Interview with HIM by Avelina de Moray and Von Lehmann
Sydney /25.03.2008/

We arrived at Ville’s hotel at 1.45 pm and waited for Natasha ( Warner Music’s publicity organizer ) to take us up to the interview room. Whilst we waited in the lobby, Ville Valo wandered past us, pausing only for a second to say hello before disappearing into the lift A short time later Natasha came down and took us up to meet Ville and Mige. As I set up my dicta phone, Ville got up to refill his coffee, It was then that a young assistant helpfully obliged to fill Ville’s cup and accidentally spilt hot coffee over Ville’s hand.

For a second there was nothing but stunned silence in the room, which was then broken by Ville “ It’s OK, don’t worry about it”. The young girl began apologizing profusely and Ville had to calm her down. This accident would mark the start of my thirty minute chat with Ville and Mige from Finnish ‘Love Metal’ band HIM.

HIM interview, Sydney 25/3/2008

Von: In regards to song writing and arranging, is there a particular method that you use?

Ville: It kind of keeps on changing, it seems that each and every album’s a bit different. You know, for most of the basic ideas, I just play around with my acoustic guitar back home and when I’m happy with what I hear, I record stuff, like you know, on the dictating machine, you know, just a couple of ideas , and then I play the ideas to the rest of the guys at the rehearsal place and then we kind of like........plug the electric instruments in and put on the distortion and it sounds like HIM, instantly. So it’s fairly simple, and at the same time fairly ah.................

Mige: Complex

Ville: Complex, you know it’s just, we’ve been doing this for such a long time, we try to obviously find something that................

Von: So do you do everything as a unit?

Ville: After the basics are done, yeah........... I’m more or less like a benevolent dictator. You know........Song writing for me........ Is sort of like an emotional process, it’s has always been. It’s very important to me. And since I write the lyrics and sing the lyrics, it’s very important for me to try and maintain the essence, you know, the mood of the song........and then they (Ville points to Mige) fuck it up! ............We know each other very well, and the way we play our instruments and all that, so.

Von: Are you careful not to step on toes.

Ville: No you don’t have to be careful.

Mige: Not anymore.

Ville: Not any more. You know........every song’s a challenge in a way......... some songs might take fifteen minutes and their done, some songs might take seven years till their done, so........you can’t necessarily hear it. You know it’s funny.

Von: Yeah well, when someone gets the CD and they’re listening to it for the first time, they don’t realize that there’s years and years of work that has gone into it.

Ville: And something complex can be something that we did in a very short period of time.

Von: You’ve got a much more progressive sound on the new album, was it very conscious to go in that direction?

Mige: No, it wasn’t like, conscious. I don’t think things like that are never really like, conscious. It’s not like, before you start working you decide, that’s ok, we know we’re gonna have full on guitar solos.

Ville: It’s kind of cool to have an overall frame. You have a certain idea in your head, you don’t necessarily have the songs, but ah, you know, for example with ‘Dark Light’, we wanted to keep most of the songs fairly, you know, compact and fairly simplistic and straight, song writing wise, so as not to do something very different. On the new album, we just let the riff go and see where it takes you. And that ended up being, you know, ‘Sleepwalking Past Hope’.

Ville: To me it reminds me of ‘Happy chill Vibe’, some proggy stuff of theirs, then again a lot of ‘Samson’ and a bit of ‘Hawkwind’ and bits and pieces of all the people we adore and musicians we adore. Usually, an album is a refection upon the one before, more or less, so, you know, in that sense, the next albums probably gonna be like ..............philosophies of love, pure pop in major chords and all the songs are gonna last like two minutes and ten seconds, (laughs all around) I honestly don’t think we would go more proggy and do even longer songs, or........

Ville: In my head now is that it’s gonna be a ‘Misfits’ kind of vibe, you know, in a way that’s, less chords............ more in your face and ......say what you wanna say, as in, you know, with as little words as possible, which is a challenge in itself, minimalism is always a challenge. And still in our case, that doesn’t mean that it’s gonna sound like ‘The Misfits’ or that it’s gonna be recorded on a four track in four days. Probably, you know, it’s gonna be a bigger production than that, but still, you know, that’s a vision I had in my head, a bit more ‘Monster Magnet’, you know, a bit more ‘garagy’ , ‘Type-O’, in ya’ face vibe, cause that’s something we haven’t really done, we did small pieces of it on ‘Love Metal’, or maybe a bit more into the faster, kind of, punky direction, that would be something really nice. We’re getting so old; we need something, to sort of like, get us going.

Von: And coffee’s not enough!

Ville: Definitely not enough.

Mige: No, no, no. Not even close

Avelina: Do you take sugar in your coffee?

Ville: No, no, just as it comes.

Avelina: I need seven sugar’s or I can’t drink it.

Ville: Whoa! seven, oh god no. No.

