Synnin Viemää

Synnin Viemää, in English „Gone with the sin“ is the HIM book released only in Finland in 2002 and is their only official biography so far.

Release: 14.10.2002
Author: Juho K. Juntunen
ISBN - 951-0-273-04 - X

It contains the history of the band. How they grew up or how they got into the music and their instrument(s).
It has 250 pages of stories from the very early days to date and a lot of unpublished photos.
The book has a lot of names, places and events relating to Helsinki and exists at the moment only in Finnish but if there is enough interest the band will consider translating it in to other languages.
Ville and Juho Juntunen attended an open interview hour at the Finnish Book Fair in Helsinki on October 25th at 17.30. The book was presented in the hall of Aleksis Kivi in the Helsinki Fair Centre





and some info about the book in italian :

Il libro è umoristico ed anche realistico, parla degli alti e bassi.
Ville dice del libro: «Non abbiamo niente da nascondere.
Diciamo le cose così come sono andate, siamo ciò che siamo e non abbiamo mai provato a vivere una vita di fantasia.
Il libro contiene molte storie delle quali non abbiamo mai parlato prima, mostra come può essere difficile quando tante persone provano a spingerti in una direzione o in un'altra».
Quando chiedono a Ville quale parte del libro raccomanda, dice: «Dopo questo abbiamo fatto un classico afterparty nel mio piccolo appartamento, c'erano forse 20 persone. Max degli Apocalyptica era così ubriaco che si è addormentato sul mio letto e l'abbiamo preso a calci affinchè potessimo avere la stanza per sederci. Poi, si è fatto la pipì addosso e anche sui miei albums... Pätkä si è così stufato della situazione che lo ha buttato fuori dall'appartamento».
Ville dice anche che il libro è facile da leggere, che ha molte foto e che non dobbiamo leggere l'intero libro in una sola volta e che va bene leggerlo anche in bagno...

some pics from the book here :

http://www.heartaclub.com/inglese/struttura/goodies/goodies_synnin.htm

Synnin Viemää Translated by Heidi Ekbom




Ville Valo

Part 1





Ville Hermanni Valo was born in Helsinki on November 22, 1976. During his childhood and teenage years he lived in the suburb Oulunkylä. His family is composed of his father Kari, his mother Anita and his seven years younger brother Jesse, who is a keen amateur of Thai Boxing.
" The hard-on at the Kesoil gas station in Oulunkylä is one of the first things from my childhood which I can remember " says Ville Valo. " I have no recollection of my birth at all. I think I was born at Kätilöopisto hospital, or in any case somewhere in Helsinki. During the first months of my life my family lived in the old part of Valilla, with it's old houses made of wood, then we moved to Oulunkylä, where I lived for the next seventeen years, in a perfectly normal three room flat in a high rise. Then we moved again. I went to school in Oulunkylä.
My childhood was pretty normal. My father used to potter about old cars and my mum has had the same job for 20 years running. They are normal working class people. When I was little, we used to have a lot of pets. We had a dog, who taught me how to walk. His name was Sami. When he died, it was a traumatic experience for me, and I developed allergies and asthma. I am sure this is psycho-somatic, at least I think so. We also had some gold fish, a turtle and all kinds of other animals.


I have never quite understood the guys who say they keep images in their minds from their childhood, like when they were toddlers. Well, I can't remember any of those things. I was only told a lot of stories.
There was this friend of the family, who's name is Jallu, who was and still is a fucking good Elvis imitator. The first "musical" souvenir that my parents recall about me, is from a family party we once had, when around midnight Jallu started to play Are you Lonesome Tonight. In my jumper, I scrambled on all fours to the record rack where the bongos stood, and started drumming in rhythm to the Elvis song. At that moment my parents thought: this was one is going to be a musician.
My first childhood horror souvenir also has to do with Jallu, or rather with his son. Jallu's son was an Iron Maiden fanatic, and at that time I was still very small, just about 4, when I went into his room. It was evening and dark and his room was full of Iron Maiden posters with the Eddie monster and other gloomy stuff. I got scared shitless and ran away. Maybe, even today, I'm still a little afraid of Eddie, just a tiny bit. I had to get over my fear so I could later get to like Iron Maiden.


