HIS INFERNAL MAJESTY

Merry Christmas everyone...love y´all :)

I´d like to wish you all merry Christmas and all the best for the year 2009. Love you all!

In 2005, Finnish “love metallers” HIM finally broke through into the mainstream in the US with their then fifth studio outing, Dark Light. Hot on the heels of the runaway success of Dark Light, HIM recorded and released its follow-up album Venus Doom late last year. With its more aggressive approach, the album further cemented HIM’s hard earned success in the States and the elsewhere, around the world.

It’s been a long journey and exciting for the Finnish quintet since first forming back in 1991. Led by charismatic lead singer Ville Valo, the band first achieved success in their mainland before breaking through on a large scale in Europe and especially the UK where the band have been the darlings of the UK press and often gracing the covers of many music magazines. Their work ethic of constant touring has paid big dividends for the band. This interview was noteworthy for this writer in particular as his Laney VH100 head was being borrowed by the band’s guitarist Mikko Lindstrom for use at the band’s Melbourne show. So after exchanging small talk about the Laney head, Mikko spoke with Joe Matera via phone while the band were in Sydney – unfortunately the band’s very hectic touring schedule prevented any face-face interviews from happening - to discuss the band’s career thus far.

Ultimate-Guitar: Venus Doom the band’s most recent album has been the most heaviest sounding album to date, was that because it was a reaction against the more radio friendly predecessor Dark Light? Or was it due to a natural musical progression?

Mikko Lindstrom: I think it was a bit of both. Our very first album, Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666 was a pretty heavy album and so we felt that we somehow needed to move back in that area again. And Dark Light was more of a poppy album and because of that it just felt the right thing to do, the direction to go in, with Venus Doom. And a lot of the songs came out from a lot of my guitar riffs. And because of that they only can be heavy.

While Dark Light was recorded in L.A with producer Tim Palmer, when it came to record Venus Doom you stayed in Finland and got Tim to come out to Finland. Why did you decide to go with the change?

We always like to do something a bit different each time we make an album. For the last record we spent two months in L.A and so we were missing our families and homes. We felt it would be a better idea this time to go and do it back home.

Tim also produced Love Metal (2003), so what does Tim bring to the recording process that allows you to continue working with him?

Tim always comes up with great ideas but one of the most important factors is he always allows us to be ourselves. And he makes the atmosphere really nice in the studio for us in order to get the best performance out of us each time. So because of that he is great to work with and why we have stayed with him.

Does the songwriting process differ much for each album you make?

No it remains pretty much the same. Ville usually comes up with the skeleton of the songs and then we go to the rehearsal room and just jam on them and from that the songs take form.

"It was really funny with the solos on this album."

How do you approach your guitar parts and what is needed in each song during the songwriting process?

We all work together as a band and we’ll try out different ideas and see whats the best for the song. When it comes to playing solos, I always never plan it before hand, it is all improvised. It was really funny with the solos on this album as I played like maybe five solos each time and then we all took a vote for what we considered was the best take and kept that on the recording.

What guitars did you use for recording Venus Doom?

My main guitars for the album were my Gibson SGs. I have about five different ones. And for a couple songs I had some of my guitars tuned to down to a C. I also had a ESP Baritone and a Danelectro Baritone guitar. There was also a Chet Atkins semi-acoustic type guitar used on some of the tracks.

Was that a Gretsch Country Gentleman?

Yes.

Are you much of a guitar collector?

I’m not much of a guitar collector. I have the five Gibson SGs which I travel with all the time and a Gibson acoustic, a Sheryl Crow model which I really love.

Aside from the SGs, do you have any Les Pauls?

I don’t have any Les Paul’s as I have never have liked the guitars.

Live when it comes to amplifiers you’re strictly a Laney man?

Yes, I have two Laney VH100 heads and Laney cabs and they are split, but they’re both on all the time. One has a fuzz pedal on it which gives it more of a punchy tone and because of the contrast in tones, it sounds like there are two guitar players onstage because each has a different kind of attack. The other head is just a Laney going straight.

What about when it comes to effect pedals and the like?

I have TC Electronics for delays and stuff like that and a Wah pedal and an Octaver. And everything is MIDI driven. I use the Skrydstrup R&D system which makes it easy for me as I don’t have to push two pedals at the same time. Before I started using this system, I used to have a lot of problems at shows where the sound would go off and stuff like. But now I don’t have any problems whatsoever. And we don’t use any samplers. Everything is just us guys playing live.

Why do you use Laney and what does it bring to your guitar sound?

I use Laney - and Gidson SGs - mainly because of Tony Iommi. Both the guitars and amps have grown on me ever since. And I can’t imagine playing anything else. And I’ve been really happy with them. The Laneys in particular give me the type of sound I’ve always been looking for. And now, I have it.

April sees the release of the band’s very first live album and DVD called Digital Versatile Doom?

Yeah, we did two shows at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles back in November of last year which was part of our US tour and the shows were really great. And so we’ve decided to release a live album from those shows.

HIM now has the honor of being the first ever Finnish rock band to achieve Gold status in the US. How does that feel?

It feels really great. We’ve had some Gold records before [from other countries] but I usually gave them to our parents. But this time, it will be the first one I will actually get to keep for myself.

The band has toured heavily since its inception and built a large fan base around the world because of it. How do you find audiences compare in the US to those in Europe?

It’s a lot harder touring the US. It’s like it always has long drives or lots of flying involved. And because we usually do four or five shows back to back, when we do have one day off, that one day off is usually spent flying somewhere. So it’s not really a day for us for us. In Europe though the drives are a lot shorter and so touring is a little easier.

"We don't use any samplers. Everything is just us guys playing live."

What is the status of your side-project Daniel Lioneye?

I’m actually about to do a second version of that band. It is going to be a black metal album this time round. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be doing the screaming or the growling but I’m definitely making it. We already have four songs ready to go now and once we get back home in early April, I’ll start work on it. So hopefully it’ll be out sometime later this year.

Will there be any possibility of live shows from Daniel Lioneye?

I don’t know about it, as this time it is going to be a lot more technically demanding. The first album we recorded it in like five days. And Ville won’t be doing the drums this time either. It is going to be one of my friends, a double bass black metal drummer. So it will depend on whether we’re able to reproduce it live as to whether any shows happen.

Recently an American school teacher played some songs about suicide and death including HIM’s “Join Me In Death” to her students in class. This sparked an outcry and attention on the band’s lyrics…

People will always make whatever they want out of something. It’s only art and shouldn’t be taken so seriously. It’s about expressing your feelings through music and lyrics and it is not about actually doing something. It is a very healthy way of getting rid of your negative feelings. People who take things out of context and are like this are usually narrow minded and unrealistic.

Around the time of Razorblade Romance the band had to change its name to HER for the US. It must have been a very confusing time for the band?

Yes it was. Actually there were, and I’m sure, singles or maybe albums that came out with the name HER on it. It is so funny now looking back on it. This all happened because of some band in the US that had registered the name already. They thought we were some sort Satan worshippers so didn’t want us to use the name too. Eventually we had to buy the name off them. I don’t how much it cost but we now own it.

Are you happy with where you are today in your guitar playing career?

I remember when I was 16, I went to Berklee College of Music for a couple of months and now many years later, I’m walking those same streets of Boston when we are tour. And I am remembering how I used to dream of being on tour with a band and stuff like that. And now I’m actually doing it. So it’s an absolute dream come true for me and I’m very happy with where I’m at today.

Interview by Joe Matera
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2008

How are you?

I'm pretty good, thanks for asking. Just got home from a little "tour" in Thessaloniki, Athens, London and Berlin where we had some great shows indeed. Now we are having a nice 3 week break. Well at least some of us are...

The release of the new album, “Venus Doom,” is still a few weeks away. As it approaches, how are you feeling about the album?

I'm very happy with how the album turned out and I believe the whole band feels pretty much the same way.

Aside from the track of the same name, what made you decide to title the album “Venus Doom?”

I'm not the lyricist but I guess it’s the same theme that has been repeated throughout all the Him album titles so far and the heartagram symbol as well. It’s about the bipolarity of things, you know, the jin and jang [sic] stuff. And this album has a lot of those lovely doomy middle parts too.

It has been rumored that the album will be the band’s heaviest sounding album to date. But the first single, “The Kiss Of Dawn,” has a rather light chorus when compared the song’s earlier guitar riffs. How do you account for the contrast and how would you describe the sound?

