Domination TV Episode #2

Video interview with ville (in Finnish),
"Haastattelussa HIM".


the Video is also on their official youtube channel
http://uk.youtube.com/user/dominationTV

'thanks to mhesh for the Translation'
Domination TV, Episode #2 – HIM

Johnnie Cochran Jr: We’re here at the night club (something) after festivals and now I have to say that I’m all hot and bothered because I’ve waited this day for so long to come. I’m sitting here next to the perhaps sexiest Finnish Malboro man, Ville Valo. Do you smoke Malboro?

Ville Valo: Yeah, white Malboro, and the only difference between me and the Malboro man is that I’m straight.

JCJ: Okay. How do you know the Malboro man is gay? VV: Didn’t you know that?

JCJ: No.

VV: It’s a fact. It’s a funny thing actually because he was the icon of a masculine America for years and years. I don’t remember if he even died of aids, but it was a classic thing. It was back when people thought homosexuals were inferior, and it shocked everyone. I don’t know how many people stopped smoking Malboro, but after that it was rather safe to smoke Camel because you don’t know what camels are doing in bed.

JCJ: I lack of education because I’ve lived in a barrel half of my life.

VV: Me too. In a wine barrel. But my friends have shouted these things to me every now and then.

JCJ: Apparently your first festival experience was in Roskilde. After that you decided that you won’t go to any festival unless you’re performing there. Why was that?

VV: I don’t know, maybe I was just lazy or something… I went to Järvenpää’s Park Blues before Roskilde but Roskilde was the first like real festival I went to. I wasn’t intending to go there but then I woke up in Roskilde. I was wasted and I had written a debt note to a toilet paper that I will pay the ticket someday. Somebody had a spare ticket, and I had nothing, I din’t have a tent, sleeping bag or any extra clothes. I wore the same clothes for a week and slept on the ground and got a horrible flue. I drank other people’s beer and white wine, and I had an honour to pass out during Slayer’s set. That was very… How can you pass out during Slayer’s set?

JCJ: Apparently you can.

VV: I was 10 meters from the stage and I passed out between moshpits. And then I woke up to Angel of Death.

JCJ: Did you even get a woman during that festival?

VV: A woman?

JCJ: Yeah, did you get a woman.

VV: I had some flirting going on, but didn’t get laid.

JCJ: As [passing out] wasn’t enough.

VV: Yeah, it’s a horrible destiny. But it was a great experience that year specifically, I think it was 1996. It was a good year because there were Sepultura, Slayer, Sex Pistols, Neil Young, Ministry, The Cardigans, Type O Negative, Life of Agony, Cypress Hill, Rage Against The Machine, D-A-D… There were so many so great bands that we just ran from one stage to another and the distances between the stages were kilometres, so you didn’t have much time to catch girls. Rock first, then ladies…

JCJ: Why girls dig so much rockers? What’s the “it” thing?

VV: Uhm, I don’t think they dig just rockers. I haven’t noticed a difference… I know people who are in totally different fields and they have ladies by their side all the time. I don’t think the choice of occupation has much to do with it. Maybe somebody likes the crazyness of it, and that your job isn’t from nine to five, but more like a gypsy’s life. A caravan goes from point A to point B, where the point A is the beginning of yout career and point B the end of your career.
JCJ: You’ve seen a lot of parties and events. What’s the most embarrasing festival experience that you’ve had?

VV: You mean a festival or a festival experience?

JCJ: A festival experience.

VV: There are so many of them…

JCJ: Tell the best one.

VV: The funniest was when we played at Ilosaari for the first time, (something) was playing at the after party, I passed out in berry bush and vomited in our tour bus – no, we didn’t have a bus, it was a van – and I tried to jump off the van at some point on the road. And there was somebody else vomiting as well… Very basic Finnish drunken craziness, you know.

JCJ: Yeah.

VV: But the funniest festival was when some German guy booked us to a festival and later we found out that it was organized by some 15 year-old teenager who had got a loan with the name of his parents. We played around 4 o’clock at night and there were perhaps 150 people, in the middle of nowhere. It was the most interesting and most embarrasing festival, as we flew there all the way from Finland. It didn’t happen again… Hopefully the guy got to pay his loan back. But other than that, just basic drunken stupidness, you know, pissing above tents… At least not with a condom still on my dick, but I’ve heard it has happened to a lot of people.

JCJ: Indeed has happened to each one.

VV: Well not to me, yet… But whenever we’re playing at festivals, there’s less craziness then. We’re staying at hotels and there are usually a couple of festivals during one weekend, so there’s not much time to act crazy.

JCJ: Hypothetically, if you had to stop writing and composing music, and do a normal day job, what would it be?

VV: Probably assist my dad’s shop – it supplies adult entertainment in Helsinki, Viides Linja 7 – probably there. But actually I don’t have plans B’s, because I’ve done this for so long. Maybe I would go studying something, I don’t know. There’s not any particular job that interests me other than music. I’m 32 and I’ve done this since I was 7, so it would feel strange if I weren’t doing this. If I wasn’t writing songs, I would probably do something else in the music field. Maybe I sit in your seat next time and you in mine –

JCJ: Or probably not.

VV: You never know, you never know…

JCJ: Yeah. You never know what kind of songwriter I would be.

VV: Exactly.

JCJ: So, since you’re rather pretty-looking man –

VV: Thank you.

JCJ: Do you get many love letters from male fans?

VV: Well –

JCJ: Or so-called love letters.

VV: I’ve met a few guys who have been interested in that sense but, uh, I mean I didn’t schedule to meet these guys, just randomly met somewhere, but I don’t know, I don’t know if they even write letters these days since everyone uses emails, because they are easy to send and so anonymous, so you don’t know if… Sometimes we used to read every single fan mail we got, but these days we unfortunately don’t have the time. Sometimes people think something else of us than what we are, and that’s why it’s sometimes better just to leave their imagination like that, and let us be clueless about what’s going on. It’s like, there’s the audience, there’s us and here’s HIM. It has become bigger than the sum of its parts or something else, and we can’t control it.

JCJ: You’ve made many cover versions of songs by many different bands, so are you going to release a cover album someday?

VV: We’ve talked about it but the rest of the guys aren’t interested in it. It would be a fun side project thing if you get bored or, I don’t know. We used to do quite a few cover songs in the beginning but we don’t want to be a cover band so probably not. We’ve played Wicked Game since the beginning, and put some other songs in B-sides and we put the demo of Don’t Fear The Reaper in the first album mainly because we didn’t have so much material back then, and the album would have been otherwise too short.

JCJ: That’s about it. Thanks very much.