How old was I, that time at the Oulunkylä gas station where my dad was fixing his car, together with some other guys? Anyway, I was still real small, you could have crushed me with your little finger. At the gas station I saw my first pin-up calendar and instantly got a hard-on. That's really one of my first childhood memories.
On those car repair evenings I mostly amused myself by stuffing nails into the exhaust of my Dad's old Cadillac or Ford. If ever my dad had started the car at such a moment, a lot of people standing behind it, would have gotten killed.
At that time, dad was a taxi driver and used to listen to all kinds of music. Hiski Salomaa, Tuomari Nurmio, Tapio Rautavaara - typical Finnish traditional stuff, no pop music, just old country music and normal songs. A lot of Helismaa and J.J. Cale. Maybe some Elvis, too, from time to time. I still keep my parents' old records: the Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, some Reggae samplers, John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley. Most of those records are o.k. Thank god my parents were no Finnish pop music fans. We already have one Danny (a famous Finnish pop singer) in the band, that's enough! My mum tells that when I was a baby and started to cry, my father used to play the song Paratiisi from Rauli Badding Somerjoki. Then he put me on his lap and started dancing. And I stopped crying.


I think all boys are a pain in the ass when they are kids. I can't really remember any stuff from when I was a baby but at school they used to move me from one class to another. I got into fights with boys bigger than myself and tried to play the leading tough guy. I was hyper active and around the age of seven they made me do all kinds of tests, like fixing wires to my head, to capture magnetic signals. But in the end the doctors didn't find anything and I got a special permission to draw in class, because otherwise I wouldn't sit still. I wasn't really bad, just a bit wild. Apart from that nothing special really happened during my school years. Somehow I managed to keep all the hatred and frustrations bottled up inside. There was also some trouble with teenage gangs in my neighborhood. There was the Oulunkylä gang and the gang from the Patola suburb. But I really sailed through all that and my grades at school were quite decent.
In Junior High Maths were almost my favorite. But at first Maths and a teacher named Ekki Falk were a real problem for me. He was really severe. He used to call me to the blackboard to question and to make a fool out of me. At one point, I was fed up with it and I decided I just had to learn the stuff. I invested a lot of time into Maths, and from then on I got straight A's. From then on, I got along well with the teacher and with myself too. At school, Drawing, Music and History were cool subjects. But altogether I think school is a waste of time, except for elementary school where you learn to read and to write, which is important. But school itself has no function. School should only be attended when one is ready to learn something. Like for example when you are thirty and really willing to study. School is just a necessary evil for all young people and everybody just hates it. You learn it all by heart without getting to the real meaning of things.
After Junior High I went to Evening school in Käpylä. I went there a year and a half, and then I stopped because I just couldn't take it anymore. I did not have enough discipline to continue. I was still living with my parents and never quite made it to school. The bus ride was too long. The guitar player Petri Valli of the former Kingston Wall Band was in my English class at the Evening school in Käpylä.


