Black is black [Germany]

Hannover, AWD-Hall, 14.02.2006
Only a few days ago, newspaper “BILD” presented the numbers of fainting girls at the ‘Tokio Hotel’ gigs, when already another band that could cause such incidents hit German ground. Ville Valo & Co. honoured themselves after a long while of abstinence to present the new HIM-album Dark Light personally to their fans.
Moreover, the dark-rockers brought along their fellow countrymen The Rasmus and Negative – which wasn’t only especially interesting for the female part of the audience.
Arriving at the AWD-Hall in Hannover in the early afternoon, there were already quite a lot of HIM-followers waiting in front of the doors of the former sports-hall, to make sure they’d be the first ones storming into the venue or catch a glimpse of the guys from Up North.
When at 7pm finally the securities gave in and opened the doors, the AWD-Hall filled up pretty quickly. Though the concert didn’t seem sold out with 5.000 people, it was still crowded. Negative, being the newcomers of the last year, started off the evening. The young Finns around singer Jonne Aaron enthused with a powerful and passionate performance. Sweetheart Jonne stormed across the stage full of energy and kept enlivening the fans, who went along more and more with each song of the last album Sweet and Deceitful. Though at the beginning it was noticeable that to some people in the audience the name Negative had been completely unknown before the concert, but after the about 30 minutes lasting performance it was obvious that the band had captured one or the other heart on this Valentine’s Day.
After a short break followed the next Finn-combo, The Rasmus. The boys around Lauri Ylönen had some difficulties in the beginning to stand up to Negative, seeing as their sound was much poppier. But also The Rasmus could count on their fans, and after a few songs the whole venue was partying. At some points Lauri’s voice seemed to be a bit off-colour, which however neither affected the enthusiasm of the fans nor the Finns’ joy for playing. Like a dervish, the small singer bounced around the stage, which made it sheer impossible for the photographers in the pit to take a proper picture of him. The great energy The Rasmus presented their performance with this evening was rewarded by the whole audience who especially cheered, danced and sang along like mad to the all-time hits In the Shadows and First Day of my Life. The mostly female concert visitors enthusiastically waved their Finland-flags they had brought and screamed for encores when The Rasmus also left the stage after about an hour.
Slowly but surely, a tension arose among the audience, and the 45-minute break for rebuilding the stage seemed like eternity to the HIM-fans. Finally, shortly after 10pm, the ones most of the people in the AWD-Hall had been waiting for entered the stage. Ville Valo & Co. were welcomed with deafening screams and frenetic applause, which reached its top when the smart singer greeted the audience. HIM opened their evening programme, which should satisfy old and new followers during the next 80 minutes, with Rip out the wings of a Butterfly, followed by older hits like Right here in my Arms and the Cover-version Wicked Game. When Ville announced Join me in Death as the already sixth song, the fans went completely crazy, and HIM had definitely won the evening. Thousands of mouths sang along the chorus so that Ville’s voice was barely audible at some points. It didn’t matter whether next HIM would play new material or classics à la In Joy and Sorrow, Your Sweet 666 or Poison Girl, the veterans of Finnish Gothic Pop Rock convinced in every way and proved yet another time why they are at the very top of this music movement. After a short acceptance speech to the German fans, Ville Valo said goodbye after about an hour with The Sacrament, but blessed the fans with several encores, one of them being Buried Alive by Love, surely an evening that won’t be forgotten quickly by most.

Interview Ville Valo & Lauri Ylönen
The actual Finn…
…is not only busy but also a musical person. In any case that’s what comes to mind, recently looking at the homey concert events and, doing so, bumping into a tour of three bands from Up North, who regularly break the hearts of the ladies. Speaking about of course, the rock veterans HIM, companions The Rasmus and the newcomers of the last year, Negative. This means partying, languishing and rocking X3. A good reason indeed to tag along for one day and chat with the main actors. After some problems, because Ville Valo despite rough shaking and other success-promising methods like ‘holding fresh horseradish under one’s nose’, just didn’t want to wake up from his deep sleep; in the early evening a nice conversation took place with Ville and The Rasmus’ head Lauri Ylönen, about the daily routine on tour, the Finnish melancholy and the United States of America. What was supposed to be an exchange between Lauri and Ville, developed quickly into a round strongly dominated by the charismatic HIM-frontman.

Ville Valo (visibly amused about the concept of the interview): Lauri, what do you think about our tour now?
Lauri Ylönen: I am very happy with this tour. We’ve played four gigs so far, and there have been a few very nice locations. What about you, Ville?
Ville Valo: It is nice to be back in Germany again. We haven’t been here for quite a long time. It’s good to see that there’s still many people here who love what we do. I’m also very happy that the idea we had with that tour seems to work. People don’t only like us a lot, but also Negative. I think this tour is something very special. At the beginning I thought it’s simply a tour with three bands, but it’s not. It’s something that hasn’t been there before like this. I’m very happy to be in this situation.