I guess that is the reason it’s the first single. The radio stations, at least in Europe, are scared of heavy guitars, so if you want to get any airplay at all -- which is one of the reasons of even releasing singles in the first place -- you might want to pick a track that would have even theoretical chances of being aired. I think it’s a beautiful song and that it is presented in a way that suits the particular song best. What is the point in trying to sound heavy just for the sake of it? You should always respect the song and find a way to make the song sound the best it can. I have personally never been interested in singles or speculating on which one would be the best track to "do the job." I leave that for the record company. But anyway, you are right, the chorus of "The Kiss of Dawn" is probably not the heaviest part of the album.

You’ve been playing Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution tour with Placebo, My Chemical Romance and others. How has that tour been so far?

Well the tour is over now and we had a great time. We got to play to a bunch of people that hadn't seen us before and got to spread our good news. But we only got to play for about 40 minutes and always in sunlight, so we are really looking forward to doing our own proper tour in America (starting the 18th of October in New Jersey) with a longer set, our own production and lights and so on.

How did you feel about being included on the “Transformers” soundtrack? Have you seen the film?

This is one of those record company things again. I just got informed that our song is on the soundtrack and I thought, “OK, great. They're spreading the disease, which is always good.” [I] haven't seen the movie, not really my type of thing. I'm more into French relationship dramas.

With “Venus Doom” being your sixth as a band, what do you think when you look back at your debut?

It has been a beautiful journey, both musical and emotional. Crashing and collapsing, sometimes easy, sometimes hard. Sometimes lying down with your intestines hanging out on the field, as we say in Finland. I wouldn't change a thing ;-)

Who are some underrated bands that you think deserve more attention?

The band that Iggy Pop used to work with just before reuniting with The Stooges; a band called "The Trolls" with Mighty Whitey on guitar, his brother, Alex?, on drums and a bass player whose name I can't remember either. They might not be the tightest or the most technical band on the planet but who cares about that anyway? You can hear and feel that they play from their hearts and they just rock!

What have you been listening to recently?

The Stooges' latest "The Weirdness." Totally awesome! And then I just got into Bad Brains big time. They've been around for a while, but better late than never, right? I only have the albums "Rock For Light," "The Quickness" and "Build A Nation," but it seems like I have to get their entire catalog. I'm hooked!

If you could have written any song, what song do you wish you had written and why?

Songwriting to me isn't about getting personal recognition. If you're writing songs just to be "the great songwriter" or something as silly, you're missing the whole point.

Anything you would like to add?

Hope to see ya'll on our fall tour! It'll be awesome!

Thanks for your time!

No, thank you!

 

credit to: pluginmusic.com

hitparade.ch: 2007 was a pretty turbulent year for you. Your album "Venus Doom" was realeased, you were on tour in the USA, at the beginning of that year you broke up with your girlfriend and fiancé and besides this, the media informed us, that you had had a serious problem with alcoholism. What can you say, when you look back, about the year 2007?

Ville Valo: Speaking about the problem with alcohol, it wasn´t only the media who said that, but first of all, I. It´s true. But the year wasn´t so bad. It was an intensive year with the release and the promotion of our new album and I´m still doing it. The time during tours and promotion seems endless sometimes. Every year can be shitty, especially when one is on tour and misses the everyday life. One always meets new, different people and some of them are pretty strange. But the year was not so bad, apart from the drinking. But I´m happy that this time is behind me. There are always turbulent years. 2002, for example, was a hard and bad part of my life. Luckily, there have been more good than bad years. So I can´t complain really.

hitparade.ch: What do you expect from 2008?

Ville Valo: It feels like the year is over again. I do not really relate to years, but more to cycles between and during our albums. It´s been almost 12 months, since we have begun with the promotion and touring for the album  "Venus Doom".  We´re going to play today in Zürich and two more concerts in Europe. Then we have a week break, fly to Australia for few shows and then we have free in April and May. Few gigs on festivals in Summer in Europe and that´s it. Depending on the mood of the band, we will come together and write new songs, if everything fits and new ideas come. Luckily, there isn´t any pressure on us regarding this, so we don´t  have to run to the studio just to record new songs. We will record new songs, when the time is right.  "Venus Doom" took a lot of power from us and I don´t want to get through this again. All these musical influences and how the time passed us by was bad for the band. I see HIM in a more "punk" way. Not in the musical sense, but more when speaking about the work in the band and the attitude to music in general.  Just honest, simple and good music.  The whole thing starts with a song, which is seen as the birth of a new album. When this song comes, the rest happens easily. Then one or two years follow and a new albums is produced. Let´s see when this time comes. This tour has been good so far, but I´m happy when it ends.

hirparade.ch: HIM have mainly female fans and I don´t  have to mention, that most of them are fascinated by you. There are even critics, who claim, that the band HIM would be never so popular, if there wouldn´t be Ville Valo. What do you think about it?

Ville Valo: The fact that I write the music and lyrics is important.  And I´m also the frontman and singer. Of course, the band would sound different, if I wouldn´t be a part of it. To be honest, I also think, that HIM would be less popular without me. I know that I´m a good song writer. But HIM is and stays a band. A band consisting of five guys, who´s been knowing each other for ages. Especially because of this long friendship, we are what we are and I am what I am. I also depend on them and I wouldn´t  be able to do many things without them. The band is the best bond a man could have. We depend on each other, but in a very positive way. I know very well, that many things in this business depend on looks. But it should be mentioned, that our guitar player Linde or our bassist Mige also have many fans.  Of course, I do have many male and female fans, but this pushes the whole band ahead and that´s what counts. In many countries, our fans community consist of 50:50 males and females. Of course, it´s the most fun, and we are all heterosexuals, when we play in front of our female fans, here I have to be honest.  But from the musical point of view, we do not limit only to one sex.  

hitparade.ch: Last year you had a big hit together with Natalia Avelon and the song "Summer Wine". Have similar projects been  planned?

Ville Valo: It wasn´t a solo project really. I was told about the movie "Das wilde Leben" („The wild life“) and I got a list with possible soundtracks. I have always been a fan of Lee Hazlewood. He was great, especially as a song writer. I have always liked "Summer Wine" and the song fit good with my voice. And when I heard that the song should have been recorded in Hamburg, it was clear for me. I had the opportunity to fly to Hamburg for free, live for free and party. You have to know, that a few of my friends live in Hamburg.  The recording of the song lasted 3 hours, the shooting of the video 5. I spent the remaining 4 or 5 days with my friends in bars. So there was no reason to complain. I had nothing to do with the original song, the movie and could spend the time this way.  It´s really surprising, that it became such a hit. Even in countries like Greece, where the movie hasn´t been shown, the song was in charts for weeks. Unfortunatelly, I didn´t  write the song and didn´t have any rights, otherwise I could have made a lot of money with it. Who knows, maybe it happens next Summer. 

hitparade.ch: For years, the lyrics have been about love, death, pain, sin, etc. Do you still have many ideas when speaking about such topics?

Ville Valo: I´m not a big fan of happy music. People in Scandinavia, and especially in Finland, do not like listening of such songs. One can´t just write a song about pancakes. I mean, we eat them, but we don´t write songs about them. What´s this shit? I personally, still see relationships as the most monumental thing in the world.  You know, when you´re overwhelmed by a person and a new microcosmos of ideas emerges in a person. It´s like a fairy tale and no one knows how the end is. That´s fascinating for me, each and every time.  Of course, there are also the negative aspects, but it´s better to put the melancholy into songs, rather than to have it in everyday life. At least I am happy with it.

hitparade.ch: Which HIM song is one of the most important for you and what do you connect with this song? 

Ville Valo: There are many reasons that make them important for me. On the other hand, there are also songs, which I have almost forgotten, because they are of no further importance for me. With the song "The Funeral Of Hearts"  for example, I connect the shoot in Lapland and the director of the video Stefan Lindfors. I have met such a good friend. We are so similar in a crazy way and every time  when I hear the song, I think about this friendship, which emerged from this shoot. Many songs remind me of certain situations. It often doesn´t have anything to do with the moment, in which I wrote the lyrics, but more with what happened around.  On the new album the song "Song Or Suicide" is one of my favourites. I wrote it in Hotel Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.  It was shortly before we finished "Venus Doom"  and me entering the rehab. At that time I was at my lowest point and completely broken. For me it´s very important to have such a song on an album. I´m remembering the time, when I was back in Lapland to continue the rehab. I was in a room, or rather, in a cabin and saw the first snow falling in the morning. I also remember such things. Thoughts, circumstances and impressions, which were leading at that time.

hitparade.ch: There are accustic or unplugged versions of your songs on the singles and special editions. Have you ever been thinking about recording a whole album acoustically or to give an unplugged concert?

