by Tim Moore
Perhaps inspired by this fond memory, or the interest its vocalisation has aroused at nearby tables, Kojo launches into further reminiscences of atypical Eurovision revelry. A big Man United fan, he bunked off a Eurovision press conference to inveigle himself into a session at the team’s training ground, and so impressed the players with his keepy-uppy prowess that the gold record he subsequently dispatched at their request hung for many years on the changing-room wall.
Then, as glimpsed in the pre-vote interval film, there was that sedan-chair party thrown for the contestants at Castle Howard. ‘I have to tell you,’ Kojo says, with a wheezy chuckle, ‘we had a little bet, maybe a dare. We all had a good smoke in that chair! You understand what I mean? I open the door to get out and all this smoke comes out with me and I have a big smile …’
He shows me that smile, and it’s impossible not to return it. I’m seeing Kojo in the green room, what-the-fuck face, arms aloft; and I’m seeing him an hour earlier, delivering one of Eurovision’s more conspicuous performances. It has to be done: with a prompting wink, I tap my temple. Kojo surveys me with a mixture of curiosity and concern; the latter becomes more prominent as once, twice, three times, I firmly strike my forehead with the palm of my right hand. Only as the fourth blow lands do his features relax in comprehension.
‘This, yes, I don’t know why,’ he says, more soberly than my slap-happy performance demands. ‘I didn’t do it in rehearsal, you know: on-stage I do what I feel, I do my thing, and that night I guess that was my thing.’ Like Jahn’s splits, it was just one of those spur-of-the-moment expressions of on-stage joie de vivre, a helpless quirk. It might not have done either any favours in the voting, but at least they were allowed the freedom to leap and slap and dress up like berks (‘Hey – I chose that suit myself!’ cries Kojo in mock outrage when I later describe his red-leather two-piece in unflattering terms). How deflating to contemplate the ruthlessly choreographed modern contest’s ratcheting intolerance of non-conformity: as Europe becomes ever more homogenous, its edges rubbed off, its national distinctions eroded, so Eurovision has evolved into a celebration of what makes us the same, as once it celebrated what made us different.
‘So we have this all-or-nothing song,’ says one of Eurovision’s last true characters. ‘We hear the others in rehearsal, and we are so different, we know we either win or lose. So when the Finnish newspapers are asking if we can win, I say – why not? I say it because I really don’t care if we do.’
His protestations of nonchalance are more credible than Jahn Teigen’s. But did he really feel no pain, sitting there with Finland stalled on the line as around them on the scoreboard the digits flashed into double, treble figures? His shrug is slightly less cocksure. ‘I can be honest again, when the votes start, for sure that’s exciting. That’s what I liked about Eurovision as a kid. So when it starts … it’s a crazy thing, but you think: Maybe.’ Kojo forms his hands into a megaphone and launches into a Tannoyed announcement: ‘Twelve points Luxembourg, ten points blab-a-blab … Yes, we’re excited backstage. It gets down to one point, the first voting, and we have nothing, but still, you know …’
But I don’t, not yet, and I want to. ‘After maybe six, seven country votes, at this time we’re not excited, but we start to laugh. And our manager – a German guy – he bends down to me and says, “You know, we have to hope to get zero now. Zero is better than five, six. Zero is news.”’ He surveys a forkful of pasta. ‘Although back in Finland, it was not the right kind of news.’
The moment I saw that baggage-hall billboard I knew we’d come to this point, and to Kojo’s credit he doesn’t choose to trail away into dot-dot-dots, to leave this dark corner of his story in the shade. He stubs out his cigarette, and for once doesn’t light another. He shakes his head a little and those fleshy lips slide down at the sides and tauten. ‘Here … well, here it was awful.’ I didn’t expect to hear of Jahn-style red-carpet motorcades, and I’m clearly not going to.
‘In Finland Eurovision is very, very popular. You understand what I mean? I watched it as a kid, yeah, of course, in the sixties.’ He wistfully hums the Eurovision fanfare. ‘But in the seventies I stop watching. It becomes a joke for me, but not for Finland. I haven’t seen it for many, many years.’
