31st January, Lepakko

December 1996. The phone rings. I answer. ‘Hello.’ It’s Wallu Valpio.

‘I told you I’d get a gig for you, and I did.’

I swallow. Now we’d actually have to scrape together enough songs decent enough to make a set. I’d have to finish all the lyrics. Design and print posters and flyers. The band would have to rehearse. And rehearse some more. I kind of thought we’d just play at the rehearsal place forever, recording demos. I’m excited, though.

The poster is the easiest of all the things the gig requires. The first Mummypowder logo gets created. Along with a drawing of animals with a psychotic look on their faces, all heading to our gig to see us play. We spread some posters around town, excited as we are.

The gig is at Lepakko. Convenient: our rehearsal place is there too. We only have to carry the stuff outside, then inside through another door. The soundcheck is just like everyone always says. Soundmen, in general, aren’t friendly people when you’re doing your first gigs and they have to tell you what to do. Where to plug that guitar. How to sing into the mic.

After the soundcheck we go to the bass player’s girlfriend’s flat and get drunk. Not totally out of our heads. Just drunk enough to cope with the excitement. Back at Lepakko we’re greeted by the angry face of the soundman. We should have been there earlier, he tells us.

We play the gig. We’re on first, of course. The other bands tonight: Thee Ultra Bimboos, Flaming Sideburns and The Duplo. The Duplo’s frontman Aleksi has now been Mummypowder’s guitar player for a few months. Our gear is, in a word, crap. Aleksi’s guitar leads have, to this day, rarely worked through a whole set, with The Duplo or with us. Our drummer, Janne Nissilä, doesn’t have drumsticks or cymbals that weren’t broken to start with. Tero’s bass starts feeding back the moment he stops playing. My guitar, good though it is, sometimes just cuts out.

The gig goes well. Not by any means groundbreaking. But people tell us we have great songs. (No word about the playing.) Whether Aleksi played half of the gig lying on his back, like all the other gigs he’s ever done, I can’t remember.

– Janne Lehtinen