Orkus: Yes, it’s a very special combination…
Ville Valo: A good combination.

Orkus: There’s something for everyone in it, actually.
Ville Valo: Hopefully. It’s also very nice to work with all those people – of course with the three bands, but also with the technicians and all the others. That’s like a big family, which is really lovely.

Orkus: That sounds really good indeed. What’s the daily tour routine like?
Ville Valo: Exactly, Lauri, are you reading a book at the moment?
Lauri Ylönen: Yes, I’m reading The Alchemist.
Ville Valo: Oh, a classic.
Lauri Ylönen: Yeah, many people recommended it.
Ville Valo: Don’t you like it?
Lauri Ylönen: I’ve only just started. But many people advised me to read it.
Ville Valo: Yeah. A good book.
Lauri Ylönen: It’s also quite small, I can read it on the bus. We still have a long journey ahead of us after all.

Orkus: After playing in Leipzig, you will also be going to Austria, right?
Ville Valo: Yes, we’re playing Vienna, but also Zurich in Switzerland. That will be the end of the tour.

Orkus: That’s only a handful of gigs indeed. For instance you left out Hamburg this time.
Ville Valo: Yeah, but I don’t really know why. I think maybe the appropriate venues weren’t available, like Große Freiheit, Sporthalle or something like that. The others are too small. And the next bigger one is the Color Line Arena. I’ve heard that the sound there is really bad. It’s not always easy to find the right venues that match our music. But we try the best we can.

Orkus: Depeche Mode have just played at the Color Line Arena. I heard it was a very good concert.
Ville Valo: Depeche Mode are always good. But with this kind of music you don’t have that venue problem. It works almost everywhere. A lot of stuff comes from tapes. It’s much more difficult with rock bands.
Lauri Ylönen: Ville, you haven’t been sleeping well lately. What’s the reason for that?
Ville Valo: Stress… a shitload of stress. For the first time of my life I’ve been suffering from insomnia for six weeks and never slept more than two hours per night. That isn’t really a lot. It’s definitely not enough for me. But for the past three nights I’ve been sleeping very well again. I go to bed pretty early after the gigs. Sleeping – that may turn into my new hobby. It feels great. But on tour it’s always something different. You have a lot of jetlag and so on. And we work at nights. We play our concerts in the late evenings only, which causes staying up really late. And then sometimes you have to wake up early again the next morning to catch a flight. That can be very hard sometimes. But we are happy with what we do and who we are. How about you, Lauri, have you always been a good sleeper?
Lauri Ylönen: No, I have problems with sleeping in hotel rooms. I always prefer staying in the bus.
Ville Valo: Really? It’s the same with Migé.
Lauri Ylönen: I know, I’ve already talked to him about it.
Ville Valo: I can’t sleep on busses. I love hotel rooms.
Lauri Ylönen: I think the bus is comfortable. You have all your stuff with you, your books, your CDs.
Ville Valo: And it smells like hell.
Lauri Ylönen: Sometimes I just don’t like to be alone. But of course it depends on how the life on tour is going otherwise. Ville, you know what I mean, the long, scary nights… (common laughter).
Ville Valo: (grinning): No, I don’t.
Lauri Ylönen: On the bus there’s always someone doing something. Watching a porn movie or something. You just know that someone is there, and then you fall asleep at some point. Well, I do.
Ville Valo: For me it’s a literal rape, to sleep on the bus. I have to get away from all other people once in a while. That’s why I love hotels so much. I even sleep better in hotels than at home, which is strange actually. But I’m so used to travelling that I just like it.

Orkus: Let’s get away from the quiet side of life and move back to the exciting…
Lauri Ylönen: We had a big after-show-party in Cologne.
Ville Valo: But nothing special. I met a friend of mine and we talked about silly stuff for a long time and drank a lot of Jägermeister. I guess I got quite pissed but I think I went to bed around 3am which is actually pretty good for touring times. But what about you, Lauri, were you there at all?
Lauri Ylönen: Yes.
Ville Valo: But not for long, right?
Lauri Ylönen: No.
Ville Valo: Yeah, there were so many people around you. And when you’re tired…
Lauri Ylönen: The reason I was there in the first place was because I wanted to get to know all the people. Especially the Negative guys. I spent almost all evening talking to Jonne Aaron and our tour manager Loo-Loo. But the time also flew by. We arrived very late, only after the HIM-Show. Moreover the way there took a bit longer and we all were pretty exhausted. But yesterday we did something really cool. We went shooting, with machine gun imitations. That was a great hangover cure. It was just like: “Give me the weapon”, and off it went.

