NIGHTWISH keyboardist TUOMAS HOLOPAINEN riffs on new singers, new albums and new Aussie tours with SHAUN NANCARROW.

A lot has changed in the world of Finnish symphonic power metal band Nightwish since last I spoke to keyboardist and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen. Back then, the band had just released their landmark album, Once, to widely laudatory reviews and the intimations that this band had become a whole lot more than a quirky, relatively niche northern European melodic metal act were only just beginning to solidify. Teenage girls in the main street of Brisbane were not generally seen with their patches embroided upon their school bags. And, crucially, Nightwish were still fronted by statuesque lyrical soprano Tarja Turunen, whose classical operatic vocal intonations were veritably metanymical of Nightwish to those aware of them. Now, after chart success in numerous countries, a successful Australian tour and numerous adolescent acolytes squinting down through liberally applied eyeliner at their rapidly pulsing sewing machines, the time has come to talk to Holopainen once again, this time about a brand new album with a new (and radically different) singer to boot. Predictably (though also, I sense, genuinely), Holopainen is passionate (oh dear) about said album, the rather dramatically dubbed Dark Passion Play.

“Everybody says this after a new album, but I really think that it is in many ways the best effort we have done so far,” Holopainen says emphatically. “There are some songs that are a bit weird now to listen to now because most of the songs were written in late 2005 and early 2006, and life was very much different at the time,” he says, alluding to the acrimony surrounding the band’s well publicised break up with Turunen. “When listening to songs like Bye Bye Beautiful, Master Passion Greed and the Poet and the Pendulum, for example – they seem a little distant because we don’t think that way anymore.”

Incidentally, Holopainen is anxious to make clear that the band’s single, Bye Bye Beautiful, is not at all sour grapes directed at Turunen, saying it is more “a song about frustration and sadness.”

“We are not blaming her with this song,” Holopainen expands. “It’s made in a really good spirit, believe me – I mean, the song could be called ‘Bye Bye Ugly One’,” he chuckles good-naturedly. “I hope nobody gets offended.”

Continuing on the subject of vocalists, Holopainen explains why the band selected less dramatic, more contemporary style vocalist Anette Olzon as Turunen’s replacement: “That was the only thing we knew for sure – we did not want another classically trained singer. Tarja was so incredibly good at what she did, we just felt there was no use to try to find a copycat of her. We tried to find someone with equal power and emotion in her voice who would be singing in a different style. I think we really hit the jackpot with Anette.”

As Holopainen notes, fan opinion has split over the choice, but he says it was not the “total inquisition” he and his bandmates expected, given that Turunen was the “icon, the face and the voice of the band” and Olzon is “not even from Finland.”

Ultimately, he notes, the switch seems to have worked. “I don’t think any of our albums have had so good reviews and so good chart positions all over the world as this one,” he concludes. “It’s really encouraging.”

NIGHTWISH play The Tivoli on Saturday, February 2. DARK PASSION PLAY is out now through Roadrunner.

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