Gösta Erik Sundqvist (17 May 1957 – 16 August 2003) was a Finnish musician, radio comedian and record producer. He was the lead singer of Leevi and the Leavings from the band's formation in the late 1970s until his death, and composed, wrote the lyrics for, and arranged every song the band released. In 1996 he received the prestigious for lyric writing. Sundqvist systematically avoided publicity: Leevi and the Leavings never toured and gave only a single public performance under their own name, at the 1981 Finnish Eurovision preselection. From 1996 onwards he stopped giving interviews altogether and largely withdrew from public life.
Alongside Leevi and the Leavings, Sundqvist wrote all the songs recorded by the fictional crooner (performed by radio journalist Kai Järvinen), using a series of pseudonyms. He also created several long-running radio comedy series for Yleisradio (Yle), including Tietokoneenkorjauskurssi ("Computer Repair Course"), Belgialaisia kirjauutuuksia ("Belgian Book Novelties") and, most famously, ("Laboratory Animal Park").
Early life Sundqvist was born in Espoo on 17 May 1957 and spent his earliest years in Helsinki. In 1964 his family moved to the Espoo suburb of Westend. He attended Olari elementary school and later Etelä-Espoon yhteiskoulu. In the early 1970s he was known as a talented footballer, playing for Tapiolan Honka in age groups older than his own.Partanen 2006, p. 35. Through his schoolmate and neighbour Jogi Ojamo – who lived on the same street and whose sister brought home records for the two boys to listen to – Sundqvist discovered Jethro Tull around the age of 12 or 13. Jethro Tull, along with the MC5 album Kick Out the Jams, sparked his interest in music; he began to grow his hair long and gave up organised football.
With Ojamo, Sundqvist also produced a homemade magazine called Virtaset, which the pair posted on the school noticeboard. He began playing in a rehearsal band with and, occasionally, classmate Jari Malinen, initially covering Black Sabbath.Partanen 2006, p. 32. In 1971 Ojamo introduced Sundqvist to , who would later write a memoir about the singer's youth. Shortly afterwards Sundqvist's parents divorced and he moved with his mother and sisters to the Helsinki district of Meilahti. At some point during his final year of middle school he stopped attending classes altogether; according to Inna he had been a top student who coasted without effort, but Partanen recalled that Sundqvist was simply convinced he did not need formal schooling for what he wanted to do.Partanen 2006, pp. 34–35.
In a 1984 interview Sundqvist described his school years as isolated and marked by his deliberately provocative appearance – backcombed hair, makeup and women's skirts – which, he said, left PE teachers convinced he needed to be committed.Luoto 2004, p. 16. Partanen has cautioned that his own recollections of the early 1970s contain no memory of Sundqvist wearing makeup, apart from one occasion when the friends experimented with it together.Partanen 2006, p. 57.
First bands and influences In 1972 Sundqvist travelled with Inna and Partanen to the Inna family farm in Iittala for a summer of rehearsing in a group then called "Funeral Procession". Inna's taste for dance music and humppa would be a decisive influence on the later Leavings sound, pushing Sundqvist toward melodic, iskelmä-like material.Partanen 2006, p. 38. In photos of the session Sundqvist posed with his face hidden behind his hair, in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac, a character he openly identified with.Partanen 2006, pp. 40–42.
Partanen regarded the various short-lived bands of this period as "finger exercises" – Sundqvist had no interest in performing live and instead recorded large numbers of his own compositions on tape. The early lyrics were in English and drew on myth and chivalric romance, punctuated by flute riffs in the style of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Partanen 2006, pp. 47–49. Sundqvist dressed the part, with curled hair, a long Mediterranean-blue velvet coat and light-brown Robin Hood-style moccasin boots, and adopted as his personal motto a line from the Jethro Tull song "Life Is a Long Song": "life is a long song, but the tune ends too soon for us all…"Partanen 2006, pp. 56–59. After Jethro Tull, his greatest musical love was the British folk-revival group Amazing Blondel and especially their album England; the group's next name, "Troubadour", reflected this new interest in British lute-accompanied song.Partanen 2006, pp. 73–74. He was also drawn to Italian progressive rock, particularly La Bottega dell'Arte and Premiata Forneria Marconi.Partanen 2006, pp. 75–76. The group's only public appearance in this era was on the roof of the Inna family house on Mansikkatie in Westend in March 1973; a production company, Strawb Production, was named after the street and would continue to be credited on Leevi and the Leavings releases.Partanen 2006, pp. 50–51, 87. When Inna left for an exchange year in the United States in August 1974, the friends' band activities were put on hold.
In the mid-1970s Sundqvist briefly took up ballet but abandoned it after reportedly experiencing a skipped heartbeat mid-jump; heart symptoms would also curtail his football playing.Partanen 2006, p. 78. He went through periods of withdrawal during which he claimed to have no friends and to want none. By 1976 he had overcome an earlier distaste for books and was reading widely, including Martin Luther, and was writing mostly poetry.Partanen 2006, p. 111. Toward the end of the decade he moved into central Helsinki, to Ratakatu, working for his father's renovation firm and as the caretaker of his own apartment building.Partanen 2006, p. 135.
