Interview with East Electric: ‘One of the first bands I ever fell for as a kid was Queen’

Helsinki rock band East Electric will release their debut EP ‘Reflections’ next week (20 October).

The band comprises singer Jocke Levälampi, guitarist Toni Kajasti (Signlane, Superdiesel), bassist Matti Vähätalo (White Magic Wind) and drummer Tuukka Ilmakari (Prime Time Violence, Terrain). ‘We met very late on,’ Levälampi said. ‘I only joined the band in January, it all came together slowly. Toni and Tuukka are acquaintances, I’ve been in bands that faded over time. I found them like on a dating app (laughs), we set a play date in December and then it took off. Our drummer knew a bassist, then I jumped in!’ Of their name, he says: ‘We’ve always been a bit worried about the name, there was a long list of screwball names, all were goofs and stuff but sounded horribly stupid translated into English! We couldn’t pinpoint one, we had a list of 70 names! I don’t know where this name came from. I had a problem with it at first because it doesn’t mean anything but the name does leave the door open for the listener. It doesn’t say much – the name is empty, you can fill it up.’

He takes a similar approach to their upcoming EP: ‘Being that this is our first EP, we didn’t want to lock ourselves down to a specific theme,’ he said. ‘It felt too narrow that way. What we wanted was to make an announcement: “We are here, we are ready, are you?!”‘

The EP will include recent singles, including their latest single ‘You Shall Pay’, which seamlessly meshes classic rock with bluesey elements, erupting with a scream from Levälampi before ratcheting it all the way up – think equal parts The Black Keys, Foo Fighter style drums and a hefty sprinkle of glam rock: ‘It’s so much fun to play, I think our guitarist Toni is a riff machine!,’ Levälampi said. ‘When we were recording this EP, when we left Toni alone, he’d forget what he was supposed to play, ‘cos he’d figured out three other riffs in that time (laughs). Our drummer came up with the story about someone borrowing money and not paying you back. We didn’t want to touch it too much but it’s like a centre point, it’s very pure rock ‘n’ roll! Our guitarist is a massive AC/DC fan, there’s a lot of colour to it. It’s the first band I’m in where I just sing. In the past, I also played the guitar. Our bassist runs around the bass live. We haven’t had a chance to play live for other people yet but we have a big gig coming up in a month just outside Helsinki. I’m from a tiny, tiny village called Sipoo, where we had to play weddings and parties – so you play The Beatles for grandma at the beginning and Metallica at the end of the night!’

As the track goes: “Hey, I know where you come from, but you know what I got to say. I got nothing more to waste on you, you’re running down the wrong way.”

‘Our drummer wants to say exactly what something means but I wanna be sneaky and vague enough so that you can fill in the gaps’

‘Priestess’, for me, is the track that showcases just how much Levälampi can do with voice. It still retains the rocky, bluesey undertones of the other tracks but has an altogether grungier edge, making his vocals sound like a mixture of Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder: ‘There are few different guitars used on it. In the beginning, there is an acoustic guitar that is near and dear to Toni’s heart,’ he said. ‘We recorded it as a placeholder but noticed it just fit the song too well to put anything else there. The electric guitar parts are played on a Hagström Fantomen and the amp used is a Real Tube amp combo. When they put out this post for a singer, ‘Priestess’ was one of the songs they had, it was called something like ‘Loose Lips’ then,’ Levälampi said laughing. ‘I went to the garage and started improvising something. I love Eddie Vedder but I’ve never sung a Pearl Jam song before. I’ve always stressed horribly over lyrics. We all write lyrics. Our drummer wants to say exactly what something means but I wanna be sneaky and vague enough so that you can fill in the gaps.’

Nonetheless, it’s a rocky, sexy and evocative song that paints a picture of a man’s chance encounter with a woman at a bar that is more nuanced than you realise until you play close attention to the lyrics: ‘He sees her, he’s smitten, I wanted his affection to be desperate,’ he said. ‘She might not even know he exists. He describes her with words like “no-one talks like you, no-one moves like you, no- one laughs like you, no-one feels like you” but then “no-one leaves like you” – that changes the story, he sounds upset, like a wasted human being. I think a song lives or dies on the chorus. You let a song go when it breathes air.’

