“Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu)” – Hector * Trad arr. by Hector * 45: “Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu)” / “Kadonneet Lapset” * LP: Kadonneet Lapset * Label: Love Records * Charts: What Finland Plays #9
Finland’s Hector released his first single in 1965 and persists as one of his homeland’s most durable singer-songwriters. (His real name is Heikki, and the nickname he adopted is an exoticization in a country that doesn’t typically employ the letter C. He does sing only in Finnish, though.) A certain stylistic unorthodoxy adds to his appeal, with his original songs adhering to no strict formulas (save for the ever-surfacing Finnish taste for fifties rock ‘n’ roll). He’s also translated numerous songs from English (mostly) and other European tongues. His debut 45 translated Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” thus establishing cultural criticism as one of his more discernible trademarks. His 1978 “Ei Mittään (Työttömän Arkiviisu),” possibly his most beloved track, revamped the Fugs’ 1965 “Nothing.” Those folk rabble-rousers had presented it first as an amusing dada/Eastern spiritualism lark based on the Yiddish shtetl song “bulbes” (potatoes), in which Monday is nothing, Tuesday is nothing, Wednesday and Thursday are nothing, etc. Hector turns it into an expression of Finnish despair. Reflecting his homeland’s unprecedented late seventies rise in unemployment (1.6 in 1974 to 7.3 in 1978), he retitled it “Nothing (The Unemployment Archive)” with additional lines tying one’s sense of “nothing” and “nowhere” to the state of not working. Scottish band the Shamen did a scowling version of “Nothing” for a 1988 John Peel session, giving it its first overdue punk iteration. So there are your three faces of “Nothing”: mischief in ’65, misery in ’78, and menace in ’88.