“I had nearly both of my feet in the grave.”
– Ville Valo
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. “Its like ‘Alice in Wonderland’,” he says. “Because there are so many unexpected things happening all the time…surrealism actually exists in your everyday life…youre 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, 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.
Read our exclusive interview with Ville Valo on SuicideGirls.com.