Mige: Did you ever try, I don’t know if it’s an Australian thing, they put like sugar cubes on a saucer and then you drink coffee through it.

Avelina: That sounds like Absinthe.

Mige: Finnish Grannies do it. If you’re into sugar, you should try that method. That’s the ultimate sugar coffee.

Von: The general sort of mood that you always have running throughout your songs, this mood of, you know, the ‘melancholia’ type of atmosphere that’s there. Do you find it difficult to stay it that place?

Mige: I find it easy.

Ville: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find it very hard to get out of it. We come from a fairly desolate, you know, cold country which musically denudes the Slavic melancholy, whatever you call it, there’s a lot of Russian influences, a lot of the traditional pop music, folk music, Finnish music is very melancholy. It’s very passionate and kind of like............wasteful and full on, not in a negative or depressive sense, but...........this is the kind of stuff I grew up with, I can’t stand happy music. Sad massive doomy, gloomy music makes me feel good. Makes my day. Makes me want to eat ice cream. (laughs all around).

Von: Ok, now there’s a couple of things on the net I want to clarify, something about a ‘James Bond’ movie and you writing the theme song?

Ville: Oh that was just a rumor, you know, about me being involved in writing the ‘Quantum of Solace’ which would be a great song title but, ah, unfortunately it’s just a rumor........ I was at a party in London, and those guys that have been doing the theme songs for the Bond movies were there, but I didn’t get the chance to meet them so it was just a rumor that I’d been talkin’ with them.

Quantum of Solace............. It would have been a great thing for the band or for me personally. We grew up watching Bond movies and they’re changing their direction as well, you know, so, it would have been great, you know, maybe next time around, I guess Amy Winehouse was sober enough to do it this time ‘round.

Von: Is she doing it?

Ville: That’s the last thing I heard, but she relapsed so it’s hard to say. I’m a big fan of Amy, I’ve heard everything from her, It’s kind of like stalker-ish, I know all the pubs where she goes to in London.

Von: In regards to covers that you guys have done over the years.......... ‘Solitary Man’, ‘Wicked Game’. How do you decide, like, is there any sort of particular reason for choosing one cover over the other four hundred million covers that are out there?

Ville: We had couple of our songs, a couple of ideas that didn’t sound that good, that weren’t fully formed, and I’d just seen ‘Wild at Heart’ by David Lynch..........and Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ was the theme song for the movie, I guess it was my idea just to try it out, to make a hard rocky version of it, then people started lovin’ it and when we started playing our first gigs, we didn’t have enough of our own material so we’d played a few covers, we played Madonna’s ‘Live to tell’ we played sets of eighties stuff, Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, you know, really cheesy ballads. Madonna’s ‘Live To Tell’ translates really well into ‘Doom’, a ‘My Dying Bride’ sort of thing.

Von: Do you ever change the words at all?

Mige: Of course not. We’re not into that, Gender bending never helped anybody.

Von: Ok, the whole Edgar Allen Poe influence.

Ville: What about that?

Von: Which part of the Edgar Allen Poe’s image are you personally influenced by?

Ville: The whole lot. (smiles sardonically)

Von: More his art or more his personal life?

Ville: I think it’s a combination of the whole thing, you know, he was a very peculiar fellow and we don’t know a lot about him. There’s not a lot of historical facts about him. There’s still speculation as to whether he was a drunkard or a drug abuser or not, and at the end of the day, a lot of people forget that he was the inventor of the modern detective novel.

A lot of people just know ‘Raven’ and ‘Tomb of Ligeia’ and films with Vincent Price, but he wrote a lot of different kinds of stuff, he’s an interesting character, I haven’t read everything that he’s done. The same with, lets say ‘Dali’ or ‘Alister Crowley’, you know, he’s a cool bloke but you can’t really tell what’s true and what’s not, when he’s talkin’ about, you know summoning up ‘Charon’........

Von: I’m sure Crowley believed it at the time.

Ville: Well, you know, at the end of the day there’s no humor perceived, Crowley’s perceived as being a very serious man and at the end of the day, I find a lot of humor..........

Von: He’s very funny, you just gotta look in the right place.

Ville: Yeah, and especially with Poe I guess, well you know, people tent to find most of his stuff very melancholy and we don’t have any T.V. interviews with him and we don’t have any recorded interviews with him, so we don’t actually know how he perceived himself , so our imagination has just put those people into those, kind of, dark places, I think that there must be another side to them and I think that does come through in the work.

Von: And in the end, the eye sees what it wants to see.

Ville: Yeah! It makes it easier, judging the book by its cover. .......So I do think that there’s a lot of hilarious aspects to most characters.

Von: Yeah. In Crowley’s work especially, I don’t know if you familiar with ‘the Book of Lies’ and stuff like that......

Ville: Yeah. Bit’s and pieces.

Von: You can’t understand it, it’s crazy!

