Ultra Bra performed two concerts at Olympiastadion in Helsinki on Friday, August 22 and Saturday, August 23. I attended both shows, and Mark came with me on Saturday. I had seen the band perform eight years ago in Turku and Joensuu yet these shows would be the first in a stadium that was not part of a festival environment.
The concert organizers kept ticket holders informed with information about what was and was not allowed into the stadium, and also about the time the gates would open and how early you were allowed to “camp out” in front to get in. People were allowed to line up as soon as 2 p.m. and gates would open at 5:00. I had a ticket for the Golden Circle, which entitled me to be right at the front of the stage–provided I got there early enough to secure a spot. In what might sound like the activity of a 16-year-old and not a 59-year-old, I decided to head down early. I got to the stadium by 4 p.m., not knowing what to expect. Would there be a long line of people waiting? I half expected it. The other half didn’t, because this was a Friday afternoon and people would still be at work. Yet as I approached the stadium gates I counted only about twelve people. That’s it. I took my spot in the Golden Circle queue and chatted for part of the hour with some fans, who were in my age range. I ate my sandwiches and drank my water, knowing that I was not permitted to bring in any food or a full bottle.
We were allowed in shortly before 5:00. I showed my bag to the first security check, noting my empty bottle. My paper ticket was scanned and I got a wristband then proceeded to the stadium floor. A second security check at the entrance to the Golden Circle field resulted in the confiscation of my empty water bottle. I realized only after the show that I didn’t read the rules thoroughly. While my bottle was definitely below the 500 mℓ limit allowed in the stadium area, I had neglected to read the restriction that all bottles, regardless of size, were prohibited from the field area in front of the stage. I can well imagine why. When I saw Zara Larsson perform at Ruisrock in Turku in 2017, she had had enough of fans throwing bottles at her that she threatened to quit the stage if anyone threw another one.
I jogged to the front of the stage and took a spot on the right, where Antti and Joel usually play. It was a three-hour wait till showtime, and it wasn’t long before I joined the other fans who had already chosen to sit down with their backs to the barrier. We sat for two hours. looking as the stadium filled in. The grass was covered by a black tarp yet those at the very front sat on a low metal platform, a few centimetres higher than the tarp.
Throughout the stadium, both outside before we were let in and over the course of the three hours before showtime, people were walking around selling korvatulpat and sadeponchot. The first items are earplugs, which some people prefer to wear while at concerts. I had a laugh over the second item: rain ponchos. It was funny, not because there was no sign of rain in sight, but rather, at an Ultra Bra concert, the fans wear raincoats as a sign of solidarity with the band. During the making of the “Sinä lähdit pois” video, Ultra Bra wore yellow raincoats as they cycled around Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. Selling raincoats at an Ultra Bra concert is like trying to sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo, as they used to say. The vendors might have sold some if the rain ponchos were yellow, but they were purple.
I did not talk to anyone while I waited, yet enjoyed listening in on other groups’ conversations. What struck me as most interesting was the code-switching I heard, always by young women. In one example, a woman took a smuggled juice packet out of her pocket and in the middle of her dialogue, in Finnish of course, she said in English “I need to be hydrated”. Another woman in a nearby group was going on and on and then in the middle of her rant she broke out with the English “I don’t care” and resumed speaking in Finnish.
One hour before the show was to start I heard some commotion behind me and through the grating of the barrier I could see what looked like a black-and-white silent version of the “Villiviini” video being broadcast on the middle screen in the back of the stage. People were starting to stand up and I did too. The clips were from the footage used to make that video. It was about twenty minutes long and repeated almost two more times, and then showtime started right at 8 pm. The audio played a brief clip from “Sinä päivänä kun synnyin” and the musicians entered the stage. The members of the orchestra and horn section entered first, then Ultra Bra came out. The single screen in the centre of the stage suddenly expanded into a wide panorama landscape triple the size. I was in the front row and couldn’t see any seams or pixels. The images, often solid blocks of colour, were vibrant and uniform.
I recorded the set list. The band played 33 songs. As I had looked at the set lists for the band’s earlier summer festival shows, I was only expecting them to play around 21 or 22 songs. I used these earlier set lists to prepare the list for this evening’s show. The song order didn’t change and I simply inserted the additional songs they played tonight, or drew arrows to indicate where they fit into the playing order. Ultra Bra played:
Tule pelaamaan meidän kanssa krokettia
Heikko valo
Jäätelöauto
Villiviini
Ilmiöitä
Musta, niljaisten lehtien kaupunki
Nainen, joka elää vapaaherran elämää
Poika vuoden takaa
Haikara
Kalifornian ruosteiset kukkulat
Aarre
Sokeana hetkenä
He kääntävät tyynynsä
Pärnu
Kahdeksanvuotiaana
Ken Saro-Wiwa on kuollut
Lähettäkää minulle kirjoja
Toivo
Kuiskaus
Itket ja kuuntelet
Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä
Savanni nukahtaa
Hei kuule Suomi
Älä soita tänne enää koskaan
Heppa
Lähetystyö
At this point the band said their thank-yous and prepared to leave the stage, but no one did. They started the encore only after a short pause:
Kirjoituksia
Laulu asioista
Hauki
Shanghain valot
Sinä lähdit pois
Minä suojelen sinua kaikelta
Vesireittejä
The first song, “Tule pelaamaan meidän kanssa krokettia” was played amidst an explosion of white confetti, against a backdrop of young croquet players and dancers with croquet mallets. It was only later, on Monday night at the home of drummer Antti Lehtinen, that I found out that the 14-year-old boy was Terhi Kokkonen’s son, and one of the young girls was the daughter of Pihla Viitala.
