HIM

Mon 15th Feb, 2010 in Features

“Rightttttto” is the first thing I hear from the deep baritone of Ville Valo, with a ridiculous roll of his tongue. The man’s greeting would seem like something out of a bad Dracula movie if not for his affable sense of humour and deadpan wit.

So what can fans anticipate when Valo leads HIM down under for Soundwave this month? “We’re usually pretty loud,” he begins. “Our drummer’s a big guy and he can really pound the skins. It’s going to be a messy affair, but hopefully beautifully messy. Everyone can get elegantly wasted. We’re going to be playing Perth this time too, so I definitely check out the Ayers Rock statue thing. It’s close to Perth, isn’t it? There’s that big Sea World thing, too, so I wanna see that. I’m a big fan of octopi; I don’t know why. So we’ll see some squid and some octopi floating about.”

Despite HIM’s runaway success, there have been some very dark times for Valo and the band. Somewhat surprisingly, Valo is very open about his battle with alcoholism.

“I’m sober now,” he reveals. “I’m not touching any lager or spirits or wine, or alcohol for that matter, and no drugs. It’s something I needed to do. I love drinking, but at one point there was way too many things to handle at once and I was self-medicating too much. I’m not fully blaming alcohol or even myself; I blame my circumstances.

“At one point I was waking up and I had to down like eight pints of beer to be able to stand up. You’re puking blood, shitting blood, having heart palpitations and you feel really, really bad. I had a personal relationship that was going really bad, the band was going pretty badly and we had an album to make. Being the stupid fellow I am, I decided to resort to the bottle way too much.

“I went to rehabilitation – it was just like a month long holiday without a cell phone and any work to be done. I slept like a baby, ate good food, and got my shit together a bit. It was weird after that, doing the first gigs and touring sober, because there’s so many rituals you’re used to, downing two or three pints before a gig. All the butterflies and adrenaline really overwhelm you when you do it with a clear head. I had to relearn a lot of things with a sober head.”

Despite his persistent humour and quick wit, there’s a definite underlying melancholy that permeates Valo’s words. That suits him. “Usually when you’re really happy or you’re really content with life in general, that’s when you don’t do any creative work,” he concedes.

“When there’s something that bugs you, you end up working on something creative because it’s a very cathartic thing to do. I’ve never met a painter who will paint when he’s super happy.”

I mention how Finland’s the number one country for quality of living, to which Valo counters, “Yes, but I think it’s also in the top 10 in the countries where people commit suicide. There’s two sides to everything, I think.”

When talking about the new album Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice, Valo’s much more sanguine. “It’s heavy-handedly soft. The sonic realm where HIM has found themselves is the weird combination of the kooky ‘80s – let’s say Depeche Mode, Duran Duran – meeting the more grungier side of Black Sabbath, The Cult and Guns N Roses. The new album’s Back in Black meets, say, Black Celebration.

“Whether we’re entirely laughable or whether we just created devilish smack on the listener’s face, I don’t know. I’ve always been a keen fan of melody and I love big choruses. I love the pomposity in music that a lot of the bands of the ‘80s had.”

HIM pioneered ‘love metal’ – if only to stop pesky journalists from trying to corner the band into a traditional box. Singing about love comes naturally for Valo. “I haven’t found religion, and I’m not looking for one. I’m not politically involved, and the swords and sorcery stuff has been done so well already that it’s not interesting. Singing about drugs or easy women or fast cars, it’s been done a gazillion times. I think that if you sit down with a guitar and you come up with a song about matters of the heart and it ends up on the album really naturally, then you’ve done something right.

“Love and relationships are magical; fantastical. They’re the only things that can really shake your world, in this modern time. There’s no wars here in this side of the world, so the biggest jaw-dropping moments usually happen when somebody of particular interest walks into a room, and that ends up in the songs.

“The rest of the guys [in the band] have families and girlfriends and kids and wives and shit. I’ve never had time to do anything besides fuck up my relationships, because I spend all of my time writing about them. I guess that’s the kind of perverse nature I have. I’ve never understood how the rest of the guys can pull of long-distance relationships. I’ve tried, but it’s impossible. You’re spending half of the year 5,000 miles away from the person you basically share your life with. One always misses the other more, and then you can’t know what the other person’s doing, so there’s always jealousy or uncertainty.

“I’ve never been able to make it work, at all, but who give us a fuck? It’s my life. If one day I happen to meet someone and things go well and I’m happy then that would be nice. But it’s not like I’ll be going on whateverdate.com in desperate search for companionship. I don’t need it.”

HIM play Soundwave around the country (check out the festival set times), as well as Sidewaves in Sydney and Melbourne.

Saturday 20 Feb – Soundwave Festival Brisbane
Sunday 21 Feb – Soundwave Festival Sydney
Tuesday 23 February – The Forum, Sydney
Thursday 25 February – The Hi-Fi, Melbourne
Friday 26 Feb – Soundwave Festival Melbourne
Saturday 27 Feb – Soundwave Festival Adelaide
Monday 1 March – Soundwave Festival Perth