Posted on 08/26/2002 7:07:18 AM PDT by Tancred
Air Guitar Champions Strike a Chord Mon Aug 26, 9:21 AM ET
By Gleb Bryanski
OULU, Finland (Reuters) - Can't play the guitar? With a lot of nerve but little shame you too can be a rock star at the air guitar world championship.
Toby Peneha, a Maori from New Zealand, had never been on a plane or traveled abroad. His life changed when his girlfriend put his name up for a national air guitar competition.
"I went on stage and just made a complete fool of myself," Peneha, a 28-year-old meat factory worker, told Reuters.
Within minutes he was the air guitar champion of New Zealand and got a ticket to the other side of the globe to compete at the annual world championships in Oulu, a Finnish city some 320 kilometers (200 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.
Dressed in a heavy metal T-shirt, leather trousers and Union Jack-capped shoes, Peneha twirled his long curly hair to hard rock band Pantera, winning squeals of delight from the 2,500-strong mostly Finnish audience.
He came second, conceding first place to last year's winner Briton Zac Monro, whose simple performance to the tune of "Fell in Love With a Girl" by The White Stripes went down well with the jury late Friday.
"I like the improvisation, living the moment, and this year's winner did just that," jury head Juha Torvinen said.
The art of playing the air guitar goes back to the 1970s when breathtaking electric guitar solos by bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin inspired teenagers throughout the world grab their tennis rackets and mime their idols, swinging and prancing around their bedrooms.
"One should not be ashamed of playing air guitar. It's like masturbation. Everyone did it at some point," Torvinen, himself a Finnish "real" guitar legend, told Reuters.
The first air guitar championship was held in Oulu in 1996. Soon national championships sprang up around the world.
"There is that moment on stage when all the adrenaline has gone through and you are left there with absolutely nothing, just you and an audience, and your air guitar," Monro, a 32-year-old architect from London, told Reuters.
The prize is a real electric guitar.
Twelve finalists from eight countries contested the title.
In summer Finland also plays host to wife-carrying and mosquito-killing contests.
Yeah - but nobody has ever gone blind playing the air guitar..
No, they go deaf. Some say it's the loud music they listen to, but it's actually the air guitaring.
And they haven't been electrocuted on stage during a performance either like the real thing.
Untrue, you could poke your eye out doing the windmill.;^)
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