Suffering for his art

Alexi Laiho is often seen in a wide variety of metal magazines, but for their interview with him in the May edition of Finnish magazine Image, a strikingly different portrait of the COB frontman graced the front cover. In the interview, Alexi revealed the frustrations (and resultant injuries!) of writing new songs for the band's forthcoming 7th studio album.

"Alexi Laiho lifts his bandana from his forehead. From under is revealed a long, bloody wound and a big bump. What has happened? The rock-star sits at home on his couch in Vuosaari, Helsinki and speaks:

'Sometimes I’m such a fucking idiot, seriously. Last night I was working on this one riff and thought I’d just invented the best and coolest thing ever.'

Laiho was sincerely happy and thought that this was going to be something very cool for the next Children of Bodom album. Then he started to hesitate. The riff sounded vaguely familiar. He began to go through his cd-collection.

'It turned out that it was some riff from Pantera, it was somewhere in my subconscious. I got so pissed off that I drank every drop of alcohol I could find from here. And after that I smashed one of our gold records into my head.'

And that wasn’t the end of it.

'Then I was so fucking drunk and I became anguished by the shards of glass. I started to vacuum and stumbled over the vacuum cleaner pipe and fell against the wall.'

Laiho shakes his head and sighs. 'I don’t take anything in this life as seriously as making an album and sometimes I take it a little bit too seriously. I guess I would need some kind of therapy. There’s no sense in this whole thing.'

No. There is no sense in smashing a gold record to your forehead, but exactly because of that passionate attitude, 31-year-old Alexi Laiho is one of the best guitarists in the world."

Thanks to COB forum member Celeb for translation