Ville Valo: In the late ´90s we played sometimes small unplugged concerts. Mostly for the radio and such. I simply don´t like this kind of unplugged concerts, when one just takes the electric current from the instruments. One has to make the song newer and change it. For example the way how we arranged Chris Isaak´s "Wicked Game" in a new way. To organize existing songs in a new way takes a lot of time, and unfortunately, we´re not a good acoustic band. Gas Lipstick, our drummer, for example,  is not able to play more sensitively or acoustically. He´s just this type of „slam it – guy“ :/ And that leads back to this bond within the band. Who knows? An acoustic album would be surely something great and I would like it. Let´s see.

hitparade.ch: On our website, the members can vote for songs, which were released as singles or were on an album. What do you think, which HIM-song has achieved the highest rating?

Ville Valo: I don´t know your members, but I suppose it´s "Join Me" or " Gone With The Sin". Also "Poison Girl"… I think it´s something from the album "Razorblade Romance".

hitparade.ch: So you estimate our members as very shallow people.... I´ll show you the Top 20. 

1.  The Path
2. Our Diabolical Rapture
3. Your Sweet 666
4. It's All Tears (Drown In This Love)
5. Beautiful
6. Love You Like I Do
7. Vampire Heart
8. Close To The Flame
9. Cyanide Sun
10. Under The Rose
11. Sleepwalking Past Hope
11. Bleed Well
11. Please Don't Let It Go
14. When Love And Death Embrace
15. Passion's Killing Floor
16. In Joy And Sorrow
17. Gone With The Sin
18. Join Me
19. And Love Said No
20. Dark Light

Ville Valo: Wow, I didn´t think about such a result. It looks like there was one or another HIM-expert voting. That´s really interesting. There are many cool songs included, which have never been popular that much or played on radios.  I´m especially happy for "And Love Said No" (19)! I think it´s one of our strongest songs, which has never caught so much attention, as it should have. It was only on our  Best Of album and has never been a part of an album, about which I´m still very disappointed. I love the song and I love the lyrics. Yes, I can say, that your members have taste! But for the disillusionment I have to mention, that we won´t play many of these songs tonight in X-Tra.  

hitparade.ch: Do you still smoke so much?

Ville Valo: It´s been a little less. I had to cut down on it, because I was obliged to do so. It´s because it´s forbidden to smoke in most of the bars and clubs in Finland. I seldom hang around in bars, since I quit drinking and I do not smoke the whole evening one cigarette after another. Nowadays I smoke from 1,5 to 2 packs of cigarettes. It used to be 4 or more in the past. Of course, it´s not the smartest thing and besides when someone has got asthma, like I do. I have been thinking a couple of times to quit it totally. But it´s hard for me as a singer. If one quits, the lungs throw out everything that has been gathered up for years and that´s bad for the voice. I once tried to quit it during a tour. Various musicians told me not to do it. One needs at least two or three months to recover from it, but can neither tour nor record songs. Maybe it´s also the reason, why our holidays are so short or why we are just lazy. We always want an excuse for the smoking. 

CREDIT: hitparade.ch

 

We catch up with the fast-flying, multiple-language-spouting Irishman who stars as Declan in Paramount Pictures' "Mission: Impossible III" and learn that he's truly a very polite young man with loads of potential.

 

Question: Given that this is your first big scale action movie what was your initial reaction to the scale of this?

J. Rhys-Meyers: You know the scale of the movie is… it is enormous, but you do not really know how enormous it is until you see the movie. When you are making it you do not think, “Oh my God, this is the hugest film”. It is just another film that you are working on because it is a really intimate process making the film regardless of how many millions of dollars you have to make the film the process is still the same at its core, but when you see the movie you realize that you are in a big, big action movie.

Question: What would you say was your favorite stunt or scene to do in the movie?

J. Rhys-Meyers: You know I really like doing the scene with Tom when we are in Rome, and we are screaming at each other in Italian, and arguing. We changed the dialog slightly so it would be more tolerable for a younger audience, but I said some things to Tom that people do not say to Tom even in Italian so it was good fun. It was good fun, and it was our first scene where our first dialog scene with each other so it was kind of strange. It was like an… it was so intense, but really broke the ice between the two of us, and it was great.

Question: How many languages do you speak?

J. Rhys-Meyers: I speak a little Italian. I speak a little French, English that is it.

Question: So you actually knew what you were saying in Italian?

J. Rhys-Meyers: Yes, I use to live in Rome. I made a film called Titus Andronicus with Anthony Hopkins seven years ago.

Question: Could you tell us a little bit about the actual training regiment that you have to go through for this film, and I understand you have gone from playing one king to another. Can you tell us a little bit about your future role as Henry the VIII, and the Tutoress* because you seem kind of skinny for Henry the VIII, but I am sure you can nail that one just right.

J. Rhys-Meyers: Okay, the first… I will answer the second question first. Playing Henry the VIII is the (inaudible) conception of why Henry is, is he is rather… he is this chubby red-haired guy who eats lamb legs, and he is (inaudible/coughing) paintings of Henry. Nobody actually painted Henry while he lived. So nobody really knows what he looks like, and anybody who spends that much time hunting, and bedding women is not going to be round, rotund, chubby looking guy. The modern… our perception of him is actually an artist impersonation of what they thought Henry was going to be like, but I am playing Henry from a very, very young age, and he was a very physical athletic guy. He was the ultimate tutor alpha-male. So this is how we are going with Henry. He was a very, very aggressive, very competitive guy, and the first part of the question was again?

Question: Can you tell us a little bit about your actual training regiment for MI3.

J. Rhys-Meyers: MI3. It is physically quite demanding, so I had a lot of working out. We had to train… we had to go to the gym everyday because even if you do not have to do these stunts you have to look like you can do anything at any moment, but I did have to learn how to fly a helicopter. That was about it.

Question: With all these exotic, and wonderful locations that you go… shot this movie, I hope you had time to explore, and if you did what was your favorite memory?

J. Rhys-Meyers: Well, you know it was nice to go back to Rome because it is almost like a second home for me. I use to live in Rome. So it was nice. I had some friends there, and I was able to catch up with them. Shanghai I spent very little time in, but I managed to go to the circus with Tom, and it was a lot of good fun, and LA I know, so that is it.

Question: And I noticed you are working with Keri Russell again.

J. Rhys-Meyers: Yes, we just completed a film called August Rush, which is a beautiful, beautiful love story with Keri, and Robin Williams, and Terrence Howard, and Freddie Highmore. It is beautiful.

Question: You said you actually learned how to fly a helicopter.

J. Rhys-Meyers: Yes, I did,

Question: Boy, like how well? Like could you actually go flying, and do you put that to use now?

J. Rhys-Meyers: No I do not. I think my flying expertise is very, very limited. I am not sure that anybody would trust me to go up in a helicopter by myself, but I learned the basics of it. Once you get the chopper off the ground it is pretty much simple from there on. The hardest thing about flying a helicopter is just get over the fact that you are flying a helicopter, and that you are up in the air, and it is just… things look different from up there, but it was good fun, but I have not flown a helicopter since.

Question: Are you actually doing any of the flying in the movie

J. Rhys-Meyers: A little, but it is very, very limited. I always had a pilot there with me, but for those scenes where I fly through the windmills there is absolutely no way that they would let an actor do that. It is too dangerous.

Question: I see that one of your upcoming films is a horror film.

J. Rhys-Meyers: I am not doing an upcoming horror film. Adeena is not a horror film. It is a ghost story, but it is not a horror film at all, and I spoke to Nicholas Roeg about doing it, but the film has not generated, and it is on IMDB, but IMDB are very rarely right.

Question: How was it to work with the team because you have to bond before you started shooting?

J. Rhys-Meyers: Yes. It was easy to bond with everybody. Tom, myself, Maggie, and Ving Rhames spent the first day of shooting in a speed boat, so it was really, really easy to do that, and Tom Cruise is a really, really easy guy to work with.

Question: With Mission Impossible coming in, with Match Point having done so well earlier have you noticed a big change in things for you at least recognition wise certainly when you come to the states?

