ANETTE OLZON: I Didn't Leave NIGHTWISH; I Was Fired

Former NIGHTWISH vocalist Anette Olzon has told Prog magazine that she believes she was fired from the band in 2012 because she became pregnant with her third child.

Olzon's departure from the group came seven years after previous NIGHTWISH frontwoman Tarja Turunen was dismissed from the group by being presented with an open letter which was published on the NIGHTWISH web site at the same time. An official announcement from NIGHTWISH claimed the split with Olzon, which happened in the middle of a North American tour in September 2012, was made "in mutual understanding."

Olzon, however, tells Prog that she did not leave NIGHTWISH of her own accord. She says: "I have been getting frustrated with people saying I left the band — because I didn't. I was fired exactly as Tarja was fired, but maybe in a more quiet way."

According to Olzon, her pregnancy was a major factor in her former bandmates' decision to fire her from the band. "That’s how I see it," she says. "Why [else] should they kick me out when they got to know I was pregnant?

"We, of course, had some problems in 2009, but we had a good tour and there was nothing else coming until then."

Olzon, who will release her debut solo album, "Shine", in February, adds: "The reason I didn't say this a year ago is because I didn't want to state something so negative. I felt really bad about the situation — it was quite a big divorce."

Anette recently gave an extensive interview to Finland's largest women's weekly magazine, Me Naiset, in which she accused her former bandmates of excluding her from the decision-making process and not splitting all the revenue equally, forcing her to start her own company and take a financial loss in 2010. The NIGHTWISH members responded in a statement on their official web site, accusing their former singer of making claims that were "full of twisted truths and defamation."

"The split with Anette wasn't because of pregnancy or illness," they said. "We discovered her personality didn't fit this work community, and was even detrimental to it."

They added: "Anette told of her pregnancy to the whole band already a week earlier in Montreal. Everyone was congratulative, and Anette herself offered an option of hiring a replacement vocalist if she couldn't manage everything, which was already agreed on. Later she took back her decision, and the difficulties really started."