Finnish Love Metal at its Finest
An intimate sit down with HIM’s Ville Valo to discuss everything from success to iPads
I

We walked down the long hallway, coming to the room in which our subject waited. It was dimly lit by a bathroom light and a TV showing the opening band’s set on the screen.
Lighting a candle in front of the typical backstage type of mirror, stood Ville Valo of H.I.M. He seemed slightly surprised at our arrival, and having recently found an ashtray, asked if we thought that he was able to smoke in the room.
“You can smoke pretty much anywhere in Las Vegas,” we said. After all smokes were lit and small talk was out of the way, we proceeded with the interview. I did not expect the humbleness or the answers to the questions at all. Not your typical “rock star” personality. It was like catching up with an old friend. You’ll see why:
I

ZR: Did you ever expect to get the amount of success that you guys have had?
Ville: More. I would have expected more.
ZR: Really?
Ville: Oh yeah. You have to think about when you start
out, whatever you are passionate about, you want everything. You could
be the first band playing on the moon, or you could want all of the
stars in the sky. Obviously though it’s a bit of a gamble in the realm
of art. So, no, we just started a band because we had the innate need to
do so. That’s the way it goes. If you want a band you need to get
people together and then you need a rehearsal space, you need songs, and
things like guitar strings. There are little steps that a band takes.
It never really happens super fast. Then you play your first gig or get
your first demo, and then obviously one of the biggest things is to get a
record deal. It expanded in baby steps. We started touring back home in
Finland and then over in Sweden and then Germany. It’s been quirky in a
sense that we’ve never had one album that was successful all over the
place. It seems to be that there’s one that is successful here in the
states or one that’s successful in the UK, which currently keeps
everyone on their toes within the band, and then it’s a challenge to
tour because it’s not that everyone is wiping our asses driving around
in limos. In some places we play for 400 people and others it’s 4,000
people and everything in between so that makes it quite interesting. So,
no, we did not have a clue, but also there’s no expectations. If you
have too many expectations you’re just going to get disappointed. The
best way is to just go with the flow, and do the best you can, and work
super hard.
I

ZR: How have you guys stuck together after all this time?
Ville: It’s fucking tough. The special thing about our
band is that we grew up together. I’ve known the guitar player and the
bass player since we were 8 years old. We went to the same school. So,
that’s one big deal.
ZR: That’s an anomaly in itself.
Ville: Yes it is. Since we’ve been together
approximately 20 years I think the only way for a band with 5 different
kinds of personalities to survive is to know each other really well. We
know when to leave somebody to their own peace and give space. Humor is a
big deal that keeps bands together because, well, we’ve talked to so
many bands where often times it’s 4 or 5 individuals who are just on
their own ego trip. So, they always use the band as a vessel towards
their own personal greatness as opposed to a collective one. At least in
Europe a lot of times bands don’t start playing music just because they
want to be rich and famous. They start playing music because they love
to play music. I’m always saying that it’s so cold in the winter that
hard rock is the only thing to keep us warm. It’s so physical,
headbanging and such.I