J. Rhys-Meyers: Yes. There has been a change. It happens when you make films that are successful, and the people like, things change, but for my own personal life, nothing has changed, but for my own personal life nothing has changed very much. I work as hard as I did before. I live a very, very low key, simple life so I try to keep it that way. I like that… the recognition has come from the work…

Question: What is it that you look for in a director, and two, how… since J.J. Abrams was basically making a leap from television to a major feature film did you have any trepidation about working with somebody who had not worked on a project of this scale before?

J. Rhys-Meyers: No. No trepidation whatsoever. From the moment I met J.J. I was completely confident that he was going to take this movie, and he was going to knock it out of the ballpark. There is not that much of a difference between shooting something for TV, and shooting something for film. The difference is film is in the Cinema, and TV is in your home. J.J. has had an awful lot of success in television. He is probably the most successful guy in television, so it was very easy for him to make that transition from TV to film. It was really natural for him.

Question: What sort of qualities do you normally look for in a director? What makes you feel like this is the guy I want to work with?

J. Rhys-Meyers: It is all about the (inaudible). It is all about their work, and I will choose a great director over… I am the kind of actor that does not go, “Oh well I want to play this role”, It is more like I want to work with this director regardless of what the role is because if you scratch a good director usually you will find a good role underneath it, and a good film, but a mediocre director will always make a mediocre movie.

Question: What sort of qualities do you think make for a good director of actors… is there a certain level of kind of confidence that they have or just the ability to communicate or articulate what it is that they want from an actor or…?

J. Rhys-Meyers: I think it is important to be able to articulate what you want. I could cause problems if there is a lack of communication, but you know I am not an actor that requires much talking to a director, I do not want to sit down, and discuss a scene for hours, and hours. It would bore me. Hence why I enjoyed working with Woody Allen. I never had a conversation more than ten minutes long with Woody. Ever. Ever.

Question: You must have gotten tons of questions about this movie, and I know you all had to keep a lot of the details secret. How hard was it to keep it secret for you? And what did you learn about keeping secrets like this?

J. Rhys-Meyers: For me I found it hard because I felt sorry for the people who were asking the questions because you know their boss sends them out going, “Get me something on Mission Impossible”. And you know they would ask me questions, and it would just be simply, “I am not going to tell you”, and then every so often they try, but can you just tell us a little bit or they would try to work it into another question. I have to say to them, “You know guys I am under contract, and I am not going to tell you anything so you can keep asking the question, but I am just going to keep smiling”, and it is hard because I do not want to seem rude. It is part of my job as it is the same way a part of their job to ask, it is part of my job to keep it secret.

Question: Do you still live in Ireland, is that correct? Have you had any thoughts about moving to the U.S. as far as your career goes?

J. Rhys-Meyers: I do not live in Ireland. I live in London with my girlfriend and it is because of the globalization of our planet it is not necessary for you to live in Los Angeles anymore to be a successful actor. Any country is just an airplane ride away. If there is an interesting director that would like to meet me or if there is something that I got to do, I can always hop on an airplane. The world is small now.

credit to moviejungle.com

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 fucking 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:

Fuck 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].

EB:

[Laughs] Take that, R. Kelly!

VV:

That’s the reason why I turned out to be a proper Scandinavian satanist. [Laughs] Yeah, but everybody’s got to find their own way. I’m still getting used to it. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been actually alone in a house.

EB:

With yourself and your “me time”.

VV:

Yeah, with the “me time”. It’s “me and my guitar time”.

EB:

Exactly, which is be a more satisfying relationship than most, probably.

VV:

Well, they never stay in tune and they’re fucking downright bastards.

EB:

Well, at least you don’t have to kick them out of the house the next day.

VV:

Yeah, you don’t have to saw your own arm off when you wake up in the morning.

EB:

One thing we’ve talked about before is that it’s really hard for you to separate fantasy from reality in music, mainly because you live your life in the music that you write. That seems like something that could trigger the emotional fallout that happens when you write a record.

VV:

It is emotionally devastating but that’s how I like it. Let’s say it’s good to be a white boy dancing badly on the razor’s edge, if you know what I’m saying. You know, it’s not necessarily the white boy thing. I’m just a shitty dancer that’s all. Just the fact that I’m not purposefully trying to find myself in tough situations, but the world in itself it is a pretty tough place. Turn on the TV and watch the news. I just can’t do that anymore. It just makes me so sad.

EB:

You said recently in another interview that life as a musician is a very [Salvador] Dali-esque experience.

VV:

Yeah, I don’t know. I’m living my life the best way I can and I don’t know the perception of the band or me as a person outside of myself. It’s not like I’m sitting up in the morning, sitting in a fucking Gothic chair.

EB:

Or having midgets bring you morning tea.

VV:

Yeah, with trays of cocaine on the top of their heads.

EB:

Oh God. Rise and shine.

VV:

Yeah, oh my God, ooh, I don’t even want to think about that.

EB:

Yeah, let’s not. Because we don’t want to throw up, right?

VV:

Why not? They have phone sex, why can’t you have phone vomiting sessions?

EB:

We could, we could throw up in tandem over the phone. It’ll be really romantic [laughs].

VV:

Exactly. Purge on beautifully, my dear [laughs]. But, you know, at the end of the day you are one with your art and everybody’s an artist. Everybody’s a piece of art. Everybody’s got a story to tell. Everybody tells it in different ways, some people tell it the way they walk, some people tell it the way they talk or the way they smile. You’ve just got to have some imagination. [Being a musician] is surreal and it is very surprising that you never know what’s around the corner. It’s weird because phone calls happen, all of a sudden an album is on the charts, and all of a sudden you’ve got to fly tomorrow somewhere to meet somebody, like, let’s say a video director whose videos you watched since you were a teen. Things like that, it’s very surreal so in that sense it is an adventure. It’s like Alice in Wonderland because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time. The surrealism actually exists in your everyday life. So you’re there 'in the looking glass' so to speak. It is a little weird. But that’s life, isn’t it. It can make you feel like, “Whoa, what the hell is going on right now?” But it’s also really beautiful. It’s more of a laugh when you’re sober. There’s a great comedy in me coming out one day. I wish that it would be like The Truman Show, there would be somebody secretly recording.

EB:

All of a sudden you wake up and you find out that the whole thing has been this big experiment. They tap you on the shoulder and say, “And… scene. That’s a wrap, guys” You’re like, “What?”

VV:

I’d fucking love it. It’d be so fun. I’m waiting for that to happen. With the surrealism in everyday life, that’s something that actually could happen.

EB:

Exactly, well, if that ever does happen to you…

VV:

I will call and let you know.

EB:

Let me know. I didn’t sign any release forms.

VV:

[Laughs]

EB:

[Laughs] Well, your music definitely has a wickedly humorous side to it as well. Would you mind telling me how humor plays a factor in your music? A lot of people would consider it really emotional and melancholy.

VV:

There is humor in melancholy as well, you know. It’s like existential humor. It’s funny that single individuals and billions of people are sitting alone in a chair and all sad about the fact that he or she lost a relationship or whatever. It’s a weird thing. We’re like fucking ants, building up our own den and house, to do what? To live there and maybe procreate someday? I am a miserable bastard in the most positive sense of that term. So let’s say the stuff I’m writing about at times is so demanding that humor is the only thing that helps me through the day and night, and the mornings with the ridiculous amounts of coffee I drink. We were talking about the surreal, the Dali-esqueness of life being in a rock band or my life in general. You know it’s just nice that it is like a cluster fuck that you can’t separate the humor from the sadness. And I don’t want to. It’s nice to find yourself laughing at the wrong spot.

EB:

You told me once that the best way to express emotions is through music and not through lyrics. That’s something I find really interesting because a lot of your fans really connect with the particular words you use in your lyrics and the emotions they convey.

VV:

What I’m trying to do, my mission in life is to get thirty different definitions of love into Webster’s Dictionary. That’s my mission in life. [Definitions] that really, really do explain the emotion. To be able to verbally explain how people really do feel. That’s what I do and that’s my new challenge. My first challenge was to be able to express myself through music and now I’ve learned it and I’m really happy with it because it makes me more of a whole person. That would be an interesting thing to do in life, to concentrate on emotion so much and to be able to verbalize it so well that it would make the dictionary.

EB:

That would be nice.

VV:

At the end of the day I just want to be happy.

 

source: SuicideGirl

 

Christina Aguilera and Jordan Bratman welcomed a baby boy on Saturday at 10:05 p.m., PEOPLE has confirmed exclusively.