When I was younger I used to draw a lot and went for quite a while to Art school. But then gradually music took all of my time. In 1984, I was 8 years old and listened to Animalize from Kiss. This was the very first record I ever bought. I can thank my cousin Pia for that. I had saved enough pocket money, to buy a record, and I asked her which record she'd recommend. I myself knew nothing about records or record shops. Pia said, Kiss is good, and I went to the record shop and took the record from the shelf where it said "from the TV ad". I did not know much about Kiss, but since my cousin said the band is good, I thought their music should be cool too. Basically, Pia brainwashed me into Rock'n Roll. Had she recommended Schubert for example, the result would have been much different.
I still like the Animalize album. For me personally it's the Kiss record. It often happens that the first record you ever hear, is the one to leave a lasting impression. In my opinion it's one of their most wickedly underrated albums. Later on I bought all of their other records or tapes. But I never got to like their masquerades, I guess because I first got to know the band without it.
In third grade, you could switch to music class. I passed all the tests to start music class and we had to choose an instrument. Because I thought Gene Simmons was so cool, I felt I absolutely had to start playing bass. I just needed the instrument.
Somewhere my parents found a second hand bass, and it was a great moment when they gave it to me. I'm a reasonable person, so I kept that bass all along and just had it checked. It's still fucking good and I still play it. It's a Dia SG Bass copy from the seventies. Later I changed that bass several times for better instruments, but I still remember that I got more pain than pleasure from that bass and the first small amp. My fingers were terribly sore, but still my mother said, now practice goddammit. A couple of times I also banged the thing against the wall. I don't know if my mum wanted me to become a musician, but still it was good that she forced me to practice. This way I learned a lot, even though the practicing bored me like hell. I never played the piano and I have no other classical basic knowledge. I preferred to learn how to play pop and rock instead of something of higher cultural value. My first bass teacher's name was Hannu Talako, he was the teacher of the music class of the school in Oulunkylä. We studied things like reading music. It took a hell of a lot of time till I got to learn something. Then there was the first band. I was in fourth or fifth grade. The band was called B.L.O.O.D., with dots in between the letters like in W.A.S.P. We did not know why they had those dots, but it looked good. With this band we performed once in front of the music class. The other guys where older than me, they were probably already in sixth grade. We played Run to the Hills instrumental from Iron Maiden. The special thing about B.L.O.O.D. was that we had two drummers. One used to play during rehearsals, but he used to have such stage fright that he couldn't perform in front of the public. Then we started to perform at school parties as the Elovena Boys.

We played songs from U2 and Dire Straits and I wrote my first song fore the band. We did about five or six gigs together which was actually quite a lot. I only played the bass and never sang. At that time I was around nine or ten. But not everything was just music. I practiced judo for about nine years, starting when I was quite young. My father used to box, he likes that kind of combat sports. Since I didn't want to box, I went to Judo class. I only went once a week, I had something like a green belt and got three medals. Then I gave that up too. I never took part in any competition. Then I started skating and I stuck to that for a real long time. And then I was no longer a child. I went through a shitty adolescence phase, where I used to call my mother a whore constantly. My father forced me to write the word whore a thousand times, so I would check what a bad word it was. So I wrote whore a thousand times and my parents calmed down a bit.

The first time I got completely wasted, was when I started seventh grade. I was about thirteen. I was a fairly simple kid, if you compare me to Linde, for example. He got completely plastered for the first time when he was barely six. I also never got into fights or did anything really criminal, music and skating where more important to me. And living in Oulunkylä was not that stressful. Mige used to live in Patola and Linde in East Pakila, there were some kinds of freaks hanging around. I was the kind of kid that grew up wrapped in cotton wood. I tried alcohol for the first time, when I was only two or three. I was taking a bath with my dad, and he was, as usual, drinking his glass of Whisky in the bathtub. I wanted to try it too, and my parents thought, they'd let me, so that I get a trauma for life and will never touch drink again. I took a sip of the whisky and said: "Tastes good, can I have more?" The attempt failed... The first time I got really wasted was when I downed seven bottles of beer and then lay on the playground in Oulunkylä. The second time was funnier, with Linde and the other guys we threw our money together und bought about seven crates of beer. Then we watched the video of The Song Remains The Same by Led Zeppelin, which in Finnish is wisely titled Laulu jää pystyyn = a song stands still. At that time I also had a girlfriend. I used to get bloody drunk, puking all over, and then passed out somewhere. In between I was making out with my girlfriend on the bed and threw up all over her. At one point the cops came because, we made such a racket. Then we escaped into the woods. There we continued boozing, and it all ended up with Linde and his dudes carrying me to East Pakila to the room of a guy called Joonas, who' s parents slept on the floor above. First I went to the loo, to vomit, and then I went upstairs and messed around there. Joonas' father almost beat me up. That was my second time of being completely wasted and the hangover was just as bad.