He’s not joking: a moment later, when I mention my encounter with Jahn Teigen, he has no idea who I’m talking about. How could anyone – and a Scandinavian Eurovision performer of all people – not know Jahn Teigen? In deconstructing my shock on hearing this news I accept just how radical has been the restaffing of my internal rock hall of fame. In it, Jahn Teigen now stood proudly up near the front, perhaps obscuring half of Jon Entwistle’s head and the Jam’s rhythm section. And Kojo isn’t doing badly, either: that performance in the Harrogate green room barged Martha and the Vandellas out of his way, and the revelations of the previous half hour have seen him leapfrog Ray Davies’s brother and – do us a favour, Timo: turn round and punt him up the arse – Brian Ferry.
‘Team,’ he says, lowering his voice and leaning forward on table-planted elbows, ‘what it is with Finnish people, they are so serious. And so strange.’ In two words he encapsulates the enigma that is the Finnish race. I think of my recent trip to the Estonian capital Tallinn, watching golf-sweatered ‘vodka tourists’ from Helsinki downing breakfast beers with silent, grim determination as their children wanly sipped hot chocolate. And try as I might not to, I think of the shower heads that dangle beside every Finnish lavatory, public and private.
‘Strange, serious … and shy. In everything! In politics, you know, to win an argument you have to use your elbows, but here they can’t do that. They like to just sit behind the table.’ The repeated us of ‘they’ to describe his countrymen is no longer a mystery. In the hour I have known him, Kojo has made it plain that he is neither serious nor, still less, shy. In a land of tight lips and held tongues he’s a tub-thumping holdforther, bearing personal responsibility for perhaps 70 per cent of all decibels being generated by the restaurant’s several dozen diners. Consulting the menu he’d extracted and donned a pair of half-moon spectacles, without first troubling himself to remove his existing eyewear. Other than in his capacity for tobacco, and to a modest extent booze, Timo Kojo is not Finnish.
I suppose it was a bad combination. Scandinavians in general and Finns in particular are not bred to accept arrant failure – they’re too efficient, too dependable, too doughty. You don’t leave tips here: good service is guaranteed without the need for a grubby financial incentive. Mr Bean is a Nordic institution because he messes up with a consistency unimaginable to even the most gormlessly incompetent Scandinavian.
But though we in Britain might watch Eurovision for the same reason they watch Mr Bean, for them there’s no silly side to the contest. The most recent UK winner, Katrina (of And The Waves renown), said that in a perfect Eurovision future, ‘the Scandinavians would take it less seriously, and the Brits more so’. All Nordic competitors are weighed down with earnest national expectation, and none more so than Kojo in 1982.
Whatever Jahn Teigen might tell you, no Scandinavian nation has endured a more testing history than Finland. Many Swedes and Norwegians don’t even consider Finns Scandinavian: ethnically and linguistically they’re out on a cold limb, their historical and cultural origins utterly remote from their neighbours. As they remain, despite 600 years of Swedish rule. The ethnic Swedes who still form 6 per cent of Finland’s population are an elite that enjoys enormously disproportionate economic and political clout: in Helsinki (bracketed even on the BBC website by its Swedish name, Helsingfors), most street signs are bilingual. Without wishing to call it an inferiority complex, there’s certainly a sense of Finnish isolation.
When the Swedish empire began to retreat, the Russians moved in; Finland achieved independence only in 1917, and promptly lost it again to the Soviets in 1940 after a heart-breakingly heroic winter war. ‘Since World War II, the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower has meant that it could at any tim
e end Finland’s existence as a separate state,’ states a startlingly matter-of-fact US Library of Congress report. ‘Recognising this, the Finns have sought and achieved reconciliation with the Soviets, and have tenaciously pursued a policy of neutrality avoiding entanglement in superpower conflicts.’ As the no man’s land between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, for Finland the Cold War was always more about bombs and nuclear poo, not birds and love.
Eurovision had always offered Finns a chance to get one over on their fellow Scandinavians – and make a rare splash in Europe – but in 1982, it was more than that. Kojo’s mission wasn’t just to bring home the long overdue Eurobacon, but to use his elbows on their behalf to declaim the dangers of A-bomb apathy.