Music career Leevi and the Leavings
In a 1978 interview with Partanen, Sundqvist dated the actual formation of Leevi and the Leavings to the autumn of 1977.Partanen 2006, p. 124. Inna and had met while doing their military service at the Häme Jaeger Battalion in Hämeenlinna; a few months later Inna invited Paananen to the Iittala cottage to play bass. Sundqvist and his friends had already been making Stereogramofoni cassettes on which they parodied real radio shows and bands; among the fictitious acts appearing on the tapes were The Babyboys, the Kyösti Salmenoksa Quintet, and Leevi and the Leavings. About ten of these cassettes were produced and circulated privately, with Sundqvist writing most of the sketches; he wanted the material to remain within a close circle of roughly twenty friends, feeling he had nothing to prove to anyone.Ketvel 1989, p. 37. In 1978 the band made an appearance at the Äimä-Rock festival in Iittala under the pseudonyms "Tarmo Dynamo" and "Rife Paananen ja kyytipojat".Alanko et al. 2008, p. 21.
Inna was determined that the group should release a proper record. He secretly sent two cassette songs – "" and "Rakas Annika…" – to at Love Records; Sundqvist himself would not have offered the songs for release. The label agreed to fund a single, which appeared in 1978. Sundqvist initially resisted recording a full album and wanted to release double singles instead, two of which appeared in 1979. That same year guitarist joined. Inna, who felt the group did not yet have enough material for an LP and who wanted it to remain an anonymous singles-only project, left soon after; his place on drums was taken by Paananen's old schoolmate Jarmo Leivo.
From the beginning Sundqvist was firmly in creative control, and the public identified the band primarily with him. The classic line-up was completed in 1987 when took over on drums,Luoto 2004, p. 80. and remained intact to the end. 's backing vocals were a defining feature of the Leevi and the Leavings sound from the beginning. Under their own name the group made only one public appearance, at the Finnish Eurovision preselection in 1981, performing "Sinisilmä, mansikkasuu"; they were eliminated in the heats. Sundqvist treated album sleeves as equal in importance to the songs themselves; in a 1989 interview with Roo Ketvel he said the covers mattered as much as the music.Ketvel 1989, p. 42. The cover art, based on Sundqvist's ideas and executed under his close supervision, was the work primarily of Mikko Kurenniemi and Timo Puranen.
Other projects At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s Sundqvist also worked as a producer for other acts, including The Crinolettes, in which both of his sisters sang. Another of his production projects was The Silver, whose two singles were released on Johanna Records' Black Label imprint; the identities of the avant-garde noise project's members remained a mystery until Yle identified its leader in 2015.
In 1989 the actress performed Sundqvist's composition "Huominen Eurooppa" in the Finnish Eurovision preselection.Luoto 2004, p. 40. Sundqvist appeared as a guest vocalist on Liisa Akimof's single "Viiden pennin paskiainen" (1993) and on Sipe Santapukki's "Häiriintynyt kuu" (2002).Luoto 2004, p. 112.
Sundqvist's radio work introduced the wider Finnish public to , a recurring fictional character in his radio series played (and still played) by journalist Kai Järvinen. Sundqvist wrote and composed Tenkanen's songs under pseudonyms including "L. Samarialainen", "Erkki Salpola" and "Pentti Jormanainen". The recording career began in 1995 with the single "Hemaisevan seksikäs pörröpää", which became a major hit and led to a sequence of albums: (1996), (1998), (2001) and, posthumously, (2010).
Radio comedy career Sundqvist had a parallel career of more than a decade as a radio comedian. It began no later than the end of 1988 with Gösta Sundqvist esittää ("Gösta Sundqvist Presents") on Rockradio. His next series, Tietokoneenkorjauskurssi, launched in 1990 shortly after the start of Radiomafia. In 1992 the show was renamed Belgialaisia kirjauutuuksia, and from the beginning of 1993 Belgialaisia kirjaharvinaisuuksia. Many of the formal conventions that would later define were already in place. Koe-eläinpuisto itself began in September 1993 and ran until 2003. His final series, Teinitalo ("Teen House"), aired its last episode on the evening of Friday, 15 August 2003 – a few hours before his death. In all, some 700 episodes of Sundqvist's radio comedies were broadcast between 1988 and 2003.Forss 2017, p. 247.
In the radio plays Sundqvist blended fact and fiction, and occasionally used real people as characters.Alanko et al. 2008, pp. 6–7. He typically played a radio reporter who – alone or with a "colleague" – broadcast "live" from some unusual location. Short sketches alternated with musical interludes thematically linked to the preceding sketch. Some episodes formed larger arcs, such as trilogies set in Africa, Russia and South America; in each, familiar characters turned up "by coincidence". One Finnish setting was a sewer swimming pool dug under Helsinki's Market Square.
The shows remained popular to the end, as evidenced by their weekend prime-time slots in the final years. Reruns of Koe-eläinpuisto began in 2004 and continued as recently as 2015 on Yle Radio Suomi. The most popular character to emerge from Koe-eläinpuisto was the fictional tram driver , through whom Sundqvist could channel his inner Junnu Vainio in the spirit of the older crooner's "big boys' songs".Luoto 2004, p. 107.
Final years During the last seven years of his life Sundqvist refused all interviews, including from , which had previously published extensive pieces about him; he promised editor-in-chief Timo Kanerva that he would agree to an interview when he turned 50. Ilta-Sanomat did publish an interview a week after his death, based on a conversation conducted shortly before, although it had not originally been intended for publication. According to Partanen, Sundqvist also kept his distance from people generally during these years. In the late 1990s he wrote occasionally as a columnist for the free newspaper Alueuutiset.Partanen 2006, p. 154.