Mr Lordi says Lordi never expected to make it out of Finland’s national Eurovision contest in 2006, let alone win the whole thing in Athens. “We thought we had absolutely no chance,” he said, recalling how the band then took the popular vote “by a landslide.”
The victory made Lordi one of Eurovision’s defining acts, but it also brought a sharp and messy reaction at home. Mr Lordi said international media were already intensely interested by the time the band reached Athens, where they entered the press room in full costume. Even then, he said, the performance of Hard Rock Hallelujah was not his best. He was running a fever, and the latex outfit was so hot he compared it to wearing “a full body-sized condom.”
For Finland, the win landed like a shock. Mr Lordi said the country could not believe it when Lordi won Eurovision. That disbelief did not last long before turning into backlash. Within a year, he said, the mood had soured enough that there was a stretch of at least four or five years when Lordi did not play a single show in Finland.
The story matters now because Eurovision is marking its 70th anniversary, and Lordi remains one of the contest’s most talked-about winners. Mr Lordi said the song was not even written for Eurovision, but he is still proud that the band is part of the contest’s history. He said a square in his home town was later named after him, a small sign of how far the band’s reputation travelled even after the homecoming turned difficult.
That split remains the oddest part of the story. Lordi was embraced abroad as a spectacle and a winner, yet at home the band’s success quickly became uncomfortable enough that it practically vanished from Finnish stages. Mr Lordi said he could hardly believe the scale of the reaction then, and even now, he said, he remembers the victory less as a neat triumph than as a moment that changed everything at once. “Fuck, I wish we never went,” he said of the experience, though he added that he is really proud Lordi is part of Eurovision history.
