Backstage with Blind Channel & Ember Falls - “Revolutions” Long Lost Interviews
This interview was done in October 2016 for Musicalypse.net, but is only seeing the light of day now!
Photo by JB
Back in 2016, a fresh-faced young band from Oulu were making waves in the indie metal scene, catching my attention with an earwormy single, “Darker than Black.” Blind Channel were still quite new at that time, but were already touring and playing shows regularly.
Before Blind Channel got huge during Eurovision 2021, you’d have had a tough time finding a journalist who covered them as closely as I did. In fact, you can get a full rundown of my time covering the band in this article.
Anyway, I remember this being a really fun night and one of the few times that I had (and wanted) backstage access to a show. Ember Falls were well on their way to becoming my favorite band as of 2015, and you’d have been hard-pressed to find a Blind Channel show in the Helsinki-area that I wasn’t writing up. As such, I was pretty familiar with both bands at this point and most of what we were doing was having fun, as you can tell from these clips.
What I remember of this night was that the BC guys were all jittery and excited, while the EF fellows were happy and really supportive. These two bands had done a lot of shows together already, including a festival where they did a singer swap during both of their sets (South Park -festivaali 2015), so they had good chemistry together and knew each other quite well.
Getting these interview clips backstage was a bit chaotic, as you can tell from the people occasionally walking past, the noise, and the fact that I was doing them in a hallway (we didn’t pre-plan them, so it was up to me to grab the guys whenever they had a moment). I’m not sure why Olli Matela’s clip cuts off awkwardly. I do remember that Tommi Lalli wanted to make it seem like he couldn’t speak English (he could), which is why he had a translator (not sure if I ever knew who he was, oops, sorry). I think Tommi was trying to invoke ralli driver interviews, or something to that effect, but again, this was 10 years ago so my memory’s pretty hazy.
Beyond that, no, I have no idea where the question from that final clip came from—it was 10 years ago and I haven’t looked at these clips since I recorded them. But I’ve never been so mature as to shy away from a poop joke, so there you have it.
Why weren’t these published after the show, as intended? Well, I had two photographers with me, one of whom had made some hefty claims about wanting to do video interviews and promised to do the editing. Unfortunately, she flaked out on every interview she promised to do video for and eventually disappeared from the country. I finally started to learn to edit my own podcast episodes in 2023, so at that point, I figured I’d just hold out another 3 years and then release this a full decade after the fact.
For some other behind-the-scenes fun from this event, you can check out the photoshoot from the stage setup and sound check, or the backstage photoshoot from before the show, or you can check out the live report from the show over here!
While I haven’t paid much attention to Blind Channel since the Eurovision days and my semi-retirement from music journalism, I nevertheless felt like it’d be fun to explore these clips from back in the day when I was in the thick of things with both of these bands. It was a nice little nostalgia blast for me, and I hope you enjoyed it too!