I tell him that’s it an incredibly cinematic song, that you really picture the drama unfolding as you listen to it and he agrees: ‘I have a background in filmmaking and video,’ he said. ‘It can easily become overthought, you should just let something be. If you overdo it, it will destroy itself. I thought: “I’ll go to my roots and tell a story”. Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, they have stories. I’m in awe of them, I’m not those guys. Chris Cornell’s James Bond song ‘You Know My Name’ is my favourite Bond song, he had such an iconic voice. You put a symphonic orchestra behind him! The guys in the band had to talk me down, I thought “Damn it, I sound too much like Chris Cornell” (laughs). I think as long as you’re inspired by someone and not imitating them, it’s ok.’

As the track goes: “You walk away, but stay in my mind. I hear you preaching like a queen of the blind. Weak and crawling with nothing left. Just a wave of her hand and…I’m turn into a revenant.”

I tell him that I love the cool, retro tube amp artwork, which turns out to have been inspired by their guitarist: ‘He had a lot of problems with his amp every time we practiced! It worked for a while and then it would crackle and drop the volume but then sometimes it would boost and get this awesome unique distortion,’ he said. ‘The amp used these old 70’s Sovietish tubes or something, and we thought it would be fun to use them as cover art. Kinda like saying: “You never know what kind of sound you’re gonna get out of these guys, ‘cos neither do we!”‘

‘I listened to it and thought it had to be rock ‘n’ roll for me’

The Finnish music scene can be tricky to navigate, according to Levälampi: ‘We got going in the spring,’ he said. ‘Finland is either frozen or hot (laughs). All bands attack in the summer, so it’s really hard to get a gig in the summer. I live and die on the stage, just get me there! This year, we’ve been more about writing songs, next year we’ll try to get more gigs. I didn’t expect our sound to become so classic rock but it just grows.’

Levälampi, endearingly, wears his influences on his sleeve: ‘One of the first bands I ever fell for as a kid was Queen,’ he said. ‘They’re every genre – rock, silliness and opera, they made me think “Wait, a band can do whatever they want?” I’ll try to let the song go wherever it goes.’

As a band, they have set themselves an ambitious songwriting target: ‘They set a goal of writing an idea for a song or a song every week, they keep churning out songs,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘It’s not just about finding a band and making music – it’s harder than a relationship and that’s just two people (laughs). You want to click, we were a bit nervous but we figured it out.’

Incredibly, it wasn’t obvious initially that Levälampi would carve out a career as a singer: ‘I never really thought I’d do something with this until late high school,’ he said. ‘I’d just started listening to Metallica. A friend forgot his AC/DC Ballbreaker album at my house one day (their thirteenth album, released in 1995) and I listened to it and thought it had to be rock ‘n’ roll for me! I used to sing Bryan Adams and Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ and I thought “I wanna do more of that”! I was dyslexic, not good in school but I thought “Now I know what I’m doing”.

‘East Electric came along at the perfect time’

In 2021, Levälampi appeared as a contest on Finland’s version of The Voice and I ask him what that experience was like: ‘I was desperate for attention,’ he quipped. ‘I hate the idea of music being a contest – they’d pull Bob Dylan off the stage on The Voice, he’d never win (laughs). It was fun and exciting but the most stressful thing. It was mid-Corona, so we never sung to a live audience. I’m empathetic to a bad degree and I remember singing in front of the judges, there were about 20 people, some of them were aged 25 and below. Some were nervous and shaking but I remember eating a sandwich and doing a Sudoku and I so wanted to give that to them, to help them enjoy it. You become friendly, it felt horrible to compete with them.’ I ask him if the contest itself opened any doors. ‘I got offered to play at a bar on the Russian border, I thought it was kinda far! East Electric came along at the perfect time. I’d just turned 40, we had no expectations. Our guitarist constantly talks about playing Wembley (laughs) but we’re happy as long as this is fun.’