This is the first child for the 27-year-old singer and her music executive husband.

"Christina and Jordan are proud to announce the birth of their son Max Liron Bratman. He is a beautiful, healthy baby boy!" a rep for the couple tells PEOPLE. "Mom is resting and doing well!"

Despite various media reports that Aguilera had her baby on Friday, Max – 6 lbs., 2 oz. and 20.5 inches – arrived late on Saturday night in L.A.

In a message later posted on her official Web site Sunday, Aguilera tells fans, "Today is a very joyful and special day for Jordan and I as we welcome our first son into this world."

The singer also posted a special video of her song Save Me From Myself, with footage from the couple's personal wedding video.

"Just a little something to say "thank you" for your undying love and support," writes Aguilera. "It is in no small part because of you that I live such a blessed and wonderful life!"

If you’re a guy hoping to marry Nelly Furtado someday, your chances of doing so have just diminished considerably.  It has just been announced that she’s engaged to sound engineer Demacio “Demo” Castellon.

Furtado met “Demo” while recording her 2006 multi-platinum album “Loose.” And Timbaland has confirmed that the lovebirds have a wedding ahead of them.

This news puts to rest speculation over who Nelly was referring to in Blender when she said she had a “secret boyfriend.” She revealed, “I just don’t really talk about it. It’s nobody famous or anything.”

And it sounds like the marriage plans are a sharp contrast to “modern” view of not getting married.  “I’m kind of modern. I don’t really live by society’s standards. Maybe in the next five years I’ll get married, have more kids. One grandmother had eight kids, the other had 10. If I have that many kids, then I would need a hubby.”

Finland's most successful rock band to date stopped off in Portsmouth on their short but sweet tour of the UK - BBC Southampton's Indy Almroth-wright caught up with frontman, Ville backstage.

How did HIM get together?
It's a long, long story. We formed officially in 1994, so this is our tenth anniversary. We're old school mates, so we're like family members to a certain extent which makes it a lot easier on tour because there are no ego clashes as we've known each other so long.

How have the gigs been going down?
This is our third tour here. Back in 2000 we did the first one playing to 18-32 people and the next time around it was 200-300. Now there's clearly something wrong, there must be some sort of virus going round because suddenly we've become as successful as we are!

Mige

Do you enjoy touring?
When it's good it's fantastic, but when it's not as good it's horrible. When people get ill on the tour bus, all of a sudden there's 12 people with diarrhoea and flu going round. But this one's been good and easy because we haven't been playing so many gigs, but it's nice to tour when it's a bit warmer!

What do you do to keep your voice in tip top shape?
Just sleep as much as possible, that's the best thing to do because I smoke a hell of a lot of cigarettes and drink too much as well, it easily happens on tour. It's hard to sleep on those bunks so you need some help. Sleep's the most important thing so I sleep at least 10 hours a day.

What do you get up to on the tour bus?
Our guitar player sleeps, our bass player and keyboard player play chess but now they're playing some role-play game on their laptop computers. The crew and me drink beer and watch The Office. I don't watch telly at all but one of our technicians brought the first series on DVD and it's been lovely actually - I've been laughing my arse off. We're going to get series two now. I like to support the old rock n' roll tradition and have some fun.

Ville

What's the most rock n' roll thing that's happened to the band?
Meeting Iggy Pop in Germany. We won a music award and he was presenting the award. We met him later on backstage. He's always been an idol to me - he was great. He was a total gentleman and told us lots of stories about Finland because he's been there a couple of times. It's always great to meet your idol especially when they don't disappoint you.

What's the best thing about Finland?
I like the fact that the country's pretty small. I live in the capital, Helsinki and if you count all the suburbs within it there are only a million people. The centre's really tiny so you don't have to take taxis or trams to get anywhere.

How do you cope with all your adoring female fans?
Well, I don't really. I don't think about things like that. It's cool that people are interested in what we do but that's about it. It's funny, we're honoured and we keep on blushing every time we see all those people screaming at us.

Linde

Do you get bras and knickers thrown at you?
Yeah there's some of that, but we've been trying to tell them that it would be more pleasant if they threw cigarettes or cans of Stella.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?
We'll be releasing a compilation album in March which should be out in April here. It's all the singles we've released and two new tracks, and we'll be touring until the beginning of June.

Then we'll be doing as many festivals as possible, we'll hopefully be playing at Download here, and then we'll be in the studio in October to record the next album.

How much did you know about Kommune 1?

Natalia: not much, mainly my parents told me about it

Matthias: the same like Natalia

 

You speak so good the bavarian dialect, how comes?

Natalia: i have learned it by myself, very quickly, but i hadn´t met her before we started to shoot the movie, then i met her 3 times in the USA, she already was the main character and the third time, when she met her in L.A. she was finally ok with her

Matthias: i met him in Berlin, where he lives now, he was wearing some white gown and was talking very loudly about sex and some mothers with little children were shocked

 

What do you know now about Kommune 1?

Natalia: well, it was...

Matthias: it was an organization of people, they fought for the freedom, being free from all those material things in life, they fought against the political system and the state

 

Uschi about Matthias as Langhans: well, he´s a known actor in Germany, i have known him before, but he made a great job

Natalia told then, that she didn´t like him (lol), and he told that he didn´t like this wig, he didn´t hear anything

 

Uschi about Natalia: she has made a great job, she likes her, she is smart, she was very satisfied with her, it couldn´t be done better

 

Then they talked about Uschi as a groupie...

Natalia: i don´t think she was a groupie, i mean, she had affairs with those stars, but she had been a known model before in the USA, but they wanted her mainly for sex, and she herself told, that this happened mainly because she was very pretty at that time, so the looks was the most important thing for those stars

 

How does Uschi look now?

Natalia: she was the best coach ever, but she wasn´t on set all the time, only when they were in India, and she helped her mainly with emotional scenes

 

Tell us about the song...

Natalia: it was the idea of the director, i know that i don´t have the voice of Mariah Carey, but I think it´s a very pretty song

 

And how is Ville Valo?

Natalia: well, very good-looking...

 

Any plans for the future?

Natalia: not really, I have some film scripts, but I haven´t decided yet

Matthias: I have made a movie which was shot in Prague....

 

 

And in the end the host of the show tells them about his most favourite scene, where Uschi enters a club and a boxer from Kiez kisses her hand and tells her, that she is the most beautiful cunt he has ever seen...

 

Hello sweeties, i wanna wish you all merry Christmas and a successful year 2007. I love you all, you have become great friends, although i don´t know you personally. Take good care of yourselves. Hugz

What did it take for Christina Aguilera, an innocent kid from Pittsburgh, to morph herself into a pop-music phenomenon?

 

Christina Aguilera vexes those who want their babes on one side or the other of the vixen/virgin fence. When her record company asked her to change her name, the half-Ecuadorian, half-Irish singer stayed true to her raza roots. When It comes to hair color, though, Aguilera's blond is the genie from the bottle. As an opening act on one leg of TLC's world tour, Aguilera looked like Disco Barbie (complete with silver halter-top and hip-huggers), but her voice is a force to be reckoned with. Maybe, even, a supernatural force: When I tried to watch her performance at the American Music Awards, the tape not only jammed my VCR, it caused a surge of electricity that sent a glass ceiling light crashing to the floor. Over the course of two phone interviews, Aguilera was as candid as canned--unusually so, for a barely-grown-up child star. The nineteen-year-old has a charming tendency to emphasize feelings by saying "all my life," as if that were such a long time. Aguilera got her showbiz start on The Mickey Mouse Club, alongside Britney Spears and 'N Sync's Justin and J.C. Her 1999 self-titled debut spawned four Top 10 hits. A world tour, a Spanish album, and a Christmas album are in the works for 2000. Meanwhile, Aguilera keeps popping up everywhere, on floats and half-time shows, belting out note after note after note--a veritable nonstop aria of youthful energy.

EVELYN MCDONNELL: I know you started performing at a very young age. Was your mom steering you?

CHRISTINA AGUILERA: My mom was definitely behind me 100 percent, but really it was my grandma who noticed something was different about me. When I played, I would spread towels on the floor as my stage and use my mom's old twirling baton as my microphone. If anything, I pushed my mom. Everything I've gotten just fell into my lap. I had no acting experience or vocal training when I auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club.

EM: Have you stayed in touch with your former Mouseketeers?

