I was born in Helsinki on September 1st, 1942. My father was a naval officer and my mother a dancer. I had an elder sister and a younger brother. My grandfather was, among other things, a parlamentarian, my grandmother's father the renowned journalist, storyteller, history professor and rector of Helsinki university, Zacharias Topelius.

In 1949 I started primary school, in 1953 secondary school, i wrote my universityentrance diploma in 1962, did my military service in the navy and graduated teacher's college in 1965. The teaching carreer only lasted for one year, since I moved from the classroom on to the stage in 1966.

I got a guitar when I was fifteen, when I was sixteen we formed a singing quartet, and at the age of 1, we sang on the stage of the Linnanmäki amusement park and recorded our first single, which even made it into the charts.

Over ten years I toured more than half a million miles through Finland, experiencing the folk-music wave, the Beatles, the Summer of Love and the year of change, 1968.

In 1962 I married my girlfriend Sirpa. We have four sons, three daughters and eight grand-children. We are family people and love our big clan.

I have been writing songs since 1965. So far one and a half thousand have been recorded. Every Finn kows at least some of them, like the inofficial "anthems" Blue and White and Little Man, with which I won the Rostock music festival in 1971 and 1972. In Finland I have made 29 records.

Not only music has been important for me. I also wanted to understand this world and the mysteries of human life. For forty years I've been reading books about things people call New Age. At some point I discovered theosophy and finally Rudolf Steiner.

In 1975 a friend took me to the Christian Community, where I soon started feeling at home. My intuition told me that what's spoken there was true, and the speaker really meant it.

In 1977 I started studying at the Seminary of the Christian Community in Stuttgart, Germany. Since 1980 I Have been a priest, frist in Stuttgart, later in Wuppertal and Dortmund.

At the end of the eighties I realized I wasn't going back to Finland as a priest. So I started to write music once more in Germany. Since then many popular artists have been singing my compositions.