As Provinssi Rock’s 30th anninversary this year proves that the festival’s success as number one Finnish rock event of the year continues, Kristina Koivio decided to see what it was like trying the festival as English girl and Provinssi virgin and reported back on whether it lives up to its reputation!
As the taxi drives away from Provinssi and I can still hear the Foo Fighters ringing in my ears from 10 minutes earlier I feel a pang of regret that Provinssi Rock festival 2008 is all over. This feeling of regret is comforted only slightly as, judging by the thousands of people now flooding the streets in every direction, I am the only one to have actually got a taxi! Being my first experience at not only Provinssi Rock, but to any Finnish festival, I arrived two days ago not really knowing what to expect but since then I’ve had a real taste of the Finnish party scene and am pleasantly surprised…
Arriving at the Provinssi Rock site in Seinajoki on Friday afternoon before the party started, the first thing that struck me was how scenic these Finnish grounds were. Unlike your average music festival’s muddy field, Provinssi is dominated by forestry with the arenas being mostly clearings among the trees. Something else typically Finnish was the unmissable smell of pine trees that filled your nostrils and certainly gives the term “fresh air” a new meaning. The ground itself is split into two by a river connected by bridges along the way. It was Provinssi’s 30th birthday this year so as well as numerous colourful floats dangling from the trees there were balloons the size of a car flying in the air wishing Provinssi a happy anniversary! A great thing about arriving early whilst the place was still setting up was that I was lucky enough to go get a sneaky look on the main stage. Coheed and Cambria, who were the first band to play that stage, had their crew busy setting up the most expensive collection of electrical equipment I have ever seen and as I walked on the stage I could literally feel the floor shake beneath me as the amplifiers let out a loud rumble of base. And it seemed they would need such a phenomenal sound system as the arena in front of me was big enough to fit 30 thousand people! As I stood there, imagining which famous band would be standing in my exact same spot over the few days to come and looking out onto the vast area in front of me that was soon to be filled with thousands of screaming fans, I was over come with a sense of excitement at the weekend before me and what new experiences it would hold!
In true celebrity style Coheed and Cambria traveled big! It turned out whilst they were touring Europe they had been ‘backlining’. This meant keeping two seperate sets of crew on the go, having just come from Norway their last crew was on the road to Switzerland whilst a totally different crew arriving from another previous festival was already waiting here for them in Seinajoki. This new and ‘fashionable’ way of touring allowed the band to maximize their time on the road! And their performance proved just as grandeur and lavish as their transport arrangement. Within minutes they had the anticipating crowd roaring with approval and trampling over one another in a mosh pit that seemed to last on and off till the end of the weekend. And of course if Coheed and Cambria wasn’t exactly your thing then there was plenty of other acts to see on one of the other five stages on site. After the show there was time to grab some food from the multitude of food stalls or do a bit of shopping for anything from band memorabilia to PVC gimp suits before the main stage was back in action again featuring Linkin Park, who, it seemed also liked to make a big entrance and had just turned up in Seinajoki in three jets planes!
As the night drew on I noticed another remarkable thing about Finnish festivals: in Summer the sky never gets dark. When the sun set around midnight, the sky was miraculously almost dark for an hour or so and then it was sunrise again! This apparently meant that most people at the festival didn’t feel the need to go to bed and so the bands carried on playing well into the night. So I decided to check out X-stage, (a 15 thousand man tent and so the second largest arena at the festival), and found the place had been decorated accross the ceiling with lanky papier-mache and fairy light figures from ghosts to a sinister looking scarecrow claiming to be Superman! Playing inside the tent was Stam1na a Finnish metal band who ran around chasing each other on stage rather comically and swinging their extra long hair at the audience round in circles like a washing machine! However, outside in the forest by the much smaller Zanzibar stage was the sound of some more mellow sounding tunes and a different crowd of people chilling under the stars, some already in their sleeping bags curled up against a tree, apparently exhusted from a night of non stop moshing.
