by Tim Moore
I do: with 250 million record sales to her name, along with a stack of films, a self-edited eponymous magazine and a line of footwear, here is a woman who can rightfully claim to be Russia’s greatest star. She inevitably counts a Eurovision appearance amongst her achievements: at Dublin in 1997, the stout and definitively feisty forty-eight year old silenced the audience by striding out in a pair of teetering (and self-designed) Pinball Wizard platform boots, before winning them round with a bellowed rendition of her anthemic (and self-penned) entry. In a year when Portugal and – yes – Norway went home pointless, Alla returned with a steady thirty-three.
Among Kojo’s more unexpected Muscovite achievements were a series of prizewinning children’s albums – ‘soul and rock, played by real good players, but with lyrics for kids’ – and an associated UNICEF concert in Red Square. ‘Children singing about peace and love, live on TV in forty countries.’ He sighs, his wistful tone explaining why I recall no such event. ‘The Chechen war suddenly got real bad, and Coca-Cola and Heinz and all the big sponsors just disappeared. At the last minute it all went up in smoke. I lost a lot of money on that. Really, I lost it all. I was absolutely bankrupt.’
Worse, in fact. ‘The big problem in Russia,’ rasps Kojo half a Marlboro later, ‘is you always have to pay behind the table to make any success.’ With some reluctance he tells me about a call received weeks after he’d settled a $30,000 Moscow studio bill. ‘This guy says, “Maybe you need to pay your studio bill now.” I tell him I already paid, in cash, but when I call the studio, the engineer I gave it to has disappeared. I think: What the fuck? And then this man calls back. “Maybe it’s a good time to pay – now.”’
Kojo bangs the table rather too hard; most of the coffee that’s just been placed before me ends up in its saucer. ‘I was afraid, really afraid. I know how bad the bad people can be in Russia, and these were very bad people. And I didn’t have that money.’ Just listening to him, seeing his confident, meaty hands starting to knot together, I’m feeling queases of empathy. With nothing more than eager charm and a way with a tune he’d earnt acceptance in a country not known for its willingness to welcome outsiders. But with his feet under the Moscow mixing desk, the happy-go-lucky naivety that defined much of Kojo’s life almost had them shattered at the ankles.
Having somehow persuaded his music-biz contacts to resolve the situation, he returned home shaken and – once more – back to square one. But this is the man who laughs in the face of nul points, so I’m not surprised by his response when I ask if he wishes he’d never gone to Moscow. ‘Why should I regret? I was hanging out with all these big Russian stars, all their bodyguards, a lot of beautiful girls. It’s an exciting place, a big market … Most people were too scared to go, but I went and I almost made it. I can say at least I tried. What it is, Team, I love to hang around people, talking, dealing, bullshitting. It’s easy for me, this kind of things. I love people. You understand?’
It’s impossible not to admire the imperturbable, gung-ho optimism of this rock ’n’ roll Mr Pickwick. The ever-spinning world of Timo Kojo has no predictable orbit, yet he’s still enjoying the ride. ‘Today? Well, you know, I need to earn a lot. I am bad with money, I have three boys, I like to eat good food, I like to travel. And I spend a lot on shoes.’ (To Kojo’s loud delight, I peer speculatively under the table just before realising this is a joke.)
His current musical undertakings range from corporate parties (‘playing soul stuff, the way I started’) to TV-ad jingle-writing (‘good money, but I feel like a whore when I smile to these business guys’), but these days his is a portfolio career: of all the artists I’m to meet, Kojo is one of the very few not to press upon me a copy of his latest CD. It’s no surprise to learn of those Marlboro-tinted fingers being wedged in a lot of very unusual pies. ‘I’m doing a big promotion for a new champagne, Sibelius. We get it from a good-quality French producer, and we made a deal for the name with the Sibelius family, and a deal to give a per cent of the profit to new music in Finland. We’re going to sell it all around the world. The big year is 2007, fifty years after when he died.’
Then of course there’s that country club, St Nicolaus, a half hour from Helsinki: ‘the official golf club of Santa Claus’, as Kojo calls it, and as it’s billed on the rather ritzy website I later consult. ‘Very high-society – these are my people now,’ he says, with just the tiniest hint of self-mockery. ‘I built up the club, found the money, hired these Canadian course architects … We play golf from May to October, and then have deer hunting there in the winter.’ I shoot him a gawp: what does Santa Claus have to say about that? ‘Not reindeer!’ he blurts, reddening slightly. ‘Just, you know, regular deer. Anyway I don’t do guns. If I go to the club in the winter, it’s for a drink and a sauna. Golf is my thing.’