And although he has sung in Finnish, he confesses to not being a fan of singing in Finnish: ‘I speak Swedish and Finnish, Swedish is my mother tongue,’ he said. ‘It’s a burden to sing in Finnish, like the words and melody are fighting each other! I like going to see the tiny bands. There’s a band called Amber Shadows, they’re a fuck you, punk rock band, they’re friends of mine. I just stand and stare at a gig, I put my hands in my pocket, I’m very Finnish (laughs). I always tell people to check out small bands, you’ve got nothing to lose, there’s something in their attitude – they’re so enthusiastic – that I love.’

That kind of enthusiasm is evident from their own debut single ‘The Show’, which captures every band’s journey to finally get on the stage. It has a pinch of melancholy in the verse which builds up the tension until it bursts into the epic rock explosion in the chorus, a kind of updated version of AC/DC ́s ‘It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock ́n ́roll)’. It’s incredibly hooky and impossible not to sing along to it. The chorus feels like Dave Grohl and Freddie Mercury having a sing off, such is its energy.

As the track kicks off: “Just another night, a hundred miles, the guitar screams and you’re alive. Far away, far from home, my shoes could walk there on their own. The stage is set the lights are on, the silence way before the storm.”

‘Dave Grohl is the Keanu Reeves of music, he’s so relatable’

Coincidentally, if he could go for a pint with anyone, he picks Freddie Mercury or Dave Grohl: ‘Dave Grohl is the Keanu Reeves of music, he’s so relatable,’ he said. ‘He’s the kind of guy who has a barbecue and plays some music. I adore his way of music, the way he writes lyrics, it’s so good. He could only use five words and I’d die a happy man. Freddie could serve our drinks! Dave Grohl, in his book (his autobiography, ‘The Storyteller’), he talks about going out one night with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson – he’s everyone’s buddy. Tenacious D, he’s played drums on all of their albums and he plays the devil in one of their music videos. He has that ability not to care too much about things, or it doesn’t come out unless it really matters, like when Taylor died. I’d love to have an ounce of his energy. He has a good quote, he said: “Go play live or to watch a band live”. When you’re a teenager in your room, you feel that the only one who gets you is that one artist, it’s so euphoric, it’s so much more than the sum of its parts. I hope when I’m onstage that somebody has that feeling, too. It’s like a ball – the ball starts with the band, you have to show the crowd that you’re having a good time. You have to give that out and, when you do, that comes back to you, they let themselves go and close their eyes. We just want to have fun, it’s a cliché, but it’s true.’

Levälampi has also been inspired by Brazilian band Sepultura: ‘They came to Helsinki to play a gig in a place called Tavastia, like Whisky a Go Go (LA’s historic club), it’s tiny and filthy (laughs) but everyone plays there, so you wanna play there. I hope one day we can get to that.’

His love of music on our Zoom is really infectious and it’s clear how much fun they must have when they’re in the same room: ‘The funniest thing we have have so far as a band was the recording of this EP, or these five songs,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t played together for more than five months or so, so no-one really knew what to expect. It was like letting four kids loose at the ball pit! We were just playing and jamming and napping and messing with whoever was recording at the time, and of course being Fins we had to go to the sauna, which they had 10 feet from the recording studio. It was great fun!’

Levälampi’s dream line up would be glorious: ‘Oh, it would be a summer gig outdoors on some kind of remote island in a Scandinavian setting, so the weather would be a dice roll! It would start with Kingston Wall, Rival Sons and then Pearl Jam. Then we would calm down with a few songs by Florence + The Machine and a duet with Frank Zappa and Tenacious D. Once everyone is mellowed out, we would have a blast all the way to the end with East Electric, AC/DC, then Led Zeppelin – the original line up – and, to end the night, it would be Foo Fighters. We have to be in the middle so we have the chance to see the other bands!’

(Top photo from left to right: Matti, Jocke (front), Tuukke and Toni.)