THE 69 EYES Singer: 'We Can Tour With Everything From Black Metal Bands To Sleaze Rock Bands'

Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with vocalist Jyrki 69 of Finnish gothic metallers THE 69 EYES. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metalshrine: Do you feel you need videos these days? The only place where it's shown is YouTube.

Jyrki 69: Recording an album in a studio is great and it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience all the time, but it's not that pleasurable. The video should kinda be like an award for doing the album. That's how I always looked at it. That's why we've done videos with, like, Bam Margera and you get a lame excuse for the record company to pay us to go to Hollywood and party for a long weekend. [laughs] It's like an award. "Hey, we did the album and now it's time for the video, so let's fly somewhere with a bunch of models and let's make sure we have a few days off for partying." Also, we're a visual band and people like to see it and the band changes a bit with every record. Not older, but changing the image. That's also interesting to show to the fans. It's a weird world to release a record in these days. The last album, which came out three years ago, back then we didn't even have Facebook, and now when the first single came out, fans could comment on Facebook and you get all these responses. Last time around we went on tour and we started to play and we had four or five new songs in the set and and we started talking, "Did you notice how they reacted to that one? Maybe we should drop this one?" and the communication was on that level. Now you get the feedback immediately. It's different, but also exciting in a way as well. On the other hand, we're old school and some of our fans that come to the shows, I don't think they're into social media at all. Like if you have an old band like L.A. GUNS and they have a few thousand people following them on Facebook, it doesn't mean anything. When you go to the shows, they're full and there are people standing with the album covers waiting to get them signed.

The title of the album is "X" and there's ten songs on it. Did that come right away or where there other titles floating around?

Jyrki 69: Well, once you get to your tenth album, it's not an unusual title. I checked it out and somebody said that Kylie Minogue recently released an album titled "X" and I just noticed that SPOCK'S BEARD has one, but I don't care. With the tenth album, I just thought, "Why not celebrate it a little?" because we've never celebrated anything. We've been playing for 23 years and we never had a 10th anniversary or a 20th anniversary or a compilation or a show. Nothing. We never thought about it because we're always looking forward. Our band is progressing all the time and I think we are just climbing higher and higher. Sometimes less and sometimes a little bit more. I think our stocks are rising by the years. The more stable your fan base is, the higher your stocks are. I think we haven't reached our peak yet and our musical progression is happening all the time. My vocals are not limited to a certain sound and we can, for instance, tour with everything from black metal bands to sleaze rock bands and we can probably play with NICKELBACK and OASIS as well. I think we have a long way to go and it's just fun. We feel that things are developing all the time.

Read the entire interview from Metalshrine.

"Borderline" audio stream:

"Red" video:

Photo credit: Pauli Rouvinen