And so we move to his most eye-catching professional venture. ‘Team, I’m real excited with this ocean golf driving range. The beautiful part is that you need a lot of space for a driving range: land is expensive, but water is free!’ The enthusiasm he’s expressing is so heartfelt, that despite the project’s apparent silliness I find I’m sharing it. ‘Two guys and a diver can set the whole thing up in a day, jetty and everything. And then you can play all night! We use balls that float, and at the end of the day a guy goes out with a sea tractor to pick them up.’
Kojo looks at his watch, tuts in self-reproach at what he sees, then abruptly snatches up his phone and with a significant wink enters a number. ‘Tchim? Yeah … I’m just back. Yeah, we played a few rounds out there … I birdied a hole where Tiger took a par! Yeah, see you tonight, Tchim, but first here’s someone you need to talk to.’
As the tiny Nokia is pressed to my ear, I wonder if, despite all his cheery bluster, Kojo is now gently trying to remind me, and maybe himself, that Eurovision is a contest for songs, not singers. That it wasn’t he who scored zero, but Tchim. A familiar estuary mumble emerges. ‘Hi … Yeah, listen, I’m a bit tired. Haven’t been sleeping too well …’ It’s now almost three o’clock.
Kojo rises and delivers a manly slap to my shoulder. ‘I’m having Tchim and a few people to my apartment tonight,’ he says. ‘You can come – why not?’ Not an offer a man facing a night alone in an airport Holiday Inn is likely to turn down. ‘OK, I write you my address.’ Rather splendidly, remembering what this is requires three guesses, two pages of my notebook and a full minute. ‘We’ve been in this apartment just a few months,’ is Kojo’s inadequate explanation, delivered as he trots away for a word with Finland’s richest woman.
I’m left with an empty packet of Marlboro Lights and two inches of his wine for company, along with a glow of happy relief. Many surprises lay in wait at the bottom of the Eurovision barrel, but it was clear now that not all were moist and malodorous.
Outside it’s already dark, a weak blizzard wafting around the narrow strip of bleak parkland opposite the restaurant, and into the big arched windows of the dour arcade alongside. But lugging that Fender case along the ice-varnished pavements I’m barely aware of the environmental discouragements: there’s too much Timo in my head. How inspiring, how enviable to reach fifty-two and still lead a life so nomadically fluid, so unpredictable, that you can’t even remember your own address. And how risibly feeble that my sole domestic relocation in thirty-eight years had seen me move eight stops down the 65 bus route.
Yet settling into an aimless, slush-scraping shamble, I begin to wonder what kept him on the move. Kojo-Kojo, I’m soon thinking, so bad they named him twice; the double-zero country-cheat pelted with cans by his strange and serious countrymen. When Kojo went to Moscow, he was running away just as fast as Finn Kalvik ran to Thailand – running from that lingering nul-points shadow, from a lifestyle that claimed so many of his contemporaries, and, maybe, from the overwhelming domestic responsibilities of trying to deal with three young kids after a rootless, self-contained life on the road. Ignominy and tragedy drove him away; perhaps he hadn’t forgotten his address so much as displayed a fug
itive’s facility for blanking it out. Perhaps he was still on the run.
The streets fill as I wander about looking for somewhere to pass three hours. In doing so I at last find a use for this stupid, redundant and by now arm-stretchingly hefty guitar, hoisting it to deflect the arcs of bus-slush that slap heavily across the pavement every few steps. Its unavoidable presence also earns nods of long-suffering fraternity from buskers, and I’m soon enjoying what happens every time I put the thing down to rest my protesting biceps. Suddenly an exclusion zone opens up around me, those at its circumference aiming oh-no winces at their feet in preparation for whatever I was about to do that they would be asked to pay to witness: outside the central station, that’s good for fifteen minutes of fun.
