Music has been my passion for as long as I can remember, and as a toddler I pounded my Gran’s pots and bowls to pieces. I was in a special music stream at primary and lower-secondary school. At upper-secondary school in the Helsinki suburb of Laajasalo, I drummed in the school choir and boogied in women’s clothes on stage at the school’s spring concert. I quit classical piano at some stage, when the usual story of beer, hanging out in town and the opposite sex started to interest me as a teenager. I played the drums in punk bands, hanged around with a group of graffiti artists and listened to rap. At the beginning of the 1990s, I got the bug for collecting vinyl records, which deepened my hobby and broadened my range, and in 1993 the Roskilde rock festival blew my mind – there was no turning back.

The Classics Examination (2.5 credits), which was part of basic studies for Finnish literature, involved a stack of 36 books, and it really shook me up. It revolutionised my thinking and my conceptions about literature and the world in general. It finally woke me to the reality of the university. Literary culture began to issue into my world, where Mario Puzo’s the Godfather was the only classic to be found among the three or so books standing between the metres of records and Tex Willer comics.

My dream is to preserve my hearing and sight so that I can continue on this incomparable path, which chose me.