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Suicidegirls interview with VV
part1
For Ville Valo, life as a musician is very surreal, or very "Dali-esque" as he might say, and he's not referring to the painter's infamous mustache. In some ways Valo is still waiting for the day when he wakes up and finds out it's all been a giant LSD experiment in the Finnish military, where institutional illusions of grandeur and dreamlike oddities smash artistic ambition through the looking glass of fame, personal casualties be damned. "It's like 'Alice in Wonderland'," he says. "Because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time...surrealism actually exists in your everyday life...you're there 'in the looking glass' so to speak."
At 30-years-old, the singer has spent half his life in the limelight, fronting a handful of local bands in Helsinki, Finland before forming HIM in the early '90s and almost instantly being hurled towards star status in Europe and soon after, worldwide. It's a surreal succession of events that began with Valo as a teenager working in his father's sex shop, to now fronting one of the most popular rock bands around. His has been a life where time seems to run backward, then forward, faces come, go and change shape, and record labels push and pull in a laissez-faire game of chess where a hit single is king and the artist merely a pawn. "It is a little weird," Valo adds. "But that's life, isn't it?"
The wounded romantic turned rock surrealist endures it all with a wink and a healthy laugh, of course. With six studio albums, numerous hit singles and a devout fan base, the musicians in HIM are not want for false accolade or sympathy. For the band, it's a life filled with adventure and all the humor one could imagine. Completed by bassist Mige, guitarist Linde, drummer Gas and keyboardist Burton, the band dubbed it's Sabbath-meets-Depeche Mode sound as "Love Metal" long ago, though HIM's newest album, Venus Doom (Sire/Warner), ventures away from the band's pop sensibilities and leans more towards its Scandinavian melancholia roots. It's an album Valo wrote while holed up in a cabin in Lapland, far away from the hustle of the city and even further away from the pains of a troubled relationship, a friend's suicide and the throws of alcohol abuse that would later land him in rehab.
Sober now for months, Ville Valo took some time after browsing antique sofas to chat with SuicideGirls. In between fits of tongue-in-cheek laughter we somehow managed to talk about the new album, sobriety, and his mission in life, which is, fittingly, to have his own definition of love in Webster's Dictionary.
Erin Broadley: Hello. How are you ?
Ville Valo: Hello there. I'm doing fairly okay, thanks for asking. I've had three Red Bulls and eight cups of coffee. I'm like a Duracell [Energizer] Bunny, just hopping around the house.
EB:Hopping around, beating your drum.
VV:Just short of being beamed up by UFOs.
EB:What was that Michael Jackson movie where he morphs into a bunny?
VV:Moonwalker. [Laughs] I don't know what that was.
EB:[Laughs] Some horrible thing with a claymation bunny.
VV:Well, Michael Jackson is one of those characters that you hope your brain will be like a hard drive you can just defragment and, like, erase the files you don't want to have in there.
EB:Right, right. He's had some memorable moments.
VV:Indeed. But you know, R. Kelly is taking care of that now.
EB:Oh man, have you seen the Trapped in the Closet DVD?
VV:Not the new one, but the first one. Bits and pieces. To be honest with you, it was so psychologically demanding I wasn't able to watch the whole thing through.
EB:It's pretty intense, [laughs] there's a lot of hidden meaning in all its layers.
VV:Yeah, it's very, very deep, [laughs] very deep soaked in urine. There's nothing wrong with taking a leak but at times people do, you know, take their leaks in places that are not appropriate.
EB:Yeah, just don't pee on the wrong person.
VV:That's very well put.
EB:Alright, well, on that note, how are things going so far with the release of the new record?
VV:[Laughs] Everything seems to be going well. The band's happy and we can't wait to get back on tour. I had a really shitty last year and it's been kind of tough on me. I went to ******* rehab and shit. I had nearly both of my feet in the grave. You know, I'm not the only one and I'm not so self-centered that I'd be sitting in a corner cursing God, "Why me? Why me?" It's just that I found myself in a funny position like R. Kelly [laughs] but…
EB:[Laughs] But you handled it a little differently.
VV:[Laughs] Very differently. I had my meltdown, but I kept all the liquids inside of me. But everything is fine, it's all good.
EB:So things have kind of balanced out for you?
VV:Well, everything is kind of new and kind of weird. I had a long-term relationship, we were engaged and we broke up. We were recording the album at the same time and me battling with the booze…a lot of shit hitting the fan in all directions, at the same time. A lot of it was caused by myself, nobody else. I just didn't have the time to decompress and have quality time with myself [laughs].
EB:Right, light some candles and have "me time" [laughs].
VV:Oh my God, I hate that term "me time". I love the fact that I had somebody say, "I'm really sorry I have to get going because I'm missing myself." It sounds corny. It sounds like a sailor sitting on his hands just to make them numb just to be able to jerk off. But yeah, things are looking pretty good. It's kind of cool after a year of traveling to be able to be home for a week and a half and actually buy that toilet paper and do laundry and do the dishes.
EB:Right. Do the normal, day-to-day things.
VV:You can do even normal things in a very abnormal way. So it's always a challenge and it's always an adventure if you make it one.
EB:Well, being in bands since you were a teenager, your whole development of what normal life is has definitely been a different challenge than for the average person.
VV:It's different, it's not better, it's not worse. It's a lot of traveling. I'm really glad that I'm blessed with the opportunity of traveling and having this way of life, spending all this time with my band mates who I grew up with. That's a luxury a lot of bands don't have.
EB:You've said before that writing albums can be really disastrous, emotionally. How do you pull yourself up and stay grounded after making a record? It's a very intense way to live and it can be very manic. No wonder it destroys so many young artists, both personally and in their relationships with other people.
VV:Well, you know, I'm not a quitter. So when you wake up and you're walking out and it's raining and feels like R. Kelly sitting on top of a cloud and peeing on you…
EB:[Laughs]
VV:When you feel miserable and all that, you feel vengeful. I do feel that life is a challenge. It is a pain in the ass and if you're fucked up it makes it easier. I'm not fucked up anymore so I feel very challenged about everything now.
EB:Alcohol is an amazing filter.
VV:Yeah it is. It kind of happened with me not thinking about it. There's just a tremendous amount of partying available. When you're touring in a band there's always a cause for celebrating after a good gig, or if you fucked up a gig there's always a reason to get shit-faced because you feel bad about it. There's always a reason, so it was perfect for me to be in a position where I was shitting and vomiting blood. But now I've gone through that and now even thinking about a pint of beer makes me feel nauseous. I had to walk that line. I went to the doctors and they said I had to go to the ER. I said, "No I can't because I've got to do a couple of interviews" [laughs]. So I was that, before I got the blood tests and everything back.
EB:Literally, the press was becoming the death of you, you can't do that.
VV:**** no, man. I tried.
EB:If you throw up after this interview I'm going to be really, really upset.
VV:[Laughs] Fair enough, fair enough. They said I've got either I've got to stop drinking and calm myself down or it's going to be heart failure next. You know, it's a lonely life being sober, missing all my bar friends and everything, here on my own playing acoustic guitar, playing forlorn love songs, trying to pray to the Devil to get myself a new loved one to write some songs for. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't able to drink or party in moderation. My last bender lasted more than two years, getting fucked up every single day. It's not healthy but obviously it's a way of life. You get a different social scene and you care about different things, based on the idea that you're not happy with yourself or you're not feeling comfortable with yourself so you just want to numb the pain by using something whether it's legal or illegal. I just had vengeance in me and was pointing my middle finger up toward the cloud where R. Kelly was pissing on top of me [laughs].