Orkus: In Cologne centre?
Lauri Ylönen: No, I think it was like 100km away. That was for sure an experience. At the beginning I was quite shocked though.
Ville Valo: In the USA you can do stuff like that too. But the Americans are crazy. They have gun-clubs and run through the deserts at night then and shoot cactuses. I even saw once that they shoot at dolls, I mean, baby-dolls. Migé has something like that on his computer, where they shoot off the head of a baby-doll. That’s being blown off man – bye, bye, baby doll.
Lauri Ylönen: But we didn’t do something like that. We only shot balloons and normal targets. People funnily call them “little Chinese men” because they are so small.

Orkus: And what did you do, Ville?
Ville Valo: I slept until 9 in the evening. That was pretty long – almost 14 hours in a row. And then me and Migé walked around a bit and had a few drinks in a bar. At 3 we went to bed again though.

Orkus: That surely felt nice in between, to be able to relax for a day?
Ville Valo: Oh yeah, completely without pressure, was really good.

Orkus: But that was your only day off during the tour, right?
Ville Valo: Yeah, that’s true. I think we’ll party a bit again in Leipzig. We have two concerts there, and for these two days we’ll all be staying at the same hotel. We’ll be having a ball there one more time before we go back home and try to be loveable people again.
Lauri Ylönen: Aren’t you also working on a new video?
Ville Valo: Yes. The Americans don’t like our Killing Loneliness video, so we have to do it again.

Orkus: What exactly didn’t they like about it?
Ville Valo: They weren’t completely against it. But you know, we’re well known here in Europe. We’ve made I think 15 videos. People know approximately what to expect of a HIM-clip. For the Americans, the video was somehow too shallow – it wasn’t direct enough, not enough Rock’n'Roll. They also didn’t like the style. They wanted something straighter. For them, it’s all to do with the way of making a video. And also with the work of the stylists and make-up-artists. But then on the other hand it shouldn’t be too different. But the video is one of the first biggest performances that we have over there at the TV stations. And they don’t know us that well yet, so that we have to make it a bit more stylish again.

Orkus: Talking about the US: One hears again and again that you felt very comfortable there. Was it only positive experiences?
Ville Valo: I really like the States. It’s a good place where we have a certain fanbase by now, due to the help of Bam Margera. I’ve enjoyed my stay there very much. The States are also a good place to make music and sell records. And it’s also just something new for us. In Europe, we’ve been touring for the past 10 years. That’s why it was very exciting to be somewhere where no-one knows you and where you don’t know how everything will go. It was the extra-kick for the whole band. Now we have to see how the record is doing there. It’s the same in Australia and New Zealand, where I haven’t been so far either. That’s gonna be exciting.

Orkus: Lauri, what about you? Have you been there?
Lauri Ylönen: No, never. I’ve only been to Japan. And we’ve only played two gigs so far in the USA.
Ville Valo: But you’ve been to South America, no?
Lauri Ylönen: Yeah, we were in Mexico, among others.
Ville Valo: It’s fantastic there, isn’t it? We’ll probably cover South America in the second half of this year.
Lauri Ylönen: I just got an e-mail with pictures from Argentina. Before the show there were hundreds of fans in front of the organiser’s office who called for us and wanted to be part of the concert. I was very happy when I saw that, the people there have so much power.

Orkus: Will The Rasmus follow HIM then and conquer the US market soon?
Lauri Ylönen: No, there’s no such plans for now. Unfortunately we don’t have a real partner there who would release our album. We’re trying out some things at the moment but nothing came out of it so far. I always find it hard to judge all of this. The last company tried everything to ‘press the big button’ but it just didn’t work.
Ville Valo: That sucks.
Lauri Ylönen: Yeah. I think, first of all you should work properly on the basis. It’s more important to build something small before you start on the big things. We’ll keep going like this.

Orkus: Well it’s difficult to find someone you can trust and who does everything exactly like you imagine, when you don’t know your way around there. That’s what Ville mentioned briefly before.
Ville Valo: There’s a difference between us and other bands there. All of them are being heard on the radio very often, and we aren’t. We rather tour. If you only feed the radio stations with a song, you maybe don’t have that basis Lauri was just talking about. But we have that basis. We have people there so therefore we can do what we want. But you have to work on reaching these people, because there are people there who love us and our music. When you get them together, on a tour maybe, then you also get them to buy your music and t-shirts. There is just people who will always be there. And that’s wonderful.

Orkus: What advice would you give to Lauri, what should The Rasmus pay special attention to, if they want to hit the States?
Ville Valo: You need a good bus driver! But seriously, it’s the same everywhere. You just need great people you can work with and who understand you and your needs. Especially HIM and The Rasmus were small bands at first. It’s important to have people around you who understand that you don’t try to be Metallica or walk the trails of Metallica. We’re not trying to be KoRn. Or Limp Bizkit. We have our own identity we are proud of and work for as hard as possible. I think that’s particularly important. But such people aren’t easy to find. You always have to put up with the situation that is given to you. But you need people who believe in you and what you’re doing.