I spin a coffee out for an hour, vainly waiting for my brown-splattered trouser bottoms to dry, then repair to a state liquor store for a bottle of host-fuel. Neither commercial transaction proves as ruinous as Kojo had led me to expect: once sufficient to reduce foreign visitors to tears of confused rage, the price of alcohol in post-Euro Finland is now on rough parity with Britain’s. And though the outlets that sell it are still starkly signed ALKO, the craven, substance-dependent shuffle once expected from clients is gone. So too the strip lights and white Formica that formed a wince-inducing preview of your looming hangover.
Additionally burdened, and rather lost, I blunder with hypothermic sloth and inefficiency into quieter, residential streets. Traversing a triangle of parkland, a frosted missile catches me square in the unscarfed throat; having so recently vacated a tropical beach – my nose is just starting to peel – there’s a momentary concern that the violent, sub-zero impact might shatter my head, like a cook-chilled desert boulder. But how heartening that despite the tedious omnipresence of seasonal ammunition, the youth of Helsinki retains such enthusiasm for snowballing. Or so I think much, much later.
Kojo’s flat, as I discover by some miracle of random navigation, is on the third floor of a block whose concertina-gated lift dates it to the early twentieth century. A door opens, and with a hug I’m welcomed into an expanse of new parquet, sparsely but expensively furnished. The duty-free fruits of Kojo’s Dubai visit lie all around: a half unboxed home-cinema system, a swathe of paisley silk curtains draped over a huge sofa. ‘The mother’ is introduced to me – a woman whose gentle, tolerant features eloquently explain how she’s endured twenty-five years of Portuguese girls and Muscovite escapes.
I’m handed a glass of red wine the size of a fishbowl on a stick and, with the unslakeable alcoholic thirst of a foreign stranger here to rake up his convivial host’s most painful memories, dispatch it in minutes. As the members of Kojo’s eclectic coterie arrive, so I’m introduced to every groomed, smoking one of them: an extravagantly cleavaged former model with her junior chaperone, a couple of music executives, a theatrical impresario, a model agent. Conspicuous in their absence are the mumbling misfits I’d previously imagined as a nul-pointer’s default associates. Why didn’t I know fascinating, glamorous people like these? And why, after many decades of grim evidence to the contrary, had I not yet learnt that drinking a great deal of wine very quickly didn’t turn me into one of them?
The mother hovers about, topping up glasses, laying plates of smoked meat and cruton-topped salads on a vast dining table of curious construction. I lean down for a closer look: its sunken, glass-topped central section is filled with crushed ice, thereby chilling the cold buffet above. ‘That is quite a thing,’ I slur, nodding at the table as I’m joined by the only guest of humdrum demeanour, a chap in his fifties with John Kerry hair and a golf shirt.
‘Thank you,’ he replies graciously. ‘It is my design. You can also put small candles in this to keep food hot.’ I can say that I’ve never been so pleased to meet a quantity surveyor before. At least until he reveals that he never travels abroad without a set of bongos, ‘you know – just on the off chance’.
Last to arrive, with a tiny woman in tow, is a pasty, slicked-back, Orbison-shaded man in a careworn black suit. When he sticks a finger under his sunglasses and rubs wearily at a wrinkle-lidded eye, I began to have an idea who it might be. ‘Hoozat Fender in the hall?’ he murmurs through barely parted lips, and all doubt is banished.
I’d wondered if Jim Pembroke’s semi-comatose telephonic persona might conceal a table-stamping rock animal; it doesn’t. He’s almost sixty, after all. Yet in that shrugging, deadpan mumble, and in between drags, he seems happy to reminisce upon the fate of Nuku Pommiin. (He’d written the lyrics in English, he tells me – it’s a tribute to the heroic impenetrability of the Finnish language that after forty years in Helsinki, Jim still generally avoids attempting to use it.) As its composer, he was there in Harrogate; his account of anarchic tomfoolery dovetails neatly with our host’s. ‘We had a game of dares going on, over the whole week … I think it was ten points for smoking in that sedan chair.’
We talk a little more, covering Wigwam’s agonising near miss with Virgin, the curious online insistence that he was born and raised in Hull rather than Finchley, the sabbatical in the States during which he acquired the woman now nodding silently at his side – the same one, I now understand, whose voice first welcomed me into the story of Nuku Pommiin. This realisation, along with the shame inhibitor now swilling around my system, brings me back to the Fender, and the as-yet unrewarded pain it has brought me. ‘Could I ask a favour?’ I begin; the sentence that follows gets only as far as ‘Nuku’ before Jim holds up a hand.
