"I'm glad to be a Pagan" - interview for Nighttimes.com
/29 september/2007/

J. Gordon, 11:28:23 PM

“It’s nice to be in a position where there are people who want to talk to you,” says the seemingly modest and definitely friendly Ville Valo, lead singer of the Finnish band, HIM.

Which is a pretty funny comment, given the fact that HIM is internationally popular and Valo would have a line of fans from here to next Tuesday waiting to talk to him if he only opened his door.

Talking to fans is one thing—but talking to reporters is a necessary evil for rock stars, and Ville is famous for his tall tales to unsuspecting journalists. Can we believe what he tells nighttimes.com? You make the call:

NT: You tell me you’ve been making music since you were seven and playing with the HIM band since you were fourteen. What would you be doing if you weren’t making music?”
VV: I didn’t have a choice but to make music. My Dad owns a sex shop in Helsinki, sells dildos and toys… My Mom’s a secretary for the city. They always said, ‘Son, whatever you do, don’t do what we do.’ They were very supportive when I started playing music and helped me out when I first left home, helped me out on my first instruments… they’ve been really supportive at the beginning of my career when I didn’t get paid for what I do.I’m really happy that I don’t have a day job. I can sing songs and strum an acoustic guitar and make a few people dance and laugh and smile. If I wasn’t making music, I’d probably be assisting my Dad in the sex shop.

NT: HIM has had a great deal of success across the globe, but in your ten-year history, I’m sure the band and you have seen some hard times and made some mistakes. Any regrets?
VV: Life is just a series of mistakes you learn from. You get to try out things and be stupid occasionally. You learn not to put your fingers in the electrical socket in the walls. There are so many [mistakes I’ve made], but they’re so personal. People even with the best of intentions, tend to be bastards to each other. [A harder edge comes to his voice] They tend to do so many things it’s fuckin’ ridiculous, but [my life’s] getting better day by day.

NT: Well, most recently in HIM’s life is the new album, Venus Doom. It’s quite a bit harder than your previous albums. Will you talk about your inspiration for it?
VV: I’ve been wanting to write Venus Doom for about 18 years. It’s my only album to really exorcise my negativity; to put myself on paper and use music as a mirror. Just to cope with the mundane everyday world and all the negative aspects. Writing gloom and doom and hard fuckin’ stuff is what makes me happy and what keeps me sane.

NT: HIM fans clearly hold your lyrics up as the highest form of rock poetry around. What’s your muse for your words?
VV: I read bits and pieces. But good conversations in a bar can be poetry. I keep my eyes and ears open. There are a lot of things to write about. It’s always hard to put your emotions and feelings into words; it’s a challenge. But I’m thankful to be challenged when it comes to that. I’ve been reading [the poet] Galway Kinnell. I’m more into reading novels, though. All kinds of stuff: fuckin’ true crime shit, literary criticism, everything. But like I said, the best poetry comes from conversation at a pub. There are a lot of poems floating about. You just have to be sensitive enough to suck the information in.

NT: HIM has had a number of Top 40 hits now. How do you feel about your gradual emergence into the mainstream?
VV: I’m kinda happy about the fact that we’re dancing on the razor’s edge, between the commercial side of the music industry and the more indie-alternative kind of thing. It’s not something I consciously spend my free time thinking about. I pick up an acoustic guitar… what I can’t put down in words, I put down in melodies. And when the melodies are there, it can take months to write a sentence. Not because I’m drunk or drugged up or whatever, but because it can be tough. When I succeed, I feel relieved. I can take the thing I just invented to the rest of the guys in the band, and at the end, we perform that song onstage and people actually like it. It’s amazing, because it comes from such a haunted place. From such a small place. It’s a miraculous journey: the song, from me, sitting on the floor in my underwear; just woken up with a cup of coffee and a cigarette in my mouth, strumming an acoustic guitar. Seeing that little tiny idea travel at light speed to when it’s actually played on the radio and we’re shooting a video for it. It’s miraculous! I definitely don’t want to destroy any of the magic behind that.

NT: The band’s logo, ‘Heartagram,’ was at one point better known than HIM’s music. How do you feel about that?
VV: I consider it to be a cool thing. I like the idea of the symbol being bigger than the band. The symbol includes our lives, our friend’s lives, even our friend’s bands. It’s meant to be shared. I’m really happy when people get it tattooed. It’s beautiful. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done creatively… I drew it down about ten years ago and it’s been around the world with incredible success. I drew it the day I turned 20. It took me about five minutes, but subconsciously, I was probably working on it 15 years. Bands I liked, like Sabbath, were using the pentagram and I loved that. But I’m also a sucker for Elvis Presley and the ‘Let me be your teddy bear’ kind of stuff. I wanted to combine [both of these ideas] into one symbol. I have a few friends that are witches or should I say, ‘practicing magicians’ so when I drew it down, I ran it by them to make sure I didn’t do anything wrong, kabbalistically speaking! I didn’t want to piss anybody off with something ridiculous, mocking a tradition. But the Heartagram is two well-known symbols coming together. In popular culture, the heart represents the saccharine, syrupy values and the pentagram is the evil, hellish, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden stuff. Spirituality and carnality can co-exist. Flesh and spirit are one in the same. For me, it’s not about religious beliefs or anything like that. I grew up in a family where I was able to decide for myself if I want to pay my taxes to the church or not. I don’t. I’m glad to be a Pagan. [laughs]

NT: You’re starting an American tour for Venus Doom in October, and you’ve got a world tour in the spring that will include Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Is the heavier mood of Venus Doom, especially with the pronounced lack of keyboards, going to change the live show?
VV: Yeah, our keyboard player’s gonna be a full-blown alcoholic for lack of anything to do! [laughs] We tend to rearrange some of the older songs to make them a little more interesting. It’s always more in-your-face anyway, in a live situation. I like the elements of danger; of being in a situation where you can make mistakes beautiful mistakes. It’s like reading poetry. Check out the different performances of Bukowski [reading the same poem]. He’s always improvising and changing bits and pieces. It’s weird, and it’s marvelous. That’s one of the reasons we keep doing it. We don’t know where it leads us, we just go with the flow.

NT: Do you see HIM becoming one of these bands with multi-decade lifespans, like U2 or something?
VV: I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. Tomorrow, I could get run over by a car. One day at a time and one song at a time. I’m living in the now. Obviously, I get a lot out of writing, singing, making music and feeling good with the band. I’m content. But things can change. You never know, I could wake up one day and not feel like doing it anymore. It’s like a relationship: you should enjoy things while they last. Hopefully, they’ll last the rest of your life, but there are no guarantees.