Though on Saturday the partying didn’t really get going till the afternoon, behind the scenes the organisers were as busy as ever. Provinssi Rock being such a huge event in Finland, meant some of the team were taking part in a televised debate about Provinssi’s role in the progression of live music over the past few decades. This was followed by a photography exhibition celebrating Provinssi’s 30th birthday. The exhibition featured the works of various festival photographers over the years, demonstrating photos from Slash from Velvet Revolver to Iggy Pop performing almost naked on stage. There was also photos taken of the crowd. One touching photo showed two lovers huddled in the rain, kissing, whilst another less touching photo was of a guest covered head to toe in tatoos, feathers stuck in his arm and his cock chained up to his balls!
By this time meanwhile, around the different stages the party was picking up all over again and people were certainly really going for it! Within the space of an hour walking around I not only got asked for a lighter from a giant Teletubbie but then got approached by someone dressed as Frankenstein who was wondering if I knew where he could find his mate the grim reaper!!! And I was still trying to act unfazed when I came across a bloke being dragged around in the mud by his mates wearing nothing but a G-string. I even felt sorry for the poor guy till he got up, put his G-string on his head and ran into a tree! And the bizarreness continued as I noticed people had obviously given up pitching base at the nearby campsites and had actually taken to tying their tents onto poles and waving them above the crowds inside the marquees!
I was then lucky enough to meet the dance act, French DJs, Justice, who were due to play soon in X-stage (the 10 thousand capacity tent). However my timing was not the best because just as I had finished working out what ‘Can I have you autograph?’ is in French, the nearby X-stage burst into cheers. This was followed by chants of Justice’s famous song lyric ‘We-are-you’re friends!’, so deciding Justice had more important matters to tend to I walked away empty handed. The chants got louder and louder till the tent erupted as Justice marched on stage dressed head to toe in black leather and gave one of the highlights of my weekend. The buzz of the performance was enhanced by their impressive lights show of strobes, flashing spotlights of every colour and their signature cross at the front of the stage lit up in a variety of ways more impressive than a Christmas tree. Within 10 minutes the tent seemed to be brimming with everyone from ravers to rockers and my thoughts of its diverse popularity were confirmed when I spotted an eight year old at the front of the crowd happily moshing away!
And Justice were by no means the beginning or the end to a great line up on Saturday. Another great act I went to see was in the tent opposite, the more modest Rumba tent, designed to hold 4 thousand people, to see an act called Emmanuel Jal, which comprised of a former child soldier turned hip-hop artist accompanied by an attractive female singer. Jal had been a popular topic of debate for the Finnish press because an obvious inspiration of his act came from his past as a suffering war child. And the performance turned out to be quite unique, one aspect of this being his remarkable audience interaction which included getting volunteers from the audience on stage to teaching the rest of us dance moves and song lyrics so we could join in too! On one particularly tricky chorus Jal had us practicing the lines Jalf a dozen times before we were allowed to give it the real thing, endearingly adamant that we must get it right! Among the excitement and energy of the performance were obvious and more serious messages of pro-freedom and anti violence, implemented especially when Jal shared stories of his troubled life and his consequential views on society and war in the form of poetry. It was nice to know Jal was evidently enjoying it as much as we were as he said Provinssi Rock was the best audience he’d ever had!
As the evening drew on the day certainly didn’t slow down and the attention drew to the main stage again ready for one of the weekend’s biggest acts, Serj Tankian. Surprisingly for someone who is a former member of the experimental metal band System of a Down, Tankian turned out to be a very polite and charming gentleman, welcoming the audience by taking off his top hat (he was dressed in a cream penguin outfit- apparently going for “circus ring-master/ jack the ripper type look”) and repeatedly told the audience how beautiful we all were! Tankian turned out to be a very charismatic performer, feigning a somewhat sinister and creepy character on stage then getting everyone really riled up as he expressed his surprisingly outspoken views against George Bush and the war on terrorism, to the extent that the audience were punching their fists in the air along side him in seemingly united fury! As I later discovered as well, Tankian had exercised some of his environmentalist views at the festival as well. Unlike the big bands occupying the main stage the night before, (turning up with parades long enough to shame Noah’s Ark) Tankian did his part to reduce aeroplane gasses and arrived in Seinajoki from Helsinki by a lowly train!
