Tarja Turunen: Barbecue with leather

In Buenos Aires, and with an Argentinean husband, the queen of global heavy metal turns around the emptiness of her life. (Note: vacío means void, emptyness, but it's also a kind of meat, so it's a word play, it could also be translated as "flips the meat (vacío) on the grill"). Everything on Tarja Turunen's world has always come with a side dish of pompousness. To understand her better, think about the exact intersection between Pantera and Andrew Lloyd Webber, or a Sarah Brightman high on crack. Just recentrly these argentinean barbacues are posible. (Note: it actually says "porteños", meaning not just from argentina, but from Buenos Aires in particular).

About 10 years ago, Tarja from Finland was the biggest metal sex symbol leading Nightwish, with her huge opera voice, her notorious cleavage and her outbursts of symphonic metal. Marcelo Cabuli, local producer leading Nems Enterprises, released their albums in Argentina. "I didn't come here looking for a husband, exactly. And he was patient enough", she says. "It was the first time that we came to Buenos Aires to perform, in the year 2000. I had no one to talk to and a producer in Brazil told Marcelo to keep me company, to look after me. He was extremely busy, but he always made some time for me, he showed me the city. That's how we fell in love." The plane back to Helsinki was a lot more tense. "I was out of my mind, I couldn't be falling in love with a guy who lived on the other side of the world, my career, this and that, but it happened." Today, Marcelo is her manager. And there were some epic moments: in 2003 she was invited together with her husband by the finnish president to a gathering at the presidential palace to celebrate Independence Day; Tarja dressed in haute couture, and Marcelo inside an uncomfortable suit, with handshake to the president and everything. Tarja, in her native Scandinavia, has done the ultimate crossover: "In my country, I have a celebrity status, I'm well known, both in metal and in opera". Her first solo album, "My Winter Storm", went straight to number one in the charts, for example. But Buenos Aires, withoug being pro, is diferent.

"In Finland, I have no private life. Here I use the subway, the sun comes out, it's incredible. And I have a beautiful apartment in Buenos Aires, but I won't tell you where". Ok, who cooks? "Me. I cook salmon, lots of fish, which is not so usual here. Marcelo takes care of the barbacue, but I can help, I manage. Also empanadas, milanesas (typical argentinean foods). I know how to do all that. I love being a housewife. The only bad thing is that we are never here for more than two weeks straight, we have been living like that for five years."

This time, it's a promotional tour for "What lies beneath", her new solo album, which is quite daring. It's not Nightwish, which she left in 2005 after building a cult of followers in Buenos Aires, with a sold out Obras Stadium, in the biggest scandal in the genre in years, with plates breaking and crossed acusations ("there's no chance of a reunion, sorry"), but a piece as direct as progressive, precisely, the intersection between Pantera and Andrew Lloyd Webber, where her throne as metal queen is reaffirmed. And the queen does not clean the floors. "You are wrong. I do it all the time. A dirty house is not my house".

English translation: Manxita