Orkus: For a rough business like that, this sounds almost romantic. But you Nordics seem to be like that. Every time when you talk with Scandinavian and especially Finnish bands, you come to talk about melancholy and the differences to simple sadness or even depressive traits.
Ville Valo: Nice topic… In my opinion, depression is something you have to treat with medication. Sadness on the other hand constrains you in your life and work. Melancholy however pushes you and kicks your ass. You look back without burning down any bridges. You realise what you had to go through and learn to appreciate it.

Orkus: So, a very positive thing.
Ville Valo: Oh yes, definitely. You accept yourself this way, who you are and why. It’s similar in Portugal. The traditional music there, the Fado, is also very sad and emotional. Italians feel like that too. And the Russians have a lot of sad classic music. All of it comes together there. The Finnish mentality is as easy as that.

Orkus: What do you think, Lauri?
Lauri Ylönen: Ville has said that very well. I also think that it has to do with the fact that the music in Finland simply is very sad. Or the Russian, the Italian, or also Tango for example. When I was a child I’ve always just been listening to sad music on Finnish radio. It just is like that in our country.
Ville Valo: Now that we’re at discussing the Finnish mentality, I would like to mention something else. I think a big difference is that the Finns work because they love to work – and not because of the money. That is a big difference. People live for their jobs. This sounds crazy, but it is like that. It’s not like in America where everything is about money, money, money.

Orkus: That sounds nice. But then you don’t have that problem of unemployed people in Finland, like we do in Germany.
Ville Valo: Well yes, we do have some. But since Finland’s become part of the EU, many things have changed in our country. But of course it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Orkus: After this ode on Finland and the harsh tones about the US, you probably can’t really imagine to move away from Finland? Maybe to the States even?
Ville Valo: Finland is always in my heart. And I have all my friends there – Lauri for instance. The band is there. My girlfriend is there. It just feels natural to be in Finland or Helsinki.

Orkus: What about you, Lauri?
Lauri Ylönen: I haven’t ever really lived anywhere else or haven’t been away for an extremely long time yet. I can’t really say much to that. Sometimes I’m a little bit jealous of my big sister or other people who just managed to live in other places. With me, it never worked. I’ve always been in a band, since I was 15. So I never had a chance to do anything like that. But I never wanted a break to explore the world. I only wanted to have that band, what’s of course always hectic in some way. And it’s always a bit as if you’re living under a glass cover. Everything is so unreal. My big sister has lived in 5 different countries – here for one year, there for two. From time to time I visit her, wherever she is then. But actually I’m satisfied in Finland.
Ville Valo: We really have been touring all over Europe and have seen a lot. I’m still looking for a beautiful place for me, but no place is perfect. But we’ll see what the future holds, when one’s wiser. The USA are nice and good for a break you can afford yourself. But the food there is really horrible. You can’t get many things. And you search for a long time for a really good restaurant. Everything’s always just a lot and huge. And full of fat, salt and vinegar. And the air – it’s much better in Finland. But I like this smalltown-culture. It’s nice to go out on my own and in peace to a bar or a café and have a drink and can talk to someone for half an hour.

Orkus: Lauri, you mentioned that your life is unreal. Is it still like that after such a long time? The Rasmus and HIM are by now profs in the showbiz.
Ville Valo: I think Lauri meant that our life just isn’t normal. It’s different to most. At the moment this glass cover for instance is the tour bus. Our lives are just different currently – we don’t wash the dishes, we don’t have to buy toilet paper. In fact we don’t have to do anything of that kind. We just have to go on stage and play as well as we can for one and a half hours.
Lauri Ylönen: You know, sometimes it’s just enough of the good stuff. Like in a hotel. “Here’s your key, shall I carry your suitcases upstairs?” Uaaah… my God, I can carry my suitcases on my own! In moments like that you almost lose your mind sometimes, only because people try to be friendly to you all day. That’s really hard sometimes. Especially when you come back home and everything’s different. You have your family and friends around you who act normally. It can be like a slap in the face then, when you say something wrong. It takes a few days to get your feet back on the ground and to settle in again.

Orkus: It’s two completely different worlds after all that you live in.
Lauri Ylönen: Yes. My friends are all very honest to me and tell me if something’s shit. If I one day only acted like an asshole, they would most probably talk to me about it. But other people don’t do that. Especially not on tour. Here, people call you “asshole” behind your back. I always prefer talking about things directly, and not have this negative energy around you instead.

Orkus: Yes, when you’re famous, then many people aren’t honest to you anymore.
Ville Valo: But that’s also often a problem in normal life, no? For that stuff you don’t need to live under a glass cover. With time, you get an intuition for who is a friend and who’s not.

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