Part 2

My own parents were really worried about my experiments with booze, but they also understood, that at some point you have to try everything. We often went to the Lepakko, to listen to Punk, once in front of the autonomous youth center we emptied, two bottles of Liebfrauenmilch, warm German white wine. We scotched small bottles of Koskenkorva to our legs. I remember that the security woke me up, lying in a some corner of the Lepakko. The whole place was empty and the band had already performed. I was there lying around in my own vomit. Somehow I got to catch the last bus and also puked in there, then I passed out on the floor in front of the last seat row of the bus. The bus driver hadn't noticed I was still on the bus and drove directly to the terminal. He went fucking mad and picked me up from my vomit and I kept excusing myself over and over. Strangely enough ,I somehow managed to find a taxi. When I got home, from the courtyard I yelled up to my parents to throw me some money to pay the taxi. Then I just dropped onto the bed, with all my clothes on, shaking all over, I was feeling so fucking dizzy. Suddenly the door opens and my parents turn the lights on, point at me, dying of laughter. Much ado about nothing. Of course my parents were worried that something might happen to me. But as I've said, you have to try everything when you're young. Already in elementary school

I got interested in girls. But at that stage I showed my interest by throwing pebbles at them. And in a way, l even today I still throw pebbles at them, intellectually. Well I was never the kind of guy to have steady relationships, and in my school years I had no real girlfriends. I just dated some girls sometimes. The first time I had sex was so late, that I don't even want to talk about it. I'm sure people think something completely different about me, and I don't want to disappoint anybody, being the Love-Metal Messenger, that I am. Of course I could pretend that I had sex when I was twelve or seven - the way everybody wants to show off, even though it is all make-believe. Let's just say I was already quite grown up. Until then I got by with the help of my right hand.

Now let's go back again in time and to the Pop and Jazz school of Olunkylä. So my first real band was B.L.O.O.D. There we rehearsed the music that was important to us. Meaning Iron Maiden. With the Elovena Boys I rehearsed a lot too, but then came Aurora. There I played the drums and Linde played the guitar. And we seriously started doing our own songs. I was in seventh grade when I met Linde. I went to the school on the border between East Pakila and Oulunkylä and Linde was going to the same school. Because he was guitarist and I was bassist, we sometimes played together. The two of us used to play Charlie Parker or stuff like that. Little by little I got to know the other guys and we often hung around together. Linde was already the same hopeless guy as today. Maybe he is even more introverted today, as silent as a talking man can be. In junior high at the worst times I had six or seven bands running at the same time and at least one rehearsal per day. There were the Jazz and Dixieland bands at school and also Aurora, which always meant beer in excess. We dug Shitter Limited and played their classics, like Anna pillua Helena Pesola (in English meaning something like: Fuck me, Helena Pesola). We also wrote some songs along that line and created a public scandal. That was already quite cool. Our singer, Erkki, who nowadays plays the organ with Ihmepoika, once drank a whole bottle of Koskenkorva followed by some sixty nine percent booze and we had to carry him on stage. He fell on the support of the beams and all the spots fell down, two inches short of my head. All this happened before the first song. The spotlights fell on my drums and everything was fucked up. It took ages to fix everything up again. That was the first band in which we also rocked.

Aurora had been rehearsing for about half a year, when we decided to collect money for a class trip, by organizing a hippy party. We had also been busy rehearsing Smoke On The Water from Deep Purple, Purple Haze from Jimi Hendrix and Paranoid from Black Sabbath. The party was to take place a week later and we got all excited because finally something was going to happen. Then Martti Ilmonen, our school director, had a kind of schizophrenic fit and came running into the aula of the school yelling that no way there was going to be a hippy party in his school, cause it was all about smoking hash. That blew the party and since then we hated the man. We even had the permission of our class teacher to collect money, so we could make the trip… for example to Amsterdam to smoke pot. To take revenge, we wrote a song called Martti Ilmonen tunkee kyrpää suoleen (in English something like: Martti Ilmonen puts his dick in the ass). We played that song at the autumn concert and all the other teachers laughed their heads off. People went completely crazy and started throwing chairs around. From then on we were forbidden to play at school concerts in Oulunkylä. In the end we still made it to Amsterdam. We collected the money another way, selling donuts from door to door or so. It was an excursion of the music class and we traveled to Holland passing through Sweden, Denmark and Germany. The idea was to perform at the local schools. In Holland we had three or four performances and the whole trip lasted ten days. Amsterdam was a lot of fun. I had been abroad only once before. In 1991 I went to Thailand with my parents and my younger brother. We celebrated Christmas and the New Year there. That was my first real vacation trip and until today the only one. All other trips somehow had to do with music, touring or promotion.