Joel gave me a shoutout by yelling “Craig!” in the middle of “Heikko valo”, which he also did when I saw them in Turku. He did this when the singers weren’t singing. I was so happy that he was able to see me amidst the crowd up front. Vuokko took advantage of the long stage and walked to both ends of it, to the right (from my point of view, thus by the Stadionin torni) and then to the left. I noticed that she was singing a bit off synch and she was fiddling with her earpiece. I later found out from Antti that Vuokko did have audio trouble and for a brief time was unable to hear what the rest of the band was playing. She’s a pro and blended back in with the other singers by the time she returned to centre stage.
During “Villiviini”, the song paused as it did in the video, to show a clip of Kerkko and Terhi telling each other how much they love each other, only to have Vuokko come by to overhear them. She curses “Perkele!” and yells that she’s going to jump in the lake.
Terhi walked to the far right of the stage to sing the next song. Vuokko stayed at centre stage. I liked the collage of photographs that swept across the screen during “Musta, niljaisten lehtien kaupunki”. What caught my eye was that some photos moved faster than others, overlapping them as they moved right to left. I liked seeing the band members from almost thirty years ago. They even included a photo of former member Anna Tulusto. Anni Sinnemäki was in some of the photos too. At the end photos of their late producer Pekka Aarnio appeared, and the final shot was a single photo of Pekka and the years of his birth and death, as a tribute.
Arto Talme did all of the talking onstage, and he introduced “Nainen, joka elää vapaaherran elämää” as being an old song from their first album. It’s one of my top five Ultra Bra songs, and I was happy to hear it live for the first time.
“Kalifornia ruosteiset kukkulat” featured clips from an American concert in the late sixties with Joan Baez. Joan is mentioned in the song in the line “Joan on maailman ihanin nainen”.
The visuals for “Ken Saro-Wiwa on kuollut” featured songwriter Anni Sinnemäki and all the band members in their yellow raincoats being drenched with a black liquid, which was meant to represent oil. The lyrics to the song reference the Shell company. I asked Antti on Monday what was really being poured on them, and he said it was a syrupy concoction.
Based on the summer festival set lists, I was not expecting to hear the new song “Toivo”. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Arto introduce “Toivo”, which featured Terhi on lead vocal.
Tommi sings on only one Ultra Bra song, “Kuiskaus”, and in the footage from their concert at Tampere-talo in 2000 he appeared shy and nervous as he sang it with Terhi. He was the same this evening, almost afraid to approach the mike and sing. These actions only endeared him to the audience. Tommi is clearly most confident strutting around stage and posing like a rocker with his bass in hand.
My favourite Ultra Bra song of all is “Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä”, and the visuals showed dancers acting out the handclaps which the singers do in the music video. This provided a cue to the audience when to get their hands ready so we could all clap in unison.
Mikko Sirén had an amazing percussion solo on bongos and standing drums during “Älä soita tänne enää koskaan”.
Near the end of the night Terhi appeared onstage wearing a coat. It must have been cold for her up there.
“Lähetystyö” was the final number before the encore, and just as in the show opener it featured an explosion of confetti. However there was far more than in “Tule pelaamaan meidän kanssa krokettia”. This time the confetti was red, white and blue to tie in with the American theme in the lyrics. When I got back after the concert, I met Mark in the corridor as I got off the elevator. He was either going to the washroom or the kitchen. I unknowingly unloaded all of this confetti in our room. I didn’t want Mark to see it and question me about it, as that would spoil the surprise for him tomorrow, so I quickly picked it all up, careful not to create micro wind currents and spread it even further throughout the room. This confetti got into my jacket hood and the next day was in my raincoat hood and pockets. I was still pulling it out of my clothes a week later in Oulu:
Kerkko got to sing during “Laulu asioista”. He sang “Moskova” as his solo eight years ago, but the band voted to be Putin-free for these shows and after some internal debating, decided in the end not to perform it. While he was singing, four hundred members from five high school choirs walked onstage. They stood in the back to provide enthusiastic vocal accompaniment. You can see them in the still shot from the videoclip below.
I knew from the summer festival set lists that the band would be performing a song called “Shanghain valot”. Ultra Bra never released this song, but it was written by Kerkko and Kyösti Salokorpi. I was in awe of the visuals: nighttime shots of Shanghai and New York, with gigantic Chinese text running across the screen. The background screen started like a karaoke clip with countdown, then the lyrics were projected so that the audience could sing along, with the colour of the words changing from white to red. Although this clip is from Saturday’s show, it shows best how big the panoramic sweep of the screens was:
Terhi turned her microphone towards the audience at the start of “Sinä lähdit pois” and the whole crowd sang along. She also did this during the Turku and Joensuu shows in 2017.
Of the 33 songs, four were from their first album Vapaaherran elämää, ten were from Kroketti, nine from Kalifornia and five from Vesireittejä. The remaining five were their two new songs (“Aarre” and “Toivo”), a single-only release (“Villiviini”), “Shanghain valot”, plus “Lähettäkää minulle kirjoja”.
I took the photos below from Friday’s concert:
Kiitti jengi. Thanks guys.
The following pictures are from the official Facebook pages of Ultra Bra or Joel Melasniemi. These shots are from “Tule pelaamaan meidän kanssa krokettia”:
From “Haikara”:
From “He kääntävät tyynynsä”:
From “Kalifornian ruosteiset kukkulat”:
From “Ken Saro-Wiwa on kuollut”:
From “Tyttöjen välisestä ystävyydestä”:
From “Shanghain valot”:
A fan posted the entire concert on YouTube:
I will write a separate report about Saturday’s show which I attended with Mark.