This weekend sees award-winning Finnish rocker Ismo Alanko perform his debut concert in St. Petersburg as part of an evening of Finnish music, The St. Peterburg Times reports.

Ismo Alanko is a Finnish living legend. Having started out as a teenager with the prog-rock band Sight, Alanko went on to front Hassisen Kone, the new wave band which won the annual Finnish Rock Championship in 1980, and then the avant-rock Sielun Veljet. He had a successful solo career before performing with Ismo Alanko Saatio — a band featuring avant-garde accordion player Kimmo Pohjonen. Over the years and with different lineups, he has released more than 20 albums of original and very diverse music, but always with the Finnish spirit.

Despite his fame, gold records and multiple awards, Alanko has never performed in St. Petersburg. His first concert in the city will be on Saturday at Tantsy, where he’ll play with his current band Ismo Alanko Teholla. Although it consists of just two people — Alanko and percussionist Teho Majamaki — Teholla sounds like a full line-up and is described as “perhaps small in size, but not in sound.”

Alanko spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone ahead of the concert.

Is this your first visit to Russia?

No, I played in Moscow a couple of times in the 1980s with my former band, Sielun Veljet.

I have visited St. Petersburg maybe twice as a tourist, but never played there, so this will be the first time.

According to the promoters, the idea of the concert is to “introduce Finnish music to Russia,” because Finnish music is not very well known in Russia. Don’t you think that that is a bit strange, considering the two countries are so close both geographically and historically?

I’m really looking forward to playing in St. Petersburg, because Finnish and Russian music have something in common; they’re close to each other. They both have these melancholic melodies, Slavic feeling.

It’s interesting that you mentioned Slavic feeling, because the Finnish people are a totally different nation and the language is Finno-Ugric, which is very far from the Slavic languages.

Yes, the language is different, but I think we are so close to each other; the nature and climate are similar. I think the climate is the key thing. We have long cold winters, dark nights for most of the year and a short summer.

What was the title of your first album, “Taalta tullaan Venaja?” (“Russia Here We Come”) from 1980, a reference to?

[Hassisen Kone] was a new-wave/postpunk band, and we were criticizing vodka tourism — Finnish people going to Russia to drink cheap vodka and so on. It was a critique of these people, who drank and behaved badly — and behaved like the owners of the Soviet Union. These ordinary Finnish people who went there and were transformed into pigs. But it was a long time ago.

Your current band, Ismo Alanko Teholla, is just two people. How did it come about and what was the idea?

The idea is that we’re a two-man band, a duo, but that we sound like a big rock band. It’s very dynamic. We use a lot of different instruments. I play piano, organ, and acoustic and electric guitars, and I use these octaver things [octave-effect boxes], so there’s a lot of bass. The sound is really big. And the other guy [Teho Majamaki], is a percussionist, he has a vibraphone and different kinds of drums, as well as homemade instruments. So it’s very rich in color, our sound. The idea is that in one song we’re really sensitive; we play beautifully — small, quiet, just the piano and vibraphone — and in the next song we play like a rough punk band, with a huge sound influenced by different music styles. It’s kind of a rock band, but influenced by a bit of punk, Finnish folk music, British pop, maybe even a little progressive rock. We also both have a classical background. The percussionist has played percussion in a symphony orchestra, and I played cello. Sometimes even now I play it in the studio. So it’s a fusion of different kinds of styles. I use different kinds of harmonies and melodies when I compose, compared to most rock music. That’s another thing that’s typical of our music.

Is it all in Finnish?

Yes, normally we sing in Finnish, but we have also recorded some songs in English, though they haven’t been released yet. Finnish is part of the sound and part of the music. But we can also sing some songs in English, so people can understand a little what the lyrics are about.

I really like the Finnish language, which is my instrument. I think it sounds really good in rock music. It’s tough but it’s also really beautiful. Long vowels and tough consonants — I think it’s great.

It has been said that your lyrics are untranslatable. Is this due to wordplay?

Yes, there’s a lot of wordplay, and also they are related to Finnish culture quite a lot. But I wouldn’t say they are untranslatable. I think [at Saturday’s gig] we’re going to sing a couple of songs in English, so people who can speak English can get the idea.

You were born in Helsinki, but grew up in Joensuu. What was being a teenager in Joensuu at that time like?

I was only a couple of months old when we moved to Joensuu, and I lived there for 25 years. We lived really near the Russian border. It’s a small town of about 40,000 people.

I liked being there, because I started to play music when I was really young, like seven or eight years old. I started to play piano first and then cello, and I was really into sport too. So I had plenty to do there, and even though it’s a small town, I didn’t feel it was boring at all. But when I finished school, I was really keen to get out of there and see the world, because it was such a small town. So I moved to Stockholm and worked there for a year after school. But I didn’t find any people to play with in Stockholm, because it was really tough for Finnish people to make friends with Swedish people at that time. So I went back to Joensuu and created my first band there.