Yet as eagerly as he endorsed the nation’s fears of nuclear conflict, Kojo’s carefree conduct in the aftermath of Harrogate showed how completely he underestimated their parallel enthusiasm for Eurovision. He landed back at Helsinki oblivious of a bitter ongoing inquest: even before the final he’d been slated for bunking off that press conference, and after his green-room sneering, the whiff of blood was in the air. ‘At the airport one guy came up and said real quietly, “Oh man, I’m sorry for you,” and I see suddenly that this is worse for the Finnish people than it is for me.’ Kojo shakes his head slightly. ‘If I had apologised there to the country for letting them down, if I had looked sad, played the right game, I would have been forgiven.’
A tiny, snorted laugh suggests that though he’s now glad he didn’t do this, there have been time’s in the previous twenty-three years when he wished he had. ‘But instead I stood with my arms up, a big smile you know, like hey: the King is Back!’ With winning élan, he strikes the relevant pose. ‘No humour, these Finns. I fought the papers, so they hit me back. The next day, all the front pages call me a country-cheater. What is it? A traitor.’
So began what he’s reluctant to call the worst time his life, although it’s hard to see how it wasn’t. ‘You know I’m big into ice hockey, so a couple of days after I get home I go to a game, and people around start dropping beer on my trousers. “Oh, sorry,” they say, in this stupid voice. And sometimes in the street people were throwing Coke cans at me.’ He laughed it off, and so did his friends: in truth, he says, most of them were still sniggering at the fantastic incongruity of their mate the scowling rocker doing Eurovision. But the histrionic hate campaign wasn’t much fun for his parents. ‘My mother had to listen to all this blab-a-blab at her working place, people saying this and that about me. It was hard for her.’
Kojo’s eye-rolling indulgence devolved into shaken disbelief as the resentment lingered stubbornly on. ‘Yes, I’m bred with it, the zero points. I’m famous for it. This was front-page news, and not just for one day. For two years I hear it all the time: “Oh yeah, you’re the zero-points guy.” And still sometimes now.’ When was the last occasion? Idly rearranging his grey scalp-spikes, he considers briefly. ‘I think last week. About once in a week, somebody, somewhere will talk to me about Eurovision.’ It was a stand-off between him and the Finnish public: if he didn’t apologise for Harrogate, or at least express regret, they wouldn’t forgive him. Twenty-three years on, and neither party seems ready to back down. This, I’m thinking, could be the Kalvik Trigger. If it is, what he goes on to say snicks off the safety catch and begins to squeeze.
‘You know a sports match that finishes with no goals? You know what they call such a match here?’ I kind of have an idea, I think, without saying so. ‘A “Kojo-Kojo”.’ He looks hard at me, successfully imparting a suggestion of what it is to live with this level of national ignominy, to be synonymous with worthless sterility across one of Europe’s hugest lands. I’m now back on a beach in Koh Samui, watching a wild-haired, wild-eyed man stamping towards my sun lounger. ‘Kojo-Kojo, zero-zero. This is what people say, even today, even twenty-some years after.’
It’s difficult for me to conceive how two decades of that sort of business can affect a person, though not as difficult as it might have been a week earlier. I explain, as fully as I can bear to, my recent experiences in Thailand. ‘Well,’ I say when I’m done, ‘you can understand that situation better than most.’
The expected curt nod of hard-bitten, martyrs-in-arms empathy is replaced by an extravagant curl of those substantial lips. ‘No! I don’t understand at all! For sure you want to win, but you have to be a realist. If the votes go bad, they go bad. Why should that be so shameful, so awful?’
I look at those lips, and wonder what their owner will do if I kiss them, hard and long. Thank you, Timo Kojo, thank you for not being embittered into twitching paranoia. I suppose the key distinction here is that Finn saw Eurovision as his gilded gateway to Abbadom; for Kojo, it was a chance to visit Man U’s training ground and smoke pot in a sedan chair.