On the school trip to Holland a lot of us discovered themselves. That was the time, when people slowly grew up, like for example some homosexuals revealed themselves and some nerds had complete breakdowns because they became aware that studying is not all there is to life. The trip was a catastrophe in a good way and we partied a lot. We were staying in Utrecht, not far from Amsterdam at a big youth hostel, that had a bar. There we set up everything and in a totally slushed state played some fucking Prog Jazz. This was really weird. In a way the first gig abroad. People climbed onto the roof and did all kinds of stupid shit, the way teenagers do. Of course I smoked some dope there. Well, I had also already tried some before. We had only been in Amsterdam for a couple of hours and had some time left on our own. The teachers gave us twenty guilders each, saying that's the money for your lunch, we meet again here in two hours. At that time I already had dread locks and listened to Reggae. While the others went to MacDonalds, I went into the next Coffee shop and seriously smoked up. The rest of the day went by in a haze. That was my first contact with foreign clean drugs. I'm sure Linde made the same kind of experiences. Because Linde was on the same Amsterdam trip, but not Mige.

I already knew Mige then, but he was two years older than me, he was at the Sibelius school and always hanging around with people the same age. I met Mige when I was in third grade, when I started playing bass. He was in fifth grade then. Because Mige also had a bass, we hung around quit a lot, but we just spent all the time playing our basses. Mige lived in Tuusula, so I didn't see him that often. Mige was the same as today. He fucking stunk, because he never really washed himself. Mige has not brushed his teeth in thirteen years. Honestly. And he never had any caries or anything, hard to believe, isn't it? Mige comes from an artistic family. He was a freak, who used to wear two different shoes, with incredibly long filthy hair and incredibly ugly clothes and had the strangest friends. I always considered myself to be a better bass player than Mige and therefore had no problem with him. Mige and I are still like night and day. We are so different, that we can never envy each other for anything. We're both very balanced, but in a different, really bizarre way.

When finally I was going to turn eighteen, I moved from home. My parents were paying and I could move into the center of the city. The way it happened was that I didn't follow the medication treatment although I had quite bad allergies and severe asthma, meaning I didn't take the necessary cortisone because I didn't think it useful. Then my parents got a dog, which is still alive. She is a Great Dane named Fido. She was saved because her owner wanted to have her put down, although he himself had kicked her in the head. At that time my cousin Pia was already a full veterinarian. Of course, she noticed that there was nothing wrong with the dog but with it's owner. So we adopted her. Fido was a bit shy at first, but now she gets along with every one in the family. So my parents brought the dog home and we decided to find out if I would have an allergic reaction. It had been years since I had had any problems. But then I had such a heavy asthma attack that I had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital where I spent two weeks on the same station with the lung cancer patients connected to a drip. After this my father rented the apartment as a kind birthday present. He came to the hospital and told me that there was this apartment and of course I was very happy. I moved directly from the hospital to the new flat and my parents could keep the dog. Shit. But still it was the good timing. The apartment was in the posh area, south of Bulevardi. A small place of 23 square meters. I'd rather not give you the exact address because Mige lives there now. It was an incredible feeling to move into your own place. One didn't need to fear the toilet door would open while masturbating, and one could sleep whenever he wanted, listen to music or play it, whenever one felt like it. This was real freedom. For me at least eighteen was a bloody good age, to leave home. I can only recommend it. My parents probably were disappointed when I quit school. But I have a feeling that my dad is more disappointed over the fact that until today I haven't passed my driver's license.

