A hometown hero wins the Air Guitar World Championships in Finland

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

World peace via shredding air?

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RASCOE: That’s the ethos of this month’s Air Guitar World Championships, held in Oulu, Finland. According to the organizers, wars will finish, local weather change will cease and all dangerous issues will vanish when all of the individuals on this planet play the air guitar.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PRESENTER: The winner…

UNIDENTIFIED PRESENTERS: Is The Angus.

RASCOE: The Angus is hometown hero Aapo Rautio. He beat out Japan’s Yuta Sudo, aka Sudo-chan, following an air-off tiebreaker wherein every carried out to “Sweet Child Of Mine” by Guns N’ Roses.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RASCOE: This is Rautio’s first world championship, and the primary time since 2000 the winner has come from the competitors’s host nation. This 12 months’s prize for being the world’s greatest air guitarist? It’s an actual guitar, which is unusual as a result of Rautio really performs drums in a band known as The Southgates. Competitors closed out the occasion on stage collectively. They hoisted the champ as much as Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World.”

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD”)

NEIL YOUNG: (Singing) Keep on rocking within the free world.

RASCOE: The competitors stays in Oulu and can happen this weekend subsequent 12 months if you wish to, because the organizers say, make air, not warfare.

(SOUNDBITE OF NEIL YOUNG SONG, “ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD”) Transcript supplied by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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