ZR: What was it, or who was it, that got you into rock n’ roll and doing what you do?
Ville: Well, it wasn’t really one specific moment. My
parents told me about banging on bongos at family parties while one of
our friends would do Elvis impersonations in the late 70s, but I started
playing bass guitar at about 8 or 9 years old because of Gene Simmons. I
was a huge KISS fan, and I thought bass and them were so fucking cool
because when you’re that young it’s the visual aspect. I didn’t know
shit about music. Then through KISS it was cassette trading in school,
things like WASP and Twisted Sister and Iron Maiden. I was born in ’76
so all of the 80s hair metal stuff was a big deal. Ozzy Osbourne and
such. Then I started skating, and got into all the stuff on the Santa
Cruz and then a lot of indie stuff like Black Flag and Dinosaur Jr. and
all that shit. So, all of a sudden that happened, and then in the 90s it
was Nirvana and through them it was Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and
all of the Seattle stuff through which I found Black Sabbath and Led
Zeppelin because they were always talking about those bands. So, it was a
big mish mash. I used to play all different kinds of music. I had
several bands, and I was a bass player and a drummer for a long time.
So, I’d play jazz, reggae, pop, etc. It’s been gradual. I was a huge
Jane’s Addiction fan, and since I thought Perry Farrell’s voice sounded
so odd in his vocals that maybe I had a chance to start singing. So, I
started singing to Ritual de lo Habitual and Faith No More’s “Angel
Dust” and some reggae stuff, and then we formed H.I.M. and originally I
was supposed to be the bass player, but we couldn’t find a singer. So, I
wanted to try it out, and we did our first demo with me singing and one
of my best friends came back from military service, who is still with
the band, Mige, playing bass. Music is very Las Vegassy, very Odyssey
and roulette in a way that it’s completely up to chance and luck. It’s
not like Excel shit or a Power Point presentation, you know.
ZR:So far who has been your favorite band or people to tour with?
Ville: We love Australians. They’re a funny bunch.The
Danish are a bit quiet, Volbeat, but they’ve been touring shit tons.
They’ve been touring the past 2 years straight so I imagine they are
tired. They play a great show though and people enjoy it. Musically it
is such an eclectic bunch and so different. Airbourne is like a modern
day AC/DC meets The Darkness. All That Remains is kind of that Swedish,
Gothamberg influence. It’s very melodic death metal. We and Volbeat
share some similarities. We come from that kind of melodic Misfits
background, and no one has been talking about it, but he sounds a lot
like Keith Caputo of Life of Agony, when he’s singing in the lower
voice. It’s very cool. They’re all good in what they do, and they’re all
very different which is the cool thing about the tour. However, it’s
very fucking tough with the audience. Who’s going to like all 4 bands?
That’s been the main challenge for us especially. At times there are a
lot of H.I.M. fans, and at other times there’s none. Sometimes the fans
do the whole “Fuck you! Get off the stage!” thing, which is fun! Why
ruin your voice before the actual event you came for, you know? It’s a
good challenge for us because we haven’t toured since 2010, like, lived
in a bus. It’s exciting that it is not too easy. After this tour we’re
going to go back and do a headlining tour in Europe which will be very
different, because we know that the people are there for us whether it’s
sold out or not. It’s a different cup of tea. You can play different
sets.
I

ZR: With this tour are you guys trying to do a little bit of everything?
Ville: We always try to do a little bit of
everything otherwise it’s boring. When bands release new albums and then
just play new shit it’s fucking boring. Tonight we are doing about 15
songs and we’re playing about 4 new ones. Everything else is from the
first album until now. We are missing a couple albums. We aren’t doing
anything from Screamworks because we toured for that albums and
this time it just didn’t fit. We are also doing “Passion’s Killing
Floor”, which is a bit more like Black Sabbath, which is good. It fits
in better, because none of these bands on this tour are sissies. No one
is really poppy.
ZR: You guys have been considered “Love Metal”. How did that term come about aside from it being the name of one of your albums?
Ville: You know, it’s getting crazy, all of the
sub-genres in metal and rock n’ roll. When we started out we were hugely
influenced by Type O Negative, Paradise Lost, bands like that. In music
you should have a bit of humor even though it might be gloomy. When we
played Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”, we realized we weren’t afraid to be
emotional yet have balls of steel. That’s the combination you have to
have. Like, I love Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, and Roy
Orbison, but at the same time I love Krokus and death metal and all that
stuff. When we started this band we didn’t want to draw down on a paper
that we can’t do this or that. So, that’s why we sounded like we
sounded, and that’s why people have trouble categorizing us. Are we a
goth rock band? Are we a metal band? People here in the states started
calling us an emo band, which I don’t understand! At the end of the day
the whole term “emo” comes from emotional hardcore. It’s the old school
hardcore bands who didn’t sing about politics, they sung about the
matters of the heart. So, I was lost. Then there was white metal and
black metal. That’s the reason for the cover of Love Metal it was our take on Venom’s Welcome To Hell
. Then we had t-shirts printed like the Norwegians did with black
metal. On their albums they’d print “True Norwegian Black Metal”. So, we
did something similar with Finnish Love Metal. Very tongue and cheek
which is essential to rock music in general because it shouldn’t be too
serious. It can be emotional and life changing, but like I can’t take
Iron Maiden 100% serious. There’s that sense of fun to it. Them and
KISS. “I’m 93 and you’re 16, can’t you see I’m goin’ blind” it’s like
what the fuck?I

