and The Netherlands. Then, it is a six-date tour of the UK followed by France and Belgium. A Second Deadition of the tour has just been announced with extensive dates in Spain and Germany.
Mr Lordi has mentioned many times that Kiss was a major influence, but there are reminders of Alice Cooper. Was his style influential? “Oh, fuck yeah,” Mr Lordi says. “It’s Kiss, Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper. Those are the main three ones. Then you can continue the list and add Udo Dirkschneider from Accept. Then you can add King Diamond to the list. You can add W.A.S.P. to the list.
“Those six bands are the building blocks of Lordi, pretty much, when it comes to music and the imagery of the of the band. Plus, you add horror movies and horror genre characters to the mix, and that’s how you get Lordi. Yeah, Alice Cooper, abso-fucking-lutely. And I would say with Alice, the influence is more musical than image.”
Not too long ago, Lordi were on the cover of Vogue Scandinavia. You can see this band as trailblazers, going somewhere where other Metal bands simply have not been. “Maybe,” Mr Lordi says, “but that’s because we’re not ashamed of ourselves. If somebody asks, like in this case, Vogue, and of course, twenty years ago, the fucking Eurovision thing… If we get invited to do something, sure.
“I mean, we wouldn’t go into a fucking neo-Nazi rally, you know, so we have some sort of fucking sense. We are not like complete whores and prostitutes. We have some sort of fucking common sense here, but basically, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing your own thing and you get invited to places, why the hell wouldn’t you go?
“I mean, if it’s Vogue, why not? If they really want us, come on, we’re here. Sure, it wouldn’t be the first idea in my head to put Lordi in fucking Vogue. But clearly, it was their idea, and they asked, and we said, sure, we have nothing against it. We don’t know shit about that, but we’re here if you want some really good-looking models to model your handbags and shit. We can do that if you think that’s what you want, so why not?
“I think it’s just that we have no shame in a way. We know who we are and we can go to places where, let’s say, no other Metal band has gone before because we have trust in ourselves. We know who we are and that doesn’t change, whereverwe are. Just like back in the day when we got invited to Eurovision in the Finnish competition, there were people saying, ‘No, don’t go there. You are fucking ruining us.’ What the hell? We didn’t change anything for Eurovision back then, and we didn’t change anything for Vogue now.
“So if you call us to come, we will accept the invitation but don’t expect us to change for you. If you invite us to your house, we will come, but we will be ourselves, we are not going to dress up for you differently.”
Eurovision was the first time I had ever heard of Lordi, and I have to say that seeing a Heavy Metal band in Eurovision was very refreshing. “For the 2006 competition, the European Broadcast Union Finnish chapter, or something like that, contacted us through the record label and said, okay, would Lordi be interested in joining the Eurovision Finnish competition?
“And we said, why not? At the time, we were just recording a new album, and I was thinking we had no chance of winning, but we could just go and get the free fucking free TV time and exposure on national TV in Finland. We thought that we had absolutely no chance of winning the Finnish competition, but what the heck, it doesn’t hurt, so why not? But then we won, and it was just like, okay then, all right, cool.”
Mr Lordi says that winning felt good. “It’s like the whole Eurovision trip for us,” he says. “It always creates small paths pretty much every year around May. The people are remembering it and stuff like that. I get interviews about that, and yeah, it feels that, especially for Finns, but also for many Metal and rock fans, it created the whole event. It created so many unforgettable memories.
“But for us and for me personally, it wasn’t as big of a thing as it was for many others, and especially for Finns, it was a big fucking thing. We have never won Eurovision before or after us, so it was a big fucking thing.
“But on a personal note, it was a side path. We were invited, we went there, OK. Oh, we won, and then it’s let’s get back to business and let’s do our own shit. It feels like it meant so much more to most other people rather than us, which is cool. But sometimes, especially the Finnish people and press, they want more emotion there. They want more national pride, and I’m like, but we didn’t have any fucking grand master plan to go to Eurovision or anything like that. We didn’t.
“It was just a coincidence. It was a side path, and I still see it as a good side path, but it was just a side path. It wasn’t something that we planned or something that we ever dreamed of. Of course, winning is much nicer than losing, but there are not that many of these big feelings surrounding it to me, personally, as one might think. It’s more like, been there, done that.
“But, I thought it was fabulous that a Heavy Metal band won. It’s really hard for me to relate to many people who are really nostalgic about the whole thing, and it’s really hard for me to put that much emphasis on the whole thing because we didn’t change anything for Eurovision.
“The song was already written. It was already recorded. It was not done for Eurovision. We didn’t plan our show or our outfits for Eurovision. It was just another TV show for us. It was just another fucking forum where we would go and do our own shit because, for those three minutes that we were on stage, it was a show for us. It was a three-minute gig. 
Following their victory, Rovaniemi named their town square Lordi’s Square in June 2006 in honour of their Eurovision success. All members of Lordi have been appointed honorary citizens of Rovaniemi.
“I had heard that they were going to do that,” Mr Lordi says, “so I was suggesting them some smaller place outside the city. But they were in heat after the Eurovision victory. They were horny with that, but nowadays it’s business as normal. But because it’s the town’s main square, I like to call it the Fine Man Square.”
Lordi have just played the two Finland shows on the tour, which is unusual as they often “don’t even play in our home country.” The Limited Tour ’25 – First Deadition hits Wolverhampton on 2 April 2025. “What can the fans look forward to? Well, to put it simply, the guarantee is that there are monsters playing melodic heavy rock,” Mr Lordi says. “Anything above that or besides that remains to be seen. I don’t know if the people like our show, but you know, we try our hardest not to suck.
“Monsters playing melodic hard rock or heavy rock or Heavy Metal or whatever you want to want to call it nowadays, that’s what we’re doing, and we are going to have some gimmicks and something for the visual side too, so you don’t only need to listen. You can also look at us doing something.”
Once, when I saw Lordi play in London, Mr Lordi said on stage that he was so hot that his balls were melting. Is it really that uncomfortable when you play live? “Is it hot, hot, hot all the time? No, it’s not that uncomfortable because you get used to everything,” Mr Lordi says. “Melting balls was one of my raps that I was doing for years. I would say that it’s so hot that I’m sweating my balls away so that I literally have no balls.
“I would say there’s a patch of sweat there on the stage and it looks like there’s a river of balls coming your way. It was the rap I used to do for years because it was funny, and people seemed to find it funny, so I kept doing that quite a lot.
“But you know, I’m not going to lie, the costumes are fucking hot. I mean, it’s like putting on a full-body-size condom on you. The rubber doesn’t fucking breathe. The latex won’t breathe. You will be hot when you’re wearing a fucking latex costume, that’s for sure. You will be sweating for sure.
“Is it uncomfortable? Yeah, it is uncomfortable if you compare it to sweatpants and fucking hoodie. But then again, it looks fucking cool. It looks much better than sweatpants and a hoodie on stage.”
Limited Deadition was released on 21 March 2025 via RPM. For more details, visit lordi.rpm.link/limiteddeaditionPR. Part Two of the interview with Mr Lordi is available here.
