With the 3rd heat of UMK happening in Finland this weekend, we caught up with Niina from the Barbe-Q-Barbies to find out more about the five fierce Finnish female rockers and their plans for Saturday

Barbe Q Barbies have been around for some years now, how did you get to be involved in UMK 2016? Is it something you’ve always wanted to do?

Well actually the decision was made in a short notice. Whole UMK competition has given many Finnish artists and bands a better chance to get their music to bigger crowds. And that’s something we also want. In our case we took this as a challenge. So let’s see what happens. Most important we are going to the competition 100% as ourselves. So we got nothing to lose, only to win! And what a great experience this will be! We met our competitors at the press release I can tell by the atmosphere, this will be pure fun!

I’ve listened to “Let Me Out” loads of  times now! Fantastic to get true rock music back in UMK, it’s something that Finland are particularly good at!  Listening to your back catalogue of songs, it stays very true to your sound over the years.  How did you choose this as your UMK entry over anything else that you might have available to you?

We released our third album “Driven” in September 2015. Back then we were touring in Finland and didn’t yet even think about participating to this competition. Like I said, it all came so fast and of course we couldn’t use any previously released songs. Our producer Janne Saksa composed this catchy rock song and sent it to us. And we were sold! That was the moment we decided to give UMK a try.  He’s composed 2 songs for us earlier too and we have already quite a long history together. Our collaboration started back in 2012 when we signed him to record and produce “Breaking all the rules”. By now I could already call him “the sixth member of B-Q-B”. He knows our style and vision.

Do you have any ideas about how you will stage “Let Me Out” that you can tell us about? Will you be playing it straight on stage, or will you re-create anything from the video ?

We will perform quite simple, as a rock band, with our instruments and crazy rock drive attitude. So we will stay true to our thing also in our performance.

What are you looking forward to about UMK this year? Do you personally know any of the other performers?

Yes, many of them are familiar to me and I think the range is quite versatile. We have rap, R’n’B, soul, disco, pop…you name it! This year Barbe-Q-Barbies is the only pure rock act in this competition. What are we expecting? Well,  to win of course and get to represent Finland in Stockholm this year. That’s our goal of course.

Do you usually follow Eurovision, do you have a favourite  entry?

I’ve watched Eurovision since I was a little kid. I use to tape it every year and learned all my favourites by memory. That’s how I started to sing. My favourite Eurovision act isn’t actually Finnish, it’s from 1993, The Irish Eurovision winner Niamh Kavanagh with a song “In your eyes”. I use to sing it as kid on our playground outside our house. I think I still remember all the lyrics. Now that’s a bit spooky already…

Thanks Niina for your time, and I wish all of you the very best of luck for Saturday night!

You can watch the video for Barbe-Q-Barbies song “Let Me Out” below and be sure to follow  escbubble’s live-blog of the event with myself and Jan from 2000CET on Saturday night, see you there!