Name problems, satanic verses and prayers

part 1

In 1991, at the end of secondary school, Ville Valo had a band called His Infernal Majesty. Ville played the guitar parts on his six cord bass, Mige did the bass parts and different guys took turns at the drums.

At that time, the band His Infernal Majesty didn't last very long, but there was already a real promotion mood in the air. On the shores of the Vantaanjoki river, some promotion pictures were taken (they were quite weird, says Ville today), and for six months Ville had been pestering Juhani Merimaa, manager of the Tavastia Club, to let the band perform there. Finally, on New Year's Eve of 1992 they were allowed to perform at the Semifinal Club, situated right next to the Tavastia.

"We performed just this one time, and then the band dissolved because Mige had to do his military service" Ville remembers. It pissed me off to have to wait for Mige to get a leave. That was the end of the first beginning of HIM."

The name His Infernal Majesty was the result of endless discussions. First the trio thought, Kafferi would be a cool name for the band - "Kaffer" is the word that was used before for colored people, more precisely for an ethnic group belonging to the Bantu Negroes. The word was taken from H. P. Lovecraft's old books, which the band was deeply into. By today's standards Lovecraft's books are of racist tendency, but you have to see them in relation with the period when they were written, that's the twenties or thirties. Some of Ville's dark skinned friends found the name "Kaffer" too grotesque, so they decided to forget about it. "At that time I also drifted around as a street musician, I played the African drums with friends, for example on the Kauppatori (Helsinki's market place)", Ville says. "We collected money from Japanese tourists so we could buy a pack of L&M cigarettes. I used to hang out in the old part of Kumpula and at those places in Oranssi with hippies und reggae guys, the Finnish Rastafaris. They called Haile Selassie His Imperial Majesty. After a while I got fed up with that and started getting interested in Death Metal. All that Imperial Majesty shit made me sick, and then I read the book The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVeys, where he writes in a poem about His Infernal Majesty, if I remember it right. This had horror film vibes, which suited our Black Sabbath style music well".

The band spent much time thinking about His Infernal Majesty being a good name for them. Another shitty alternative was Black Salem - that's a combination of Black Sabbath, Salem cigarettes and Stephen King's book Salem's Lot. At one point Mige was so fed up with all the bickering about the name that he solved the problem in his personal straightforward way: with latex paint and in huge letters he wrote His Infernal Majesty onto the only Marshall amp they had and the question was not discussed any further.

Of course, His Infernal Majesty refers to Satan, and during his school years Ville was actually interested in the occult. He read books on the subject, but he never really felt like adoring Satan or getting actively involved with satanic stuff. Pekka Siitoin once proposed to skin a cat alive and cook it. But the idea didn't appeal to Ville. He thought that was too crazy, besides at the time he was still living at home. His mum surely wouldn't have appreciated finding a dead cat in her saucepan when she wanted to prepare a chicken curry.

Already in 1996 His Infernal Majesty became HIM, when the band released their first single. The entire name would have been too long for the cover as well as for the back cover, and specially since the name of the CD was 666 Ways To Love: Prologue. But there were also other reasons for shortening the name. In Canada there was a trash orchestra, named Infernal Majesty, which was active in the 80's and who started a revival tour in the 90's, and they wanted to avoid being mistaken with them.

Apart from that it would have been difficult for the Finnish public to remember the word combination of His Infernal Majesty, not to mention how to write and pronounce it. The band was also aware that it was unnecessary being provocative with such a name without having any proper links to the occult.

But still HIM was not completely free of suspicions of having Satanist relations. In Poland, for example, where the Catholic church is still a part of everyday life, there was a debate going on for a while about what kind of relationship HIM had with Satanists. But also in Finland, in the beginning, people talked about that. "1997, when the burning of churches in Norway escalated, we played at the Provinssirock festival for the first time on an island stage ", says Ville. " Dimmu Borgir and Black Sabbath performed at the same festival. The media made a huge fuss and claimed that churches were burning and Satanists were running wild. Some guy even threatened that a nearby wooden church would burn. So at the festival there were many Jehova's Witnesses who blessed our stage with holy water before we performed. At the time the police TV interviewed me about the whole thing. But there were no real problems, it was just one big laugh."