For two post-Harrogate years, Kojo found solace and employment in continental exile. ‘Germany, Holland, Italy – a lot of peace gigs, many TV shows; I had a great reaction.’ His manager at the time also represented Hanoi Rocks, huge-haired pioneers of Finn metal and often cited as a major influence on Guns N’ Roses. What is it, I wonder, that unites these two apparently incompatible cultures: Eurovision was a joke to Kojo, but would he have laughed as loudly backstage at Yankovision? ‘Finland has a funny thing for America, big cars and hard rock,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Too much corporate USA stuff, a lot of TV ads, like we are a little USA.’
Yet you don’t need to look far, except geographically, to find the cultural influences that inspired Kojo’s musical output in the pre-Eurovision era. His first four albums, all released or recorded before he put on that red suit of death, were heavily Americanised, English-language blues rock: ‘So Mean’, ‘Lucky Street’, ‘Go All the Way’, ‘Hitparade’. ‘OK, but I voted to join the EC!’ he says, before embarking on a wandering diatribe against the euro. ‘Five years ago it was one Finnish mark for a coffee, and now it’s one euro – this is like six marks, it’s really amazing how bad the prices have gone!’
For Kojo’s recording career, Eurovision proved a watershed – a leaky one, with dead pigeons floating in it. ‘Time Won’t Wait’, released in 1983, proved to be Kojo’s final English-language recording; following an almost unnoticed Finnish album with Jim Pembroke, his studio output settled into the fitful release of singles. One in ‘89, two in 1990, then a gap of three years, followed by one of a full decade. (Nonetheless, with 159 studio tracks to his name, Timo Kojo has a back catalogue heftier than ABBA’S.)
But touring was always his big thing: gigging all round Europe was just an extension of what he’d been doing all round Finland since the mid seventies. Through most of those early years Kojo shared a rowdy tour bus with Yankcentric rockers the Hurriganes, a band whose shifting line-up once inevitably incorporated Jim Pembroke on keyboards. ‘Finland is a big country,’ he says, ‘and we spent a lot of time on that bus. I mean a lot. And so we spent a lot of time drinking.’ Yet after all the gleeful tales of Portuguese girls and sedan-chair sensimilla at Eurovision, his reminiscences on those hard-boozing, hard-shagging times on the road seem oddly muted.
Only later do I understand why. Alongside him in the back row of the bus was Hurrigane’s guitarist Albert Järvinen, a musician who had recorded with Motorhead’s Lemmy and new-wave pioneer Nick Lowe, and who lent his evidently considerable talents to Kojo’s first two albums. The pair shared some memorably drunken nights together on the road, until a stubborn adherence to the grimmest rock clichés assured Albert’s graduation to less sociable narcotics. In March 1991, while playing a series of gigs in London, Albert overdosed in his hotel room. In his summing up, the coroner said that although just forty, Järvinen had the body of a seventy year old. Less than a year before, another of the original Hurriganes had drunk himself to death in Helsinki.
‘It was very hard,’ whispers Kojo, but he doesn’t want to say more. In fact he doesn’t even say half the above – the details of Albert’s fast life and young death are gleaned from later research. It’s clear that as we
ll as mourning his lost friend, he’s having a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment. Had Kojo carried on living as fast as he was in the early eighties, that could have been him. Finns drink, rockers do drugs. Try being both for more than a few years, and a premature demise from unnatural causes is almost guaranteed. In taking the wind out of his musical career, I suggest, nul points saved his life. ‘Yeah,’ he says, with a dry half-laugh, ‘this and my wife.’
It’s more than a mild surprise to learn that Kojo has been with the same woman for twenty-five years – they have three teenage sons. Clearly theirs is no conventional relationship: Kojo’s tone while reminiscing on those Portuguese girls is very much that of a young rock-god about town, rather than a man well entrenched in a long-term relationship with the future mother of his children. ‘Well, yes,’ he says, analytically. ‘You can call it an unusual situation. The mother [as he refers to her throughout] has needed a lot of nerve, dealing with all kinds of persons over twenty-five years. I mean all kinds!’
The mighty leap that propelled Kojo from the Finn-rock frying pan landed him in a distant fire. Leaving ‘the mother’ behind with three young children, in the mid nineties – for reasons he doesn’t care to elucidate – Kojo relocated to Moscow. In his three years there, he did it all. ‘I made a big-band record in Russian, and recorded with many big stars. You know Alla Pugacheva?’