09-08-2007 Poets of the Fall

Venue: Kaivahuone Helsinki (Finland)
By: Nina Mende

Kaivohuone is one of the — if not THE — fanciest clubs in Helsinki located in the main city park. Right to the left in the entrance area you can find a Black Jack table, in the club you can find two bars on the left and the stage on the right side as well as huge mirrors framed in gold everywhere, and many people dressed up in designer clothes. Not the typical Poets of the Fall audience.

Poets of the Fall is a Finnish band consisting of 6 people (2 guitar players, bass player, keyboarder, drummer and singer. The band’s first single was Late Goodbye. Their debut album Signs of Life went straight to #1 on the Finnish album chart in January 2005, and stayed on the chart for over a year. The next album Carnival of Rust, released in April 2006, also hit the number one spot on it’s first week, with  the debut album still on the official Top40 charts.

  The club was crowded, and I mean really crowded. There was no coming through
  (only if you really pushed and then many people were complaining, cursing or
  trying to push you away or hold you back). The music until the band finally
  started playing, which was at 11:30, was really bad house music, very monotone.

  But I wasn’t here to listen to the house music and dance to it. So I was glad
  as the 6 Finns entered the stage. They opened with “lift” and as if
  it was a command everybody raised their hands to join the beat and went even
  closer to the stage so that there was really no coming through (don’t ask me
  how I managed it anyways).

  Mark (the singer) was playing with the audience during their whole performance.
  He was always getting close to his fans, but just so close that they couldn’t
  quite get a hold of him. Really funny to watch. The blond guitar player was
  jumping around and having a blast without getting tired or taking a break of
  jumping around, so it seemed. The other guitar player seemed like the shy guy
  of the band who tried to avoid eye contact and didn’t move that much. The bass
  player did the typical bass player stand (spread legged) and changed sides every
  once in a while. The keyboarder animated the audiencew to jump , raise hands
  or clap along whenever they didn’t do that already. Further was he rocking behind
  the keys.
  The drummer gave everything behind the drums and you could see the seat running
  down his face.

  Poets of the Fall played for about an hour and played all released songs and
  many more. It seemed like they almost played every song of both albums.
  They didn’t play their standard closing “locking up the sun” but they
  ended their performance (including the encore of three songs) with “late
  goodbye” where the complete band was raising their water bottles as it
  came to the phrase “raise my glass and say: Here’s to you”. Really
  nice because the audience joined doing so. They also sang along quite loud at
  some parts so that Mark could stop singing and you could only hear the crowd.
  What a nice evening in such a fancy club.

Poets of the Fall official
Poets of the Fall Myspace