They went particularly for Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath's lead singer. The whole night long Jehova's Witnesses made a racket on the hotel corridors shouting continuously "God's saving power". The next day, when Ozzy flew home on his private jet, a group of Jehova's Witnesses was at the airport, to make sure the Messenger of the Evil was leaving the country. Ozzy showed them his bare ass and gave them the finger.

"At that time the active Finnish Satanists wanted to keep their distance from us publicly ", Ville says. "Their representative invited me to their place and we talked a lot about the subject. Since I didn't share the philosophy of his group and we didn't want to be involved otherwise with the whole thing, he wanted to publish a pamphlet on the subject, saying that from their point of view we deliver the wrong message etc. It's kind of funny actually, that neither the religious fanatics nor the Satanists like us. We're somewhere in between in an awkward position.

The same happened to us in Pohjanmaa. A bus came to our gig, it's windows pasted all over with Jesus comics. In the evening a crowd of young people was in front of the stage, praying with their eyes closed and holding up their bibles pointing to the stage. Then we had to stop playing because the audience with their lips painted black started to beat up the praying. Again we found ourselves somewhere in between and the whole thing was a big chaos.

The person, who surprised me most by trying to convert me to God, was the keyboard player Pete from Dingo, around the end of 2001. I went backstage at the Tavastia Club to get an autograph from Dingo. Earlier on I used to like the band, I had a Dingo scarf and all kinds of other stuff. But then I had been too young to see them perform live, so I went as an adult. And Pete started talking very seriously to me that I should start believing in God. Quite sadly he asked me, have you never been in a situation that you hadn't a single friend. I didn't lie, when I said, no, I have always had friends. Then Pete took a swig from his Karhu beer, turned his head away from the bottle and said in a quiet voice, I see. Then he didn't talk anymore. Everybody has to be happy their own way.





part 2

During my Rastafari period I tried hard to believe that Haile Selassie was a kind of Messiah, but I could not quite make it", Ville says. "God never put me to trial, it's always being said that happens to everyone a couple of times in life. Luckily I was not baptized, I'm a pagan. My mother is a Christian, but my dad isn't and me neither. I think it's cool, when kids can decide for themselves whether they want to be Christians or not. I never went to church, except with the school, and I had no religious education. But I did read the bible, the satanic and the Christian. I think the Old Testament is just boring. And the New Testament is not very interesting either. So many lies are told about the Holy Shroud of Turin, and the evidence that Jesus Christ ever existed is so thin, that I rather tend to believe that Jacques de Molay of the Templars was in that Turin shroud.

What happens with the bible is somehow the same as with Coca Cola. When there is enough of money for the marketing, you can get just about everyone to buy a certain brand. But Afri-Cola or Dr. Pepper also taste good, there are many alternatives. And what is also weird about the bible is that it has been translated from millions of languages into millions of different versions, and still they insist that it is the truth. Of course there is a piece of truth in any book, but for me they are just literature, a rather boring kind of fiction. I don't think people who believe are idiots, but they are not really intelligent, either. Everyone has to decide for themselves. I've always wondered, how such a diffuse book can so strongly influence people's lives. For the Finns the book should rather be the Kalevala, although I'm not a patriot. In national mythologies and religious books you can find some really good philosophical ideas, but also a lot of things that are plainly evident. ‚Thou shall not kill.' Isn't it quite obvious that nothing is worth killing for? ‚Thou shall not commit adultery' is a completely different story, it's more about details. This and all the other commandments are rather amusing".

HIM never took the number 666 very seriously. For the band it does not really have the meaning of the number of the Beast, but represents an element of second rate horror movies. Already on the band's first CD there was the song Your Sweet 666, which comes from the saying of a priest that, when you play Stairway to Heaven from Led Zeppelin the other way round, you hear the message "Here's to my sweet Satan 666". Your Sweet 666 is a homage to Led Zeppelin.

