In the late Spring 1998, in Tampere, Finland, guitarist-composer Aki Virtanen put the band together with a Canadian vocalist Leila Catherine Ronkainen (last name reflects her father's Finnish roots), bass player Ville Olkkonen and drummer Ari Toikka. Within a couple of months the band took a new shape containing Henri Lievonen replacing Ville on bass. The group started to sound a real band pretty soon and everyone was excited about the future. However, a major setback stroke out soon, since Ari was recruited by one of the most promising new groups, Bomfunk MC's, as a tour drummer. As music was his only income, he decided to leave the band, and he perhaps made a right move, since Bomfunk hit the European music charts by selling millions soon after him joining them.
In the late summer of '98 Aki asked Timo Vehmas, whose band had been sharing the same rehearsal room, to join the band. After a couple of months of rehearsals the band headed to a local Three Cowboys studio, which had at those times served as home basis for a band of a real rock and roll superstar, Michael Monroe (Hanoi Rocks). The studio sessions were full of enthousiasm and after 2 days of intensive recordings the first promo-CD "Nobodies" saw its daylight. The CD included three hard rock songs, "Another Round", "Dear Brother" and "So Cold".
The promo-CD led to a couple of gigs and the band started to get name due to its tight and energetic playing and stage performances accompanied by powerful female vocals. The smooth cooperation between Leila, Henri, Timo and Aki had also been earned by regular and tireless rehearsals and by enthousiastic attitude of each member of the band.
Aki and Leila took a train from Tampere to Helsinki (capital city of Finland) in the Autumn 1998 and they had a meeting with the boss of Megamania, a well-known Finnish recording company. Soon after the meeting at Megamania's headquarters Nanaimo Bars started recording sessions of three songs at the Happy Road Studios in Tampere. Those songs were "Double Dare" (words by Leila, music by Aki), "A Little Love Song" (words & music by Aki) and "Don't Tell Me" (words & music by Aki). The recording engineer and producer was the ex-drummer of the Nobodies, Ari Toikka, who was asked to take over the job, because he knew the band and its music already.
The single was marketed in Finland, Canada, Belgium and Japan and it led to several performances and growing amount of audiences.
However, in the late Autumn 1998, when all gates seemed to be open for a major success, personal problems started to take over. Aki was suffering from a deteriorated relationship where his girlfriend of that time was furiously jealous about him cooperating closely with Leila. Accompanied by an increased tension between Aki and Leila, due to Leila's wishes to include more of her compositions into the band's set, the band was very close to break up in the early 1999.
Regardless of their problems Nanaimo Bars continued performing and recorded a demo in early Spring 1999 at the Happy Road Studio (again engineered by Ari Toikka) containing 14 songs out of which the first album was supposed to be constructed. Soon after the demo sessions Timo Portimojärvi (ex-Pushrods) started to play bass and Henri took over the second guitar. Timo was drummer Timpa's good friend, a technically talented bass player, and commited to a hard rock approach. However, the tensions within the band continued and the band split up soon afterwards. Leila moved back to Vancouver, Canada. She further settled down in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
After splitting up it took 6,5 years (!!!) for Aki and Leila to get in touch with each other again. However, after a very emotional long-distance phone conversation between Leila and Aki on 4th February 2007 the band decided to team up again and to start recordings of new songs.