HS Culture 3.2.2004 - Lauri, please come back soon!

By Antti Majander in Brussels

The audience is with the band from the opening bars. As The Rasmus kick the gig into life with First Day of My Life, the hands go up in a great rythmic wave, and the entire club belts out the familiar chorus line. Vocalist Lauri Ylönen clearly has his disciples here in Brussels, too, even if this is the band's first visit to the city.

F-F-F-Falling and other standards from the Rasmus repertoire, along with their only cover, Björk's I Play Dead, quickly indicate that the boys in the band have come a long way from the toy pop of their early days on the Finnish festival circuit. The make-up and the hair-dos are now darker in hue, which means the band have got more serious, but this is still pretty much about bouncearound rock.

And Brussels wants to bounce.

Le Botanique is a club venue with a capacity of 400, and tickets for the gig sold out quickly. Of course there are some Finns in the audience, since Brussels is these days an outpost of Finland, what with all the teen sons and daughters of civil servants working for the EU, but most of those here are Belgian.

The closing number in the main set In the Shadows and the final encore In My Life do the business: the lid comes off the club, and the world - or at least Europe - is now open before Lauri, Pauli (Rantasalmi), Eero (Heinonen), and Aki (Hakala).

The band arrived here in Brussels from Paris, and headed off to play the famous Melkweg in Amsterdam the next evening. The eight-date club tour of Europe began in London, and it has been a success: "Sold out everywhere", says Silke Hoelker, who is along on behalf of the German Universal label, who released the band's Dead Letters album.

"We've also made some provisional agreements for gigs at the big summer festivals in Germany and France", she enthuses.

It was In The Shadows that opened up the door. The single is selling well, helped by its getting regular TV airplay on European music channels. Dead Letters has gone gold in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, and the platinum barrier looks set to go in a couple of weeks at the current rate of progress.

In France, Dead Letters is the biggest-selling foreign album, currently at #5 in the charts, and should go gold by March. The CD is to be released in the States on March 23rd, and in England at around the same time.

"The band members are young, but even off the stage they behave like seasoned pros, coping with one interview after another", says a delighted Silke Hoelker about her charges. "They know how to answer questions, and particularly how to fend off the overly personal probings."

On the subject of the personal, the most infatuated of the female fans are packed in front of the stage at Le Botanique, at stroking distance. "Kiss me Lauri", reads the request on one girl's hand-written placard. Well, I guess it wasn't so very different from this back in Finland in the late 1990s - only the language has changed.

"I first heard about The Rasmus early last fall", says Nancy, 23, who has made the trip here from Antwerp. "I found an .mp3 of In the Shadows on the Net, downloaded it, and since then I've picked up twenty-one more of the band's tracks for free."

"Sure, I intend to buy the CDs legitimately, but to begin with it was impossible to find them in stores round here."

Nancy doesn't go back to Antwerp empty-handed: she buys a The Rasmus T-shirt for EUR 20.

Her trip to Brussels is nothing special, a mere fifty kilometres or so. Not much when compared with the trips made by the young fans who are following the band from city to city and across national borders throughout the eight-date tour.

"There aren't many of the real hard-core brigade yet; it's mostly 18-year-olds", says Silke Hoelker. "And I have seen some boys who are already trying to ape Lauri's look with the hairpins and the feathers."

There are no Lauri lookalikes on display at Le Botanique, though there are a few enthusiastic male fans a bit older than their idols. The only male admirer to make it down to the front-of-stage pit is wearing a Metallica T-shirt, however.

There's only one fainter, a girl. The security do a routine job of plucking her to safety from the front of the crowd.

Outside the venue, there's no swooning, only a faint sense of annoyance. Heidi Backman, Marita Huhta, and Minna Tiainen, all au-pairs with Finnish families in Brussels, didn't snap up tickets as soon as they came on sale, and then it was too late.

But even behind closed doors the sounds come through pretty clearly. And occasionally they catch a glimpse of the band, too, as the doors open slightly when someone heads out to the bar.

And there's no way Lauri won't be back here before too long...

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.1.2004