CA: I would love to say that we have enough time to sit down and talk, but we don't. I did come up to Britney once. I was hearing a lot of bad press and I said, "Britney, you've got my support. I want you to know that in interviews I am always asked about you and I am always in your corner." The only time we really get to talk to each other is through the press.

EM: There have been a lot of attempts to pit you two against each other--in the media, online.

CA: It's really, really hurtful to me because Britney and I were close in the Mickey Mouse Club. We were the two little girls of the show, so we bonded.

EM: Do you have much contact with people your age in general?

CA: No. But it's been that way for a few years now. I had a few friends, but they would want to rant and rave and go off about boys, and I'd want to talk careers. You grow up so much faster in the business because you are surrounded by people twenty years your senior. It's a fairly male-dominated business, so it's really tough to be nineteen, to be female, and to go up against your record company heads, who have their own perception of what you should be, what you should like, what you should sound like. You have to be that much stronger than someone older. I feel like a 35-year-old businesswoman in a nineteen-year-old body.

EM: Adolescence is a time when a person is trying to develop her own identity, and you have so many people--your manager, your A&R person, your publicist, your mom, your stylist--trying to shape your identity for you.

CA: It's easy to lose yourself. You give all day to the press or the fans or the record label and then all of a sudden it's like, "Wow, I've got no time for me." I do have good support from my family and my friends back home. It wasn't like I was born in some glamorous place. I was brought up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel country.

EM: You're all over the place, at every major Americana event: The American Music Awards, the Miss U.S.A. Pageant, the Super Bowl, Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. You're the all-American girl! Is that a little pressure to be under?

CA: Whenever everyone wants to label you a role model, it's difficult to do normal nineteen-year-old girl things. Dennis Rodman gave me some good advice. I was talking about feeling like I'm under a microscope, so I can't just have fun because everybody wants to make such a big deal out of it. And he said, "Controversy never hurt anybody."

EM: He would know! You've had some differences with your record company about your Image.

CA: Right now, my label still wants to limit the amount of skin that I show, because they are adamant about me being seen as a vocalist and not just a body. People see one picture of you showing skin and it takes away respect.

EM: You don't want to be a puritan, but you want to be taken seriously, too.

CA: Right. My manager was giving me a hard time. He was like, "What was up with all the partying you did at such and such a place?" And I said, "What were you doing at nineteen years old? You were in college having your frat experiences. This is my college experience."

 

AOR-E got a chance to briefly meet the lead singer of HIM, Ville Valo. Their drummer Gas Lipstick had also time for a few comments about the present and future of the band.

AOR-E: Him played their only gig in Finland yesterday, what's the situation in Europe?
Ville Valo: We haven't been touring that much during the summer because we have an album that needs to be prepared. We've been working with that and now we should start talking to journalist so they could tell everyone how wonderful the album is and people would then go and buy it.

AOR-E: HIM's new single "Pretending" is not as heavy song as we've been accustomed to hearing from the band. What can we expect from the forthcoming album?
Ville Valo: All kinds of stuff. The thing with the radio waves is that it is easier to put songs there that do not have such strong guitars. We're quite tired of playing heavy music so we'd rather play rock now.

AOR-E: So are you playing what you want or just thinking what would sell better?
Ville Valo: We're playing what we think would interest the record company. No, just kidding. We're playing what we like to, at least trying to.

AOR-E: What about the fanbase in Europe. How do you personally feel that you're doing there for example when compared with Finland.
Ville Valo: I don't know. I mean, it's always been fun to go there and people have coming to the shows so I think that's quite enough.

AOR-E: So you're quite comfortable with how things are at the moment?
Ville Valo: Yeah, there's been more positive things than negative things

AOR-E: About the ongoing recording process. Have you felt that you need to get it done quickly after the success of your previous album? How's it been?
Ville Valo: It's been a long and boring process. The album's been carefully done but still we want the album out as soon as possible because I think it's extremely stupid that these days the breaks between album releases tends to be three of four years. We want things to happen a bit more faster.

AOR-E: Europe is looking quite good, what about from here on? The U.S? Asia?
Ville Valo: Nothing is confirmed yet. We'll have to wait and see.

AOR-E: Thanks and good luck for the future.
Ville Valo: Thank you.

I then went on to ask HIM-drummer Gas Lipstick a few questions about the future of the band

AOR-E: "Pretending", what's after that?
G.L: Actually I don't know. Hmm.. well we're gonna release the album some time after the summer and then go on tour in September. That's basically the idea.

AOR-E: Do you have any more accurate information about the touring schedule.
G.L: We do mainly Europe this year. Start from Germany in September, then Italy and Southern Europe, then Scandinavia and Finland is up in January.

AOR-E: What are your expectations after the success of your last album?
G.L: I just hope the new album sells so we can keep on doing what we're doing. I don't know how much it's gonna sell and don't really care. Or of course I hope it sells enough that we can then start working on the next album. I just want to play live and put on some really good shows, that's the main thing for me.

AOR-E: So you see yourself playing in HIM for a long time?
G.L: Yes, I hope so.

AOR-E: OK, thanks.
G.L: Thank you.

A man whose name means light has brought dark romance from distant Scandinavia into orderly European homes everywhere. We sent our partly Finnish journalist Matiias Huss to find out more about Finland’s biggest rock star and Him poster boy Ville Valo. He spoke to Release about money, music and melancholia. And of course, love.

No autograph assaults in Stockholm
If I were meeting Ville Valo in Hamburg or Berlin, there would in all probability be crowds of fans camping outside the record company building. In Stockholm, where the interview takes place, he has no such problems. The major papers haven’t grasped the significance of his presence yet, even if the rock magazines are slowly catching on. Sweden may well be one of the last places in Europe where Ville Valo can still go shopping for milk without being assaulted for autographs. My first sight of him, leafing through a thick biography on Iggy Pop between interviews, is a tell-tale sign of his encyclopedic knowledge of rock’n’roll trivia. His last name, Valo, means light, but in the world of Him, darkness is prominent.
- I couldn’t fathom anyone singing about his or her breakfast, butterflies, or something like that to our kind of music. If there is light, there is also darkness. The heartagram is a symbol for that divide.

So Him is about dualism. Darkness and light, love and death. Life is perpetually divided, and so is the general public, at least when it comes to Him. The band has found an enormous audience, not the least part consisting of young girls in Germany and middle Europe, many of them from the gothic scene. While that audience has been very happy with the romantically morbid output of the Finnish gloom troop, Him have witnessed the disapproval of the musical underground with every record sold following the incredible sales figures of "Razorblade Romance": almost one million copies to this day. Numerous reviewers, including ones from Release, have treated Him very harshly with accusations of cynical commercialism in their musical production.
But that’s not how it works, is it?
- This band was formed because of Black Sabbath, says Ville Valo, mildly irritated. We were inspired by Kiss, Iron Maiden and all those bands. They were all mainstream bands that sold shitloads of records. Of course we dreamed of being like them, maybe go to Hollywood one day or something. But when we make a record, we have no idea if it is going to sell or not. We have never, ever had any marketing people involved in the making of our music. We make the record, and then the marketing people hopefully manage to sell it. If it sells, is it our fault?
Of course it is their fault. There are a number of inescapable facts that set Him apart from the anonymous, toiling hords of Scandinavian metal bands and take them into the sphere of popular interest. First, occultism, vampires and other sub-cultural trappings don’t seem to interest them much. Secondly, their music is very accessible, stylistically diverse and melodic with clear, strong vocals instead of hellish grunts. Third, and most importantly:
- We don’t have enough of those really tight, black leather pants! explains Ville.
Well, that might be an explanation... Still, the anger from the musical underground seems to be due largely to the following facts: Ville Valo looks too good, his band uses trappings of the metal scene but sometimes leans musically towards Bon Jovi, and sells too many records to people who normally wouldn’t buy a metal album. Is there a teeny tiny bit of jealousy I sense here?
- We obviously want people to buy our albums and play live in as many places as we can. I think it's just fabulous that teenage girls like our music. I mean, if I hadn’t heard Kiss in my teens I wouldn’t even be doing this. I really don’t see the problem.