Do you come from a musical family?

Yes, my father was a musical man. He wasn’t a professional, but he wanted us all to play music. He told us, “Yes, yes, yes, you should play something, because I couldn’t — I had to work, because music doesn’t give bread to a family.” Actually, all of my brothers and sisters are professional musicians now. My sister plays violin in Helsinki in a Philharmonic Orchestra, my brother plays flute in a Radio Symphony Orchestra, and my other brother makes pop music too.

How did you get hold of music at that time? Was it difficult to get records from England or the U.S.?

Not so difficult. It wasn’t like now, there wasn't so much music coming all the time. So even though it was a small town, you could buy the best-known records in the music store. And records you couldn’t find in the music store, it was possible to order by post. It wasn’t that difficult, so I was really into rock music from when I was 12 or 13 years old.

What music influenced you when you were young?

First I listened to glam rock, Slade and bands like that. Then I discovered David Bowie in the mid-1970s, “Hunky Dory,” “Aladdin Sane,” “Space Oddity.” Maybe the biggest thing that ever happened to me in terms of music was David Bowie. Then there was Alice Cooper and things like that. Then came progressive rock, Genesis, Pink Floyd, things like that. And then after that came punk, which was an explosion for me, a really important thing that happened. And then these New York art bands like Talking Heads.

I listened to lots of different music styles, and at the same time I played classical music.

I read that the idea for your first band, Hassisen Kone, was to “play punk rock in Finnish.” Is that correct?

In a way, yes. But it wasn’t real punk rock, it was more like a new wave band, like postpunk. We were already influenced by bands like Talking Heads. But it was also quite straight rock. It was definitely influenced by punk a lot, but I wouldn’t call Hassisen Kone a punk band.

Were there many bands like that in Finland at that time?

Yeah, there was a big punk and postpunk movement. The attitude that you don’t have to be a brilliant musician to play in a band — it was like “Wow! What an idea. Everybody can play.” So a lot of young people created bands, and everybody started to sing in Finnish. Before that, most bands sang in English.

There were very many good bands, and great Finnish lyrics in the 1980s when bands started singing in Finnish. Before that, there were only a couple of good people who wrote good Finnish lyrics.

Do you think Finland was different in this respect from other European countries?

Maybe. It was the spirit of the time that everybody started to sing in Finnish. And since then, we have had a tradition of good lyrics in Finnish rock music.

In Finland, on the radio you can hear international songs— including Russian ones — translated into Finnish. Would you say there is a tradition of translating songs into Finnish?

Oh yes, it’s been like that since the 1960s, I think. People have made international pop songs in Finnish. We definitely have this tradition.

Sielun Veljet was your second band — was it also a kind of new wave band?

Kind of, yes. That’s typical of all my bands; we made really different kinds of albums. Also, we made rock albums, kind of new wave, a bit punkish. And then we made these acoustic albums, one in English, this “Softwood Music [Under Slow Pillars],” which was influenced by oriental music, and there were acoustic guitars and some flamenco things and an Indian influence, things like that. So we made a lot of different kinds of things.

It was a pretty unpredictable band, we could do anything on stage. Sometimes we didn’t play at all, we just had a play of “Little Red Riding Hood,” when people were expecting rock music. So it was kind of a mixture of a rock band and experimental performance group or something like that.

In one interview, you described all your work as folk music. How serious were you being?

I can’t remember everything I said (laughs). But in a way, all music is folk music...

I don’t know what I meant, but there’s some kind of Finnish spirit in my music. And it’s something that’s separate from the rest of rock music. And maybe that is what I meant by “folk music.” Because I don’t play traditional Finnish folk music or American folk music, I didn’t mean that. More like Finnish spirit, Finnish nature, something like that.

What would you say is specific to Finnish music?

Maybe it’s a kind of craziness. There are a lot of bands that are really unpredictable. There is also a huge heavy metal scene in Finland, but if we’re not talking about that, if we’re talking about more underground, independent bands, some people are doing experimental things, crazy things, using different kinds of instruments, playing things that are not normal in the tradition of rock music. There are a lot of bands that can surprise you. We are definitely one of them! (Laughs.)

Could you name some interesting contemporary Finnish bands?

I was just touring in Lapland with The Bad Ass Brass Band, who are great. They’ve just released their first album. There are about 15 people, and they play really strange brass music. And, of course, Kimmo Pohjonen is great, and Lapko who is playing with us [on Saturday] is also great. And another Fullsteam band — the same record label as us — is Rubik, they’re also great. But they sing in English.