Ville: Well you know some of his stuff is so hard to read as well, you know, it’s written in such a bizarre like vitalist way.

Von: And it’s all word games.

Ville: A lot of it, yes. And some of it’s really childish as well. I’m not about to question his intelligence at all, but you know, he was a weird character, I was just reading ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ by Lawrence Sutin , it’s pretty good, and what he did in his life span was just amazing, he’s one of those renaissance men, just doing everything, like Da Vinci.

Von: He had this amazing intelligence as well.

Ville: Hm hm (nods as he finishes his coffee).

Von: Have you read any of the Israell Regardie books?

Ville: I’ve just heard the name. I haven’t read his stuff.

Von: He was one of Crowley’s disciples and spent most of his life with him.

Ville: There’s so much of that stuff, it’s impossible to read it all, it would be a lifetime operation to really get into it, but maybe I will, sooner or later, bit by bit, but I’ve got a lot of different books and, unfortunately, still don’t have the time to read all of them. You know, I need to balance, well at least I need to personally balance stuff, I need to read something totally different, lighter or darker or more poetic or whatever, you know.

Von: Do you get board quickly with one subject in particular?

Ville: No, well I guess that you loose the focus and you need a new angle and all of a sudden you come back to it and it’s like visiting old friends in a different city, you know, it’s just getting a new angle towards it.

Von: It sort of works musically too, to do a song, not complete it and move along and then come back and revisit it.

Ville: That’s why song writing takes so long. For example, what the fuck’s the song, ‘Passion’s Killing Floor’, the chorus of the song I wrote back in 1980, the riff of the song I wrote back in 2002, and then we finished it in 2006, so it takes a long time to be able to do that, to come back to an idea you really like but it’s not fully realized, you know, the puzzle’s missing a couple of pieces or whatever.

Von: And you have to know when to step away before you destroy it, as well.

Ville: Yeah, It’s not a tough decision, it’s just that when it feels right, it feels right.

Von: (Talking to Mige) Do you use any bass effect pedals?

Mige: I do, you just can’t hear them, that’s all.

Ville: We’re laughing about the fact that you never can hear his bass properly.

Mige: Yeah. And then the front house is using the ‘Amp Farm’. So it’s any combination of things I guess.

Ville: It’s a pain in the ass man, everything sounds beautiful, you like, perfect your amps sound since you started playing music......... and then this front house guy comes along, you never know how it actually sounds, not even when you’re there, and you never know about the lights either, you never see the whole band perform......so it’s kind of awkward at times actually, when it comes to sound. We don’t know how we are live or how we sound on stage.

Von: They never record the shows or video tape it?

Ville: It’s not the same thing. It depends on the recording guy you know, and then you can’t shoot that stuff on a video cam, you know the lights don’t work the same way. And we’re not likely to........... after a gig, go into out tour bus and start watching ourselves, you know, and cross our legs because we’re getting some weird tingles downstairs, you know, (laughs)......we are egocentric, but not that egocentric.

Von: Would you find it difficult to watch you own shows?

Ville: Well, yeah, There’s a DVD coming out in a month or something called ‘Digital Versatile Doom’ and, ah, I haven’t watched it, I can’t watch myself on T.V. it’s terrible.

Von: And it’s actually live?

Ville: Yeah. It’s from L.A. and.........

Von: Because a lot of live stuff is not live. I was shocked to find out that my favorite ‘Led Zeppelin’ album wasn’t live and my favorite ‘Kiss’ album wasn’t live.

Ville: Yeah, the same with the Thin Lizzy one.

Von: Yeah, ‘Live and Dangerous’ wasn’t live.

Ville: A couple of vocals I actually re-sung in my kitchen, since the bleed from the drums came through, and that’s the only thing. So like, all the basic instruments are there, you know, we played two separate nights in L.A and it’s a combination of both things, so, yeah, it’s like ninety nine percent live I guess ........

I’ll buy you dinner if you can figure out the parts I sang in my kitchen.........It was so funny. I flew back from tour, and it was like, we can’t use these vocals there’s too much snare or whatever, hi-hat there, and I’m setting up my Pro-Tools in my kitchen while I’m eating burgers, so it’s very unlike the mood of actually performing ,you know, in front of those cameras in that beautiful vaudevillian theater in Los Angeles, I was in the middle of eating my veggy burgers and smokin’ my lungs out, kinda’. ( laughs )

Von: I’ll look forward to that.

Avelina: (Talking to Mige) I love what you’ve done with your hair.

Mige: Oh you like it?

Avelina: It’s fantastic.

Ville: I totally agree.

Mige: I done it myself you know, so I’ll take this compliment, maybe I should have been a barber.

Avelina: For sure........you should have been a fucken’ hair dresser.

Ville: In Sweden It’s hot.

Mige: The funny barber from Helsinki (laughs)

Àppreciation for the interview to Avelina de Moray.