Derrida in year 2009. Photo by Tuomas Klaus.
DERRIDA timeline
1997 – Atte, Juho and Ville, along with Jarno, start their first band together, Suljettu Progressiivi.1998 – Jarno quits Suljettu Progressiivi, and the band effectively splits up.
1999 – Ville, Juho and Erno start a punk band, they ask Atte to join and Rainhold is born.
2000 – Rainhold sets up punk/hc-shows in Kotka.
2001 – Rainhold releases 21st Century Fight Songs 7”, and a split 7” with Threshold. Besides Kotka, Rainhold plays shows in Helsinki and Turku.
2002 – They play at Puntala punk-festival. Rainhold records a split-CD with Nonsense.
2003 – Split-cd is finally released.
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2004 – Rainhold splits up, Atte and Juho move to Tampere and start DERRIDA. Ville, Petri and Tatu join the band, they start recording their first demo.
2005 – Demo is released. Tatu quits Derrida, Touko takes the bass.
2006 – A short tour in Estonia and Latvia with Drowning Nation. Second demo is recorded and released. Derrida plays shows around Finland.
2007 – Derrida starts recording the first full-length LP, and does a Russian tour in March. Petri quits Derrida after returning from Russia. Jani takes his place for a European tour in May. Juuso takes the guitar in the summer, plays a short tour in Finland in September, and then quits the band. Derrida goes on as a four-piece and does more shows in Finland.
2008 – European tour as a four-piece in February, the LP is finally released just after the tour. Touko moves to England.
2009 – Touko moves back to Tampere, and Derrida is back on. Petri rejoins the band in October.
DERRIDA – the story so far
Preface
Now that I´m a historian (two full university-level courses completed!), I was the obvious choice to re-write the history of Derrida (the band). There was an outdated history-section on our website written by Atte that I used as a basis for this story. I made some corrections, wrote some new bits in between, and then wrote the last chapters myself. Everything is written based on how I and Atte remember it. While I did try to write down things how they actually happened, this is not to be looked at as an objective cultural or historical article, rather a view and a feeling from within a band. To get some of the facts right, like confirming the years and dates, we luckily have a list of our past shows to look into. It´s been a privilege being part of this band, and still is. We´ve been through a rollercoaster ride, and to a lot of places that I never thought I would go to. Still, I feel that we´re nowhere near fulfilling the potential we have in Derrida. Not as musicians, or great artists, but as a culturally aware and enthusiastic punk/hardcore/diy -outfit that, on a good day, just might rock your ass too! While it would probably create a larger, more precise picture of Derrida, I will not go deep into explaining all the other bands or activities we´ve been involved in throughout these years. Some of those bands are briefly mentioned, but I feel that opening up the whole picture, some kind of a “punk rock family-tree”, would make this article simply way too long and versatile.This is how I see Derrida as of 7th of December 2009.
- Touko
1. The Early Days
One could say it all started in 1997 in Kotka, Finland when drummer Jarno and bassist/vocalist Atte tried to find band mates for their CMX-style rock band. They had already had a black/death metal band for a couple of years with three other guys, but that didn’t really work out too well. One of the main reasons was that their former singer started to hang out with local boneheads, and he effectively turned into a neo-nazi too. Afterwards Atte and Jarno formed another band that didn´t last long either. The idea was to play, as a trio, Ved Buens Ende and Ulver -stylish black metal with Finnish lyrics from Kalevala and old Finnish myths. Atte really liked the idea but somehow everything fell apart again.Later that year Jarno told Atte about two skateboarder guys who were attending a high-school music course with him. Jarno told that the guys were into CMX, which was one of Atte´s and Jarno’s favourite bands at the time. These mysterious skateboarders were Juho and Ville. At first, Atte didn´t like the idea of having two skateboarders in the band, because it was usually skateboarders who shouted insults when Atte and Jarno walked down the streets of Kotka wearing long black leather jackets. However, they decided to give it a shot anyway, and the basis for what would later become Derrida was born. Juho and Ville had played together for a couple of years already, and back then they were mainly listening to alternative/rock bands such as Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins and Rage Against The Machine. The first rehearsals turned out to be a success. Against all the odds, the small-town division between black-metal guys and skateboarders was instantly forgotten, and the band started to practice weekly.