Him 2003.
Photo by: Nauska

A tribute to their idols
The latest album "Love Metal" is the fourth by Him, and in many respects it represents a homecoming. Like their first album “Greatest Love Songs Vol 666” - it was produced by their old friend Hiili Hiilesmaa, who with his knack for guitar riffs (Hiili has produced Finnish metal bands like Amorphis and Sentenced) brought back a forcefully direct approach generally missing from the albums in between.
- I look upon our previous output as a trilogy, says Ville. They show a band learning to record albums. We had been working without rest for a number of years and felt that we needed a vacation. So the rest of the guys took a break and I wrote some new songs. The idea was to make an organic rock album and show off some of our own idols like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. It was like a combination of all our former albums. Hopefully we picked the best parts and not the lousy ones... Time will tell.
The album takes off at full speed with “Buried Alive by Love” and balances the band’s rather ballad-choked repertoire with some fast, dynamic songs.

Goth or Scandinavian melancholy?
The subject matter though, has retained all its spleen, making me wonder where Ville’s perpetual musings on love and death actually come from. The landscape of lovers’ tombstones, angels crying blood and spiritual murder present in the lyrics brings to mind gothic literature classics like ETA Hoffman or Sheridan Le Fanu rather than the heavy metal fantasies of hell and the apocalypse.
- I think it is more about the Finnish folk tradition I got from my mother's milk, claims Ville. That is all there, and some Finnish writers are so overtly melancholic and gloomy that their writings become a celebration of gloominess. My parents also listened a lot to (Finnish singer/athlete/actor with a strong sentimental streak) Tapio Rautavaara. I got subjected to all this at the same time I was into the Rolling Stones. Him is what came out.
But the melancholy present in the music of Him is not something only the Finns should be proud of, if we are to believe Ville. Him share their particular “Slavonic melancholy” with the rest of Scandinavia.
- You can hear it in all different sorts of bands. The Cardigans' new album, for instance, sounds really American, in a Neil Young-sort of way. Still, it has this intangible melancholia that an American band could never do. I don’t know what it is, some particular Scandinavian wistfulness. It’s positive thing, not something we should run away from.

Him drummer played with Kent members
Him, indeed, does not fear the big feelings. Despair, hope, desire and disgust are described in words so serious and laden with cliché that they rise beyond cliché and become something else.
- The songs tell the story of what a powerful force love can be, says Ville. People are still asking us what love metal is, so this time we decided to show them once and for all with this album. This is what love metal is about. For instance, when I write “We are like the living dead”, I’m talking about how love can blind you and turn you into the walking dead, a puppet. And love is the master of puppets, see?
The last playful metal reference is just one in an endless string of nods to various artists from Depeche Mode through WASP to Type O Negative and Roky Ericson. Facts sift through the flow: Ville is apparently a big fan of reggae music and their drummer Gas Lipstick hails from Eskilstuna, Sweden where he used to play in bands with members of Kent.
The name issue that Him was having with an American experimental dub outfit of the same name - leading to a temporary sex change for Ville’s band in the US when the name was changed to Her - seems to be sorted out. Expensive videos starring American movie stars are in rotation. After a bit of a stand still following the release of ”Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights”, Him seem to be on a roll again.
It is high time. After all, there are oceans to be crossed.

A few hours ahead H.I.M’s first Australian show, just after flying in from Japan, Ville took the time to send a message to the devoted Romanian fans:

"Keep patient - only a few months and we’ll be there!"

Wednesday, March 22, Brisbane

Hey, Ville how is Australia today?

I’ve been actually sleeping because of the time difference. I had terrible jet lags and we travelled so much that I haven’t done anything…but we are playing a gig later on today so, we’ll see...

I heard it’s all sold out…

Yeah, it is! That’s very cool! We are playing here for the first time and that’s very exciting indeed.

So it had to be the “Dark Light” for HIM to finally come to Romania, where fans are screaming for a H.I.M concert for years now. How is it to play for the first time in a new country in general and in Romania in this case?

It is always exciting especially when it comes to Romania, that’s very exciting because of the setting, it’s an old city and a lot of old culture and stuff like that. Hopefully we’ll have time to see around and spend a bit more time there rather than just fly in and out. This gig is going to be really cool.

What do you think about the idea of playing in a medieval city in Transylvania, to a Festival which celebrates the Finnish culture?

(Laughs) This is a hard question! To be honest with you I haven’t been thinking about that yet. I’ve seen several pictures of the city and we are probably flying in there in a few weeks to check the city out before we get all the details for the actual festival. We want to build a special stage because it’s such a cool setting… So, I think it’s going to be a one life time kind of a thing! So we are really looking forward to it.

Since the release of Dark Light, HIM has been relentlessly touring the world, are you happy with the reaction of the public to the new album?

It has been fairly okay. We still haven’t been touring the entire world. We are still going to play in the UK and stuff like that. So thinks seem to be fine and of course things can always be better but I am really happy they aren’t worse.

The second single from the album, “Killing Loneliness” has just been released and the story in the video deals with finding a short happiness in a virtual world. Whose idea was it?

It was like a band’s idea but, of course we are not directors so we let the director write the script but we had certain ideas about the performance. We are really happy with the setting and with the set up and all the background art that worked out pretty well.

Do you think this is the backlash of modern culture and the “Be a winner” concept where personal life is left behind and people loose touch with the inner selves?

I think loneliness has always been there. I don’t thinks that the modern world would be any worse than it was before. But you know that video is just about people killing loneliness without drugs or bad behaviour.

Ville do you still see life through pinkish lenses? What would you say to those people from the metal scene that state that time for romance is long gone and buried?

Very gentle, show them the middle finger. You know, the beauty about being in this modern world is that there is space for all kinds of opinions and all kinds of angles towards life in general. So let them do what they do, we do what we do.

Each and every of your albums are different and have a strong personality of their own, but still each song bears the unmatched HIM flavour. What’s the secret of it?

Well, we are pretty slowly getting better songwriters. We don’t want to repeat exactly what we’ve done before but everybody in the band has a very strong idea about what they do and how their personality are as musicians so that’s something we definitely don’t want to take away from the music but rather enhance it and make it more clear by each and every album, so I think that can be one of the reasons.

How do you feel about your music touching so many people from different countries, ages and social backgrounds? What do you think it’s the main element in your music that draws so many people into Love Metal?

It could be that there is so little especially hard rock music with big melodies nowadays and with big emotions, sentimentality and melancholy. People like to listen to sad music all around the world and I think that’s a beautiful think that we can be a part of it.

HIM is a band for which the visual aspect has an important part, from the elegant heartagram to the covers of the albums and to the videos which highlight in a beautiful fashion the idea or the message of the song. Having studied the arts helps you have an aesthetic vision of the music?

I haven’t been studied arts that much. You know it’s more about studying everything that you see, and I’ve been a music fan since a little kid and I always loved the vinyl cover art work and I always loved movies… I think a lot of bands nowadays don’t use visuals enough. It’s nice to give people something hopefully special and hopefully something different, that’s what we’ve been working on. And rather, you know being influenced by movie posters than album covers.

And how does music and poetry interact for you in the writing process?

Well let’s say that it’s a lot easier to write the music and the melodies. The lyrics usually come in last because it’s very hard to explain in words certain sentiments. I think bit by bit I am getting better at it and I try to read as much as possible to get influences from all around the world and from different sorts of writers. I look at it as a natural development which happens and each time you write a song it’s a different kind of process.

Well, the result is fascinating, congratulations!

Well, thank you!

What would be your message to the Romanian fans to keep them waiting until they will see in Sibiu, on next July 15?

(Laughs) I think is to keep up being patient and remember to wear your ear plugs because we are pretty loud as a band. You know, we are really excited about the whole thing as well, so we have to be as a band very patient and it’s not that far away anyway. It’s only a few months and we’ll be there. Hopefully the day is going to be beautiful and we will be able to please everybody with our plan.

So, you will shake up the gothic ghosts of the city…

Yeah, fair enough. That sounds good…

Ok, thank you very much Ville! And see you soon in Sibiu.

You take care.