By 1am when the show ended the audience was still on a high and just as it seemed the crowd were in a daze wondering what to do next that could top off this captivating performance, the Seinajoki sky erupted with lights of all colours. It was a fireworks display that I have only seen on such scale before at the Michael Jackson concert in Wembley arena 10 years ago and it was a fitting ending to a wonderful day at Provinssi… or so I thought. Of course the Finnish don’t go to bed that easily and the party carried on with quirkier more alternative bands playing on the smaller tents. Such as Pepe Deluxe, a male Finnish band, who brought a certain humour to their performance using a vocoder and various instruments to inject their show with the occasional women’s voices, robots voices and to even burst into opera at one point!
On Sunday morning it seemed two days of partying had taken its toll on the crowd as along the river bank, instead of the usual sea of naked arses from blokes who couldn’t quite make it to the toilets, it was a sea of people sprawled out on the grass, head in hands, nursing their hangovers. However, Sunday also brought a new and fresher crowd. Today being the first time Foo Fighters had played a gig in Finland open to the public meant a sell out of tickets early on and brought a collection of people from teenage rockers to families from all over Finland to Provinssi. And to wake up the Finnish nation, first thing was a Finnish rock band on main stage called Popeda, belting out the Finnish national anthem at the top of their lungs!
The afternoon was a blur of heavy metal bands as, going for delightful and refreshing strolls around the lush Provinssi grounds one would inevitably hear deafening screams that would shake even the most menacing of banshees! It certainly came as a surprise, however, when on the outdoor Island stage they traded black leather and smashing guitars for long gowns and a wedding ceremony! It turned out that one of the Provinssi team was getting married that day and was so passionate about the festival that he wanted to do it on stage in front of the crowd! So a more sedated rock band played in the background as the vicar conducted the ceremony, and the crowd was only lulled out of its gooey eyed trance when the cat fight broke out as the bride threw her bouquet at the suddenly hysterical female members of the audience.
We were soon brought back to the heavy metal reality of the day at Provinssi though when the screamers of all screamers, Billy Talent broke out on main stage and was, so it seemed, surprisingly talented at making what I could only describe as high pitched animal noises that I didn’t even know existed! It was then I also realised how much a Finnish audience responds to the F word! If Billy’s every other word was fuck then every other word the audience would jump and cheer at the top of their lungs!
As it started to rain most took cover in X-stage to enjoy Paramore, a lively female American singer, and to anxiously speculate on whether the weather would clear up for Foo Fighters open air show later on main stage! Those who were not fazed by the rain however, were already piling up for prime position in front of the main stage a good two hours early. And as word got round the festival that Foo Fighters had arrived and were getting ready backstage, the rest of the crowd charged to fill up the remaining grounds too. One had to feel sympathy for the Foo Fighters’ only competition, a much smaller act called the Black Lips, who were the other entertainment for Sunday night playing on the much smaller Rumba tent. Though, one could certainly admire their determination as they cried “don’t worry guys, we’ll have to be dragged off stage tonight” at the dozen people who were left and were their audience.
The Foo Fighters certainly didn’t disappoint though, getting the crowd going straight off by opening with their famous song Pretenders so the ground shook with thousands of people moshing and jumping wildly in the air. After revving the crowd up with some of their classic hit songs they went on to join in the moshing with a spontaneous guitar jam on stage and later surprised everyone with a triangle solo! The crowd never stopped dancing or cheering throughout and after the longest set of the festival, ending 2 hours later, it seemed the audience still hadn’t had enough. But after the band left the stage for the final time and the crowd’s cries for their return finally died out everyone admitted defeat and so singing and chanting poured towards the exits; which is what brings me to my taxi journey back to the hotel!
Though I feel exhausted by my weekend of partying I loved every minute of it and leave Provinssi on a high with a smile on my face, having had one of the best festival experiences ever! As I reflect over memories of the past weekend I realise I’ve already decided that for me, this is only the first of many Provinssi’s to come!
Kristina Koivio