Unfortunately their music turned out not very interesting at first. It was a bit like the stuff Maj Karma and their peers made famous again somewhere in 2006 or so, lame rock music with a poetic approach to it. Lyrics were written in Finnish and they were mainly poetical nonsense in the spirit of early Absoluuttinen Nollapiste. Band took Joonas to play bass and Atte started his career as a rock’n’roll singer. The band was called Suljettu Progressiivi, and they still have no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean. Suljettu Progressiivi would probably translate into “Closed Progressiv” (spelling mistake intended). This band never released anything. The only things they got together were a number of rehearsal tapes and two live shows. First gig was at Kotka`s nuokkari (youth club). Everyone in the band wore black suits except Atte, who for some reason or another wore his mother´s old hippy dress from the seventies. He must have been an eyesore for there was no underwear under that dress. His lips and hair was painted blue. Atte was not a very good singer, he aimed to follow the note while rehearsing but simply shouted out the vocals live. The second gig took place at Atomi rock band contest in Hamina, Finland. Suljettu Progressiivi was not successful in the contest itself, but a picture of them got into the local newspaper Kymen Sanomat. The funny thing about Suljettu Progressiivi was that they used to play short hardcore songs for fun at rehearsals in between practicing those musically more ambitious songs they normally played. The guys say that these hardcore songs were actually more fun to play than their own songs. Suljettu Progressiivi split up when Jarno decided to stop playing drums and focused on poetry instead. In 2009 poetic novel called Tuleen heitetty kello was published from him.
When Jarno left the band in 1998, Atte, Juho and Ville started to play as a trio. Ville took the drummer´s seat because he was the only one who could somewhat handle it. Juho played guitar and Atte played bass. The band had no name and actually it wasn’t really a band at all. The trio mainly just improvised for fun. Back then the Finnish underground/punk music was the biggest thing for them. Juho found the Mutiny!-zine and through it a whole new world of music was discovered. One could argue that a musical and cultural process had now begun that still has no end in sight. Juho started ordering records through the mail from P. Tuotanto and Bad Vugum. Atte went ape when first hearing bands like Terveet Kädet and Radiopuhelimet. In 1999 Juho and Ville, together with their friend Erno, decided to start a punk band. They started rehearsing and a bit later Juho asked Atte if he wanted to join the band as a guitar player. Atte tried to play guitar at rehearsals but he was such a lousy guitarist that it didn’t work out. Juho and Atte decided to change places. Atte took the microphone and Juho took the guitar. Rainhold was born.
2. Rainhold
Things got underway extremely fast with Rainhold. After a few self-organized live shows the band decided to record a demo. Unfortunately, the sound of the bass drum was somehow lost during the recording session and the band decided to try again. This time, however, the plan was to release a 7” ep. The 21st Century Fight Songs 7” was released in 2001. Rainhold played simple hardcore punk, a bit like early US hardcore. Lyrics were written in English and they were just simple statements dealing with war, racism and other things very common for teenage punks. Most of Rainhold’s gigs were organized by the band themselves. Erno was the main organizer, but the rest of the band did their share too. Back then a lot of hardcore bands visited Kotka, and played shows set up by Rainhold. In 2001 they also did a split 7” with Threshold. This record now sounds quite lousy and sloppy but somehow the feedback was fairly good. Besides Kotka, Rainhold played few gigs in Helsinki and Turku. In 2002 they recorded a split-cd with a Polish band called Nonsense. Unfortunately, the record came out over a year after the studio session when the band wasn´t to be there for much longer. Rainhold disbanded in 2004 because the flame just wasn’t there anymore. Atte and Juho moved to Tampere while Ville and Erno were still living in Kotka, so the band could only rehearse every now and then, you know, the usual story. Some of the songs written at that time later found their way into Derrida’s repertory.Rainhold discography can be downloaded here -> http://www.mikseri.net/rainhold
3. Derrida
3.1 New beginning in Tampere
Shortly after Rainhold was disbanded in 2004, Atte and Juho decided to start a new band in Tampere. Atte contacted Ville, who would later move to Tampere too, and so he was back in the band. Atte convinced Tatu, bass-player from Kotka´s ska band Goon, yet another immigrant to Tampere, to join the band and so they were ready to start rehearsing. Already when Rainhold was still up and alive they thought that a second guitarist would be a good idea. Juho and Atte tried to figure out who would be a suitable person to play guitar with them. Finally everything fell in place perfectly when Petri, also originally from Kotka, moved to Tampere with his girlfriend. Atte knew Petri through a theatre-project they had both participated in back in Kotka. Also, Petri had a history of playing guitar in various metal-projects. He came to rehearsals and joined the band.Towards the end of Rainhold´s existence, singing language was changed from English to Finnish. Lyrics became more personal, and one could say, much better too. Classic punk-themes were not forgotten (in fact, they still aren´t). It was just a bit more, should I say, grown-up approach to hating the system. It was easier for Atte to put words in place in his native language. Also, it wasn´t just the classic US-style hardcore/punk they would play anymore, but with a metal-twist to it. Now please don´t fall into thinking I´m referring to “metal-core” or any other bullshit-core here, okay? Good.
