Flow Festival Helsinki

Bands know better than most those moments when you’ve got to put together what you have to keep the show on the road. It could be trying to turn a dime into a dollar to record a demo or trying to fix an equipment meltdown mid-show. At Flow Festival Helsinki, an explosion of music, art, creativity and culture in a breathtaking former power station we’ve been asking the hottest local bands and international superstars: What was your biggest DIY or die moment?

Beastmilk, Finland

Mat, vocalist (pictured above): I think the whole band is DIY or die. Our drummer is probably the best guitarist in the band, he’s not even a drummer really. We just assembled the band by grabbing the nearest dudes we know. It’s not really about musicianship. We’re not professionals in any way at all.

Recently we played at Slotsfjell festival in Norway and our sampler fell over and triggered every sample we had in the first song. So there were sounds of people talking and everything like that and it was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever experienced.

We’re not professional enough to tape things down, so we just got on stage and played. We’re pretty punk in that respect. We don’t really want to prepare too much. People should embrace it. These days things are so professional, but we’re flying by the seat of our pants.

Get to know Beastmilk.

Death Hawks, Finland

Teemu, vocals and guitar: We did a one month European tour last May and the fucking car we had… Today is the last night we’ll have it, actually. Tonight it’s gonna burn! On the motorway it blew four tyres and there was a diesel leak, the rooftop window went off and it was raining inside, the back door fell off… We still drove 167km/h in that car at one point though. It’s an old Mercedes. It was a lot of work but it took us to a place we wanted to go and we did it all ourselves.

Check out Death Hawks.

The Hearing, Finland

Ringa, singer/songwriter: I was warming up for Thirty Seconds to Mars for some reason… I don’t know why they wanted me to play there, but it was the biggest crowd I had ever played to. There were ten thousand people there and I didn’t get the chance to do a soundcheck. I plugged my instruments in and they didn’t even have the European plug. They just had the British one and I didn’t have an adaptor. I was just so stressed, I didn’t have electricity at all. Eventually they pushed in the third prong on the plug with a Leatherman and luckily my sampler and all my instruments worked. I was so nervous playing in front of ten thousand people, without all of this drama. But then the lights came on and I was completely blinded, like I am at any show so I just played and it was fine.

Find out more about The Hearing.

Huck was at the awesome Flow Festival a music, arts and culture festival in Helsinki, August 8-10. Check out all of our Flow coverage here.