ZR: You guys have done so much. How do you find the creativity and inspiration to keep going as the 20th anniversary of the first album approaches in just a few years?
Ville: Oh lord. It has been that long. I think it goes
back to that it didn’t happen globally for us. It took us from 1996 to
2003 to be able to tour in America for the first time. It doesn’t feel
so old because of that. We still haven’t even gone to Latin America. You
can’t tour all the time as it will wear people out. If you tour too
much you won’t feel creative. It’s a passion that pays. With songs it’s a
lot of times when you feel empty it’s for a good reason. You’ve given
everything you have and then doing the work via touring it drains you. I
find inspiration when I go back home because you know, maybe I can’t
stand the song I just played or the latest album we did. When you play a
song 150 times you get to the point where you go “Fuck it. I want
something new.” You pick up the guitar and strum something new. If
there’s not an idea just give it a break. When a lot of people are young
they push no matter what. If something doesn’t work they act like it’s
so serious they want to kill themselves, but I found a lot of times
working on a song for hours and hours is worse than not working on a
song for a week because you’re subconscious does the work for you. Then
you just pick up the guitar when it’s ready. That’s very important to
leave spaces between work. It sounds lazy, but at the end of the day
everyone works a different way. Some people need the constant, but a lot
of people have jobs and that’s their free time. We don’t have jobs.
This is what we do. Travelling the world playing music and meeting new
friends and old friends doesn’t seem half bad. What makes it tiring is
travel. You get the lack of sleep and shitty food, but it’s worth it.
It’s fun.
I

ZR: You guys have accomplished so much. For example, you were
nominated for a Golden God award and won. How do those type of things
feel? Is it a new rush of surprise or shock?
Ville: Well, I think one really important thing
with this band is that we understand that we are not really going to do
something 100% original. If we are recognized for something it’s a hats
off to our idols as well. Thank you Gene and Steve Harris and Peter
Steele for being good inspirations for us to kind of steal some vibes or
ideas and make our own concoction and spread the word around. A lot of
bands are kindred spirits. The vibe is there. The Golden God thing was
not just for us. It was for the whole rock n’ roll scene. It’s cool that
there are still people that are dedicated. That’s the difference
between the rock world and the pop world is that people will follow
bands for a long, long time. Even though all the social media is there
and people have downloaded shit and do Spotify and what not, there’s
still remains of the old culture when the new albums come out of getting
the album or the t-shirt. That’s something spectacularly rock n’ roll,
and I know that because I am a fan. I still have my t-shirt from my
first concert in 1986 when Iron Maiden played in Helsinki. Where we come
from, there were not many bands touring. It’s amazing to buy a ticket.
ZR: Do you have a favorite song that you like to perform, whether it’s warming up or performing live; yours or another’s?
Ville: I don’t know. I do fall in love with one song
usually whether it is new to me or an old classic. On this tour it’s
probably “More Than A Feeling” by Boston. That’s what we’ve been humming
to. We also found this crazy good song produced by Rick James for Eddie
Murphy called “Party All the Time”. That’s fucking awesome! We dug the
video. I’d never seen it before so it was like, “What the fuck is going
on?” It seemed so sad so we looked up the lyrics. She parties all the
time and Eddie is buying her like diamond rings and champagne, but she
just wants to party. It is a melancholy song, and it’d make a great
cover. Once again though, different albums have different levels of
success. In Germany, Switzerland, and Austria “Join Me in Death” was
huge in 2000. In England, Love Metal is the album that put us on the map, and in the U.S. it was Dark Light.
So, when we play “Wings of A Butterfly” that kind of creates a bit of
something. At times it’s also that the stars align in a way that even a
song the audience doesn’t know just seems to work. That’s the magic of
rock n’ roll. It’s great.
I

The magic of rock n’ roll was truly shown that night. Although,
due to the mix of bands, there didn’t seem to be too many HIM fans
floating around, but that just made them give more of their all. A blue
stage, similar lighting to that in the video for “The Sacrament”, backed
the members as they proved to the Joint in Las Vegas that after 20
years, they could still rock.
HIM performed everything from the hit “Join Me” to a song I’ve actually
never seen them perform (so it was quite a treat!) “Souls on Fire”.
HIM still puts so much energy into their set and fails to disappoint.
Never before seeing them for the first time on the 2004 tour in support
of their album Love Metal, and never
since have I seen a band so tight on stage. You can tell that those guys
truly love what they do, and what a delivery!
Sadly, HIM’s set seemed to go by too damn quickly. After a version of
“Funeral of Hearts” that started out as acoustic and then broke into the
electric, the band left the stage, and the HIM fans seemed to trickle
out of the venue, making way for the last band of the night, Volbeat, to
take the stage.
~ Stephy Hayward
Photos: Promo photos Courtesy UMG Deutschland Live photos by:Sven-Sebastian Sajak ©2013: Some Rights Reserved and Adam Liberti for ZRock*R ©2013: All Rights ReservedI