The band had no name yet, but rehearsals were well underway and new songs were written. Some of the songs, such as Kasvu, Pieni Ihmissuhdelaulu and Valon Ristiriita were actually old Rainhold-songs. As for Derrida, songwriting has always been a process. Someone has an idea, a riff, structure, or even a complete song that gets collectively wrecked at rehearsals. It used to be Juho writing majority of the songs for Rainhold, but from around 2004, when Derrida was founded, it´s been mostly Atte putting the chords after each other, only to see us strip his nice compositions down to what you folks can later hear as Derrida-songs.
Band was named Derrida after, like one would guess, the philosopher and father of deconstruction theory Jacques Derrida. He died in 2004, the same year the band Derrida was founded. This is no coincidence, because the philosopher got his fair share of media-attention that year. One could even say that at the time he was fashionable to refer to, at least to some degree. Sounds a bit lame now, but I´m sure it was a brilliant idea for a group of post-high-school punks. Whatever, it still makes a nice metal-logo! After Derrida had put five songs together, the band decided to record a demo-cdr. The demo session started in the spring of 2004 but after everything else except bass was recorded, Tatu decided to leave the band. No hard feelings there, it just didn´t really work out with him. By that time Derrida had done one live show at Atte’s summer cottage, also without Tatu. Tomi from Markku Lahtelan Sirkus was the session bassist at the show, and Juho played bass on the demo. Derrida did a couple more shows with Tomi on bass, but that was not going to be the solution because Tomi wanted to focus on his own musical projects. It was the summer of 2005 when they decided to see what would happen if they post an ad for the bassist´s position on the internet. I had just heard their demo at Abduktio-singer Mikko´s place, and he told me that Derrida was also looking for a bass player. It took just seconds from me to email Atte, and he called me minutes later to let me know that I was more than welcome to join Derrida at rehearsals to give it a shot. I had met Atte just once before, at the Puntala-festival a little earlier that year where I played guitar in a thrash/hc band Riot Patrol. I was also singing and playing guitar in hc/punk band The Divisive at the time. Later I found out that before rehearsing together for that first time, Ville, Juho and Petri were fearfully expecting me to be a militant crust/punk-monster because of Riot Patrol´s provocatively outspoken anti-smoking stance! I wasn´t quite like that, and things pretty much fell in place already at that first rehearsal session we had together. A funny detail to point out is that besides Atte, in this line-up we really had four guitarists of whom two had to pick other instruments in order to form a band. Oh, and I´m sure this is the classic Derrida-lineup that will be wistfully referred to in 2030 when Atte is doing a fourteenth Derrida-reunion tour with some random teenagers in the band with him!