Foreign reporters have always been interested in the name HIM, and still ask over and over again how it was chosen. That's why the band got used to making up so many lies about it. When the boys band Hanson was popular, they used to say HIM stood short for Hanson Is Murdered. When Gas, who's a passionate ice hockey amateur, joined the band, HIM was suddenly short for Helsinki Ice hockey Maniacs. There are many interpretations. And each time they got away with those lies because the HIM members are such accomplished liars. They remain dead serious and so far the Pinocchio effect is not showing.

"Sometimes the name HIM also sucked", admits Ville. "But the name of a band is not all that important. If you take Eppu Normaali for example, what kind of a name is that? It comes from Ab Normal, a character from Mel Brooks' film Frankenstein Junior. The name doesn't aggress anyone, it doesn't mean anything. If an audience listens to HIM, they don't think of God or His Infernal Majesty. They think of our songs or of my heavy make-up in some cheap German video. Well, a music video." What really pissed HIM off, is that that they didn't have their name registered on time. They just didn't have the money for it. Companies with the name HIM in it or Him are all over the world. Ville Valo mentions that, in the 70s there was an English gay porno mag called Him, and in Germany there are women's wear shops which make wedding gowns, dresses and other clothes for transvestites. The web address www.him.com belongs to a metal recycling company in Arkansas, USA, with the name of Hummelstein Iron & Metal. The address www.him.org belongs to a religious group: Harvest International Ministries. Which, of course is to some degree an irony. The internet system Google comes up with as many as 57 million entries if you research Him. That's a lot to check out.

A problem is that there is another band called HIM in the US and they had their name registered in their country. Which means the Finnish band HIM has to perform under another name when they become active in the US. The American HIM band plays experimental jazz and has released albums, that had a few good reviews. It already happened that the HIMs of both continents got mistaken in cases of mail record orders. Sworn Eyes- and Our Point of Departure-CDs are no rare Ville Valo recordings but global rhythms, improvisations and jazz.

Boring childhood in the shadows of Classical music

pages 32 - 39


HIM´s bass player is named Mikko Henrik Julius Paananen but later he created this artistic name Michael Eros.
Mige was born December 19th year 1974 to an artistic family.
He has a big brother called Helmut and his favourite song is Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.
-I hade a fucking boring childhood, Mige laughs. My dad played and still plays Oboe and horn,
he has been playing in the city orchestra for a long time.
I wasn’t interested in classical music as a child but I still used to hang out at the Finlandia house
where they of course had lots of instruments. They were like toys and I liked to play with them.
We have always had a piano in our home and other instruments but still it didn’t effect
in the fact that I later became a musician.
My mom is a freelance actress, also other relatives from my moms side
are or have been in the acting business.
Guess it was thanks to my mom that I later on became interested in music,
not acting.Musicians,friends of my dad, were a lot more cooler.
My dad listen to a lot of classical music at home and my mom to some fucking operets.
I have a brother, which I now call Helmut because he has Helmut moustache.
Well, my brother was into break dance stuff in the early 80ies and later on hip hop
and I started to listen to that aswell.
I got to listen to so much classical music as a child that I started to hate it.
Break dance sounded much better in my ears.
I was raised in Oulunkylä, same as Linde. We lived there since I was 13 years old.
After that my parents got divorced and I lost touch with my father.
My mom moved to Tuusula and of course also I had to go.
It was okay, we had a rehearsal place there and that is also the place
where the first HIM actually got started.
In school I was pretty much like a normal school boy. I became wilder when I became a teenager.
There was a place at Vantaanjoki called ”Pikkukoski”
and people used to hang out there and so did I.
People drank beer there and sometimes someone got into a fight but nothing that bad.
I didn’t get involved with the bad guys, don’t know why, I somehow just didn’t like them.
Linde used to hang out with that kind of people more.
After school I went to study in Sibelius upper secondary school
even if music had been very interesting for me before that.