People cant help but stare when Ville Valo walks past. They dont know who Ville Valo is, but they know he must be someone for he oozes the sort of insouciant cool that only the staggeringly confident and achingly hip can pull off. To walk alongside Valo through the hateful trap that is London's Leicester Square on a chilly spring evening is to know how it must feel to be invisible, for passers-by are blinkered and focused as their puzzled, questioning eyes lock on the Finn's chiseled features, searching for clues as to his identity. They;ll search in vain, for in this country, Ville valo is a nobody, albeit a decidedly handsome nobody.
In mainland Europe, though, things are different. In mainland Europe, Ville valo is a bona fide 'face'. As the frontman of gothic metallers HIM, the 26 year old is rarely off MTV, and a bankable cover star of both teen glossies and metal rags. This month, his band's new album 'Love Metal' will top the charts in at least three European countries, most likely Germany, Austria and Finland. In the UK HIM's fourth, entered the charts at number 55, hardly comparable, but an encouraging result none the less for a band that have hardly been greeted with open arms in this country - indeed, one early Kerrang review memoryably described the Finns as "plodding along like a nocturnal donkey wearing fake fangs and a cape".
"My hopes that this album will sell more than Micheal Jackson's Thriller and then I'll be able to buy Neverland and live in an oxygen tent with Bubbles", he deadpans. "But I suspect that's not going to happen. And I've just got to live with that somehow".
We're sitting in a NorthLondon bar, and Ville Valo is puffing on what is possibly the 30th or 40th of the 100 cigarettes he'll get through on any given day, When he laughingly insists that these cancer sticks are an essential part of who he is- "They make me sound more husky and sexy," he smiles "If I quit I'd sing like a f**king choir boy" - it's clear that his bone dry wit hasn't been blunted one iota by the raging hangover he's nursing following a night out at the UK premiere of 'Jackass: The Movie'. Valo says he's not a fan of such swish occasions, but he'd been invited along by 'Jackass' star Bam Margera and it seemed rude to refuse, particularly since Margera is one of his best friends (and also incidentally the director of the video for HIM's current single 'Buried Alive By Love'). Anyway, he got to drink for free and see The Darkness for the first time, so it was all good.
There's every chance that right now you might already have decided you hate Ville Valo, wiht his celebrity buddies and rock star lifestyle and smouldering good looks. But he's also a laid-back, witty-this man who cites the "Blood Of Christ" as his favourite drink-and immensely personable character. Besides, anyone who'll sniger when called a sex symbol and rasp out a couple of lines from Marduk's black metal anthem 'Jesus Christ...Sodomized' in a trendy Camden watering hole is alright by us. Oh, and sorry girls, he's taken.
If you must point a finger, blame Gene Simmons, for - as with Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain and just about every Us rock musician who hit pubery in the 1970's - it was the sight of Kiss' expansively tongued stack-heeled lothario who put the idea of this whole rock 'n' roll malarkey into Ville Valo's head 14 years ago. Up until young Valo spotted the God Of Thunder in a rock magazine, he was a normal well-adjusted kid...or at least as well adjusted as any kid who grew up in Helsinki as the scion of sex shop owning parents can be.
"I remember the first time I found a dildo in my house I was like, 'What the f**k is this?'," he smiles. "And so my dad sat me down and told me he owned a sex shop and said, 'Don't worry about it and just come and visit one day'. When I was 18 I used to go down there and make copies of all the porn tapes. That way i had more money to spend on cigarettes and alcohol."
When the music bug hit young Valo, it bit hard. Every day he'd reherse with a different band - Monday might mean singing with a grindcore band, Tuesday meant playing bass in a regae band - but all along he dreamt of assembling a heavy, melodic and theatrical band in the image of his heroes Black Sabbath, Kiss and Iron Maiden. When that band came together in 1995, his fellow Finns took one look at their name - His Infernal Majesty - and assumed, not unreasonably, that Valo was fronting a satanic black metal band. Around the time that the band had to halt a gig because of a pitched battle between "penguin mask wearing" black metal fans and Biblewielding religious zealots, His Infernal Majesty bacame HIM, the world's first, and only, 'love metal' band.
"There's too many bands singing about hate and politics and religion and that's what I didn't want to do thing my music," he explain. "I hate all that happy shiny people bullshit and I always wanted to be in a black metal band, but when i heard Dimmu Borgir's 'Enthrone Darkness Triumphant' I knew there was no point. Anyway love and sex is at the core of everything. I know I'll never figure love out, but I can keep trying."
It hasn't all been plain sailing, A couple of years ago, Him were unwittingly dragged into European tabloid newspapers when a cassette of their 1999 album 'Razorblade Romance' was found in a walkman of a German teenager who'd committed suicide, and it was claimed that the hapless teen had been driven to his fate after listening to 'Join Me In Death', a fantastic tale of immortality -seeking lovers. The story soon died down, but it left a bitter taste which lingers still for the young singer.
"No-one kills himself over a song," he mutters. "I'm not a psychologist and I'm not qualified to heal people's problems. I just want to make music."
When Ville Valo talks of his band's career he does so with no small amount of realism. When he says 'Love Metal' will be a Number One album in his homeland he does so without arrogance or false modesty, as both 2001's 'Deep Shadows Brilliant Highlights' and 1999's 'Razorblade Romance' hit the top spot in Finland, But while HIM (completed by guitarist Linde, bassist Mige, keyboardist Burton and drummer Gas) may have sold two million albums worldwide - 10 of them to Kelly Osbourne, who snapped up copies to distribute among her mates, some of now who sport tattoos of Him's trademark 'heartagram' symbol on their teenage flesh - but the've yet to secure a recoding deal in the US or Japan, two 'territories' every rock band dreams of conquering. Ville Valo doesn't mind, indeed, he says he likes the fact thta his band "can play for 100 people in Glasgow one day and then 8,000 people in Berlin the next". When Him comes to an end, he says he'd like to go to college to study theology or mathematics ('solving a maths problem gives you the same sense of achievement as writing a good song" he reckons), but right now he sees his band as having a very simple mission.
"Most Euoropean rock music sucks," he shrugs. "We're just trying to fight back and prove that some Scandinavians can be good at what they do. But if you have the money to buy one album right now get Black Sabbath's 'Black Sabbath'. You can get around to our album another time."

Tweety asks: When did you start with the music?
HIM says: With this band we started in 1995.

Ia_ville asks: You said recently in an Orkus interview that through the media people are only given a mask. How do you see that now? Which “you”  can we experience in the chat?
HIM says: We wear no masks, compared to other bands. Linde has to wear a mask sometimes because the police is after him (laugh) for driving too fast.

Rosenblatt asks: Hello Ville, what shall we specially look  forward to in the new album?
HIM says: The album came out yesterday, just go to a shop and listen to it yourself.

NoAutograph asks: How do you prepare for the tour?
HIM says: We didn’t really prepare. We had 5 days to rehearse. We tour Germany in September, the first concert is in Hamburg.

LilyStoilova asks: Do you think fame has changed you? If so in what way?
HIM says: We’re quite busy now, we have a lot more to do. We also have less time to go home and see our friends and families.

Tweety asks: How did you (Ville) get your style? (black clothes and so on)
HIM says: We make our own styling. No one tells us what we should wear.

Ti-Chris asks: From where did you get the ideas for the new album?
HIM says: From life in general. I (Ville)  write the lyrics and the main structure of the songs, then Linde makes the guitar parts and so on.

Lena asks: How long will the guys stay in Germany?
HIM says: We go home on Saturday. Then we go to Spain and Italy, where we’ll give interviews etc.

Gene_Simmons says: In what way were you influenced by Ozzy Osbourne?
HIM says: We were also influenced by Gene Simmons, can that be the real one? (laugh)
We were influenced by Ozzy too. My favorite hobby is to bite bats’ heads off, he did that too.

Nikita asks: What does the symbol (heartagram) in Razorblade Romance mean?
HIM says: It’s like the Ying Yang. We use it often.

Ia_ville asks: How did you decorate your house?
HIM says: Our houses are decorated with sofa and TV, we also have a carpet.

 NoAutograph asks: Will the songs be more rock on tour?
HIM says: We can’t exactly  repeat the album but that wouldn’t make sense. It will be quite rock. We have the contrast between romantic songs and rock songs.

Tweety asks: How were you in school? Did you like going there?
HIM says: We had a long discussion about the school system recently. I (Migй) was quite good, no one would have thought right? I also never skipped classes. It was ok (Ville). That was a while ago.

GothicGirl asks: Hello guys! My question is: How did you like America? Are you planning more concerts there?
HIM says: TV was cool! We liked that a lot. There’s psychics on TV there, cool. About the tour we’ll have to see how people react. We’d love to go on tour.

Nina-19 asks: How did you get the name HIM?
HIM says: We got it from Black Sabbath. We were first called His Infernal Majesty, HIM is the abbreviation from that. But really HIM is just HIM. We moved on and are just HIM now.

Laura asks: Hello HIM! Which are your favorite bands at the moment?
HIM says: Iggy Pop (Linde)