‘Oh, come off it,’ he drawls, as furiously offended as a man responsible for ‘Corporal Cauliflower’s Mental Function’ is ever likely to be.
I find a space on a sofa, and sit in it with a big plateful of food in my lap. Finnish is happening all around me, a bewildering flow of senseless sound, like Japanese spoken by drugged Italians; in the hour that follows I understand only two words: ‘IKEA’ and ‘perkele’, a favoured oath amongst the Finnish seamen in Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race and, I learn, of Timo Kojo’s. Still, having nodded and smiled my way through several hundred Icelandic gatherings, contact with sustained Nordic unintelligibility is these days a solace rather than a threat. And watching Kojo hold court is a great spectator sport: he’s at the hub of it all, that hoarse, booming voice powering the proceedings, the definitive host with the most. The ‘real good parties’ that were his principal memories of Harrogate clearly wouldn’t have been so good, or so real, without him. Having memorably failed to do so in Mr Kalvik’s company, I was at last having fun with a Finn.
It’s nearing 1 a.m.: I’m half into my coat and half through my unsteady farewells when a rangy, slightly whey-faced youth shuffles out of a bedroom. ‘Eh! My youngest boy!’ English is being spoken; I am therefore the intended audience; Kojo’s son and I exchange slightly awkward nods. I gather that he’s come to ask his dad for a little Friday-night funding – almost midnight it might be, but through long and bitter peaked-too-early experience, I’m all too aware that the Scandinavian weekend only really gets into gear during the early hours of Saturday.
‘OK, son,’ brays Kojo, handing over a crumple of notes that his boy surveys in a small, pale palm. We’re in the hall when a disembodied yell booms out of the front room. ‘That’s for condoms!’ Those young shoulders sag slightly, followed by a tiny sigh that suggests his father hasn’t quite finished. Accurately so. As I hoist my guitar case, the boy snatches open the front door and bolts off down a dark stairwell, leaving me alone with the triumphant last words I will hear from Timo Kojo’s mouth. ‘Now go out there and fuck like hell!’
I’m in a taxi and halfway to the hotel before the echoing aftershocks of this spectacular utterance subside sufficiently to allow rival contemplations into my brain. They do so tentatively as we pass two lorries that an earthmover is slowly filling with kerbside snow. Surveying this thanklessly Sisyphean process, I accept that it’s nonetheless consistent with those toilet-mounted bottom-showers and the men I’d seen steam-cleaning planes at Helsinki airport. Here was a co
untry with an almost obsessive-compulsive sense of correctitude, of doing everything properly, efficiently, completely.
Precisely on cue, the driver leans his head slightly back to address me. ‘Excuse me, but is it more accurate to say “a hotel near the airport” or “a hotel by the airport”?’ His uncertain, nervous tone suggests that should my answer not tally with what he’s been saying to English-speaking passengers, he’ll pull over at the next safe opportunity and silently puncture his thigh with the ignition key. This much wine down the line, however, I’m well beyond semantic niceties.
‘Um … I think either’s kind of OK.’
His head bobs slowly. ‘I see,’ he murmurs, clearly disappointed. ‘So you are not a native speaker of English.’
I say nothing, acknowledging only now just how awful life must have been here for Kojo after 24 April 1982. Finns were raised to do the right thing, precisely the right thing; in failing to do so, and then making a big joke out of it, he had soiled his homeland’s defining ethos. How very splendid of him, then, to shoulder aside the crushing opprobrium of a nation, to emerge from his experience stronger, more stubborn, to walk on with a sod-you swagger. There was life after nul points, and for Kojo it was an indubitably good one.
Billboards and road signs alive with dotted vowels sweep past; the roads widen and empty as we broach the airport zone’s warehoused hinterland. With a cushioned crunch the taxi pulls up at the Holiday Inn’s empty, snow-drifted forecourt; I hand the driver his cash and clamber out, dragging the Fender off my lap, into the still, sodium-lit chill. As the yellow Mercedes pulls gingerly away my shudders of cold evolve into a quiver of relieved joy: the voyage that had scraped so painfully aground on the sands of Koh Samui was afloat once more. I watch those tail lights disappear behind a Saab dealership, then let my drunken delight out in a wild, primal bellow. ‘Now go out there and fuck like hell!’