3.2 Rollercoaster ride
3.2.1 From Russia with hunger
We played the first show with this line-up around Christmas 2005 at Oranssi, Helsinki. It was a bad show, and I only remembered how to play, like, half of the songs. Luckily all the others sucked too, so I wasn´t the only one to blame for our poor performance. Anyway, after a bad start you can only get better, right? We did a short tour in Estonia and Latvia in April 2006 with Drowning Nation, a brilliant early US-style hardcore band from Helsinki, Finland. The one memorable show of this tour we still sometimes talk about was at a pool-pub in Pärnu, Estonia. It was one of those infamous moments in diy-punk where you arrive at a venue only to find out there is no food, no place to sleep and you shouldn´t expect anyone to show up because the most popular punk band of the country has a show elsewhere in town! There´s no hard feelings though, the guy doing the show did sort it all out the best he could, except the no-one-showing-up bit.Right after the tour we recorded a new demo-tape including a couple of songs already released on the first demo, and a few new songs too. There was also a couple of cover songs from bands we thought would be cool to do covers from, Adrenalin O.D. and Amen (the hc/punk band from Finland). Oh well, how could a group of four-eyed guys ever figure out what is hot and what is not? We still sometimes play the Amen-cover live though, I like the song a lot. We kept on playing them shows and boy did we do a lot of them in 2006 and 2007!
We started 2007 with a blast, a week-long tour in Russia! We were singing with locals on endless journeys on Russian night-trains, we played shows before enthusiastic audiences you wouldn´t dream of in Finland, we ate almost nothing besides potatoes and vodka, but oh my, did we love our time there! Getting hold of any vegetarian food seemed impossible at times. I´m guessing it was mostly down to us not speaking any Russian at all, and our beloved host, Kirill, not being a vegetarian himself, thus no matter how helpful he was, he didn´t really have any personal expertise on where to look from. There was a nice Chinese restaurant in St. Petersburg we went to, but besides that we basically just bought potatoes from old ladies through a train-window wherever the train would stop. There was a fight at our show in Moscow that got nastily violent, and we had to leave the venue later in groups so that no one would be alone in case the Nazis attacked! We got out of Moscow alive, and back on the train up north to play a festival in an ice-hockey hall in Petrozavodsk. That was crazy, and will for sure remain the biggest stage we´ll ever play! Probably the funniest thing there was that we were not given any free beer before we had played, but were naturally given vodka to drink while we had sandwiches! After the tour in Russia, Petri, who had moved back to Kotka, left Derrida. He just had no time to fully concentrate on the band, and at the time he was also the only one not living in Tampere.
3.2.2 From stability to chaos
After Petri left the band, we were really struggling to find a suitable replacement for him. We left for another tour already in May 2007. This time we travelled around Eastern Europe with Jani (Another Sinking Ship) on second guitar. We drove through Transylvanian mountains in Romania and tried to avoid bribing all the cops in hot Ukraine. I guess we did some shows in between, too. Jani played the tour, but didn´t join the band. Instead we did some shows in Finland as a four-piece. It didn´t really work out the way we wanted because a lot of the songs were originally written for two guitars. Things looked like falling in place again when Juuso came in to give it a try. He did a couple of shows with us, although our music wasn´t really his cup of tea. Derrida was not metal and also not punk enough for him, I suppose. Funnily enough, after a four-show tour in Finland we did with Unkind, Juuso quit Derrida to join them. Again, no hard feelings there, he got the opportunity he wanted, and Unkind was more his type of music anyway.It was more four-piece shows in Finland for us, and we did a European tour in February 2008 as a four-piece too. We played a notable show at a junkyard in a small village in southern Czech Republic. Something like half of the village showed up, and there we were, playing our rubbish hardcore at a junkyard! How come the nice shows you play in decent rock-clubs rarely ever make good stories? After this tour our first full-length LP “Vastakirjoituksia” finally came out. We started recording a year earlier or so, and Petri still plays guitar on the LP. Again, some of the songs were previously released on our demos, but some of the songs were brand new. Looking back now, the LP is a bit too fast (too fast? yes, really), but somewhat necessary thing to do in order to get fully past the earlier years in musical sense. Like a lot of first full-lengths are, it was more like a compilation of early Derrida stuff. We didn´t do too many gigs after that tour, not the smartest thing to do when you finally get an LP released, eh. I left for trekking through South-America, and Juho started working on his thesis (he is still working on it, by the way). We played a couple more shows as a four-piece later that summer, but then I moved to England with my girlfriend in September 2008, and the odds for Derrida breaking up were at their lowest ever. It didn´t feel right to go on as a four-piece anyway, and the others in the band didn´t want to look for a new bassist when I left for England. Also, Atte was now living in Turku which didn´t exactly make things any easier for the band to go on. We did not call it the end, we just vaguely decided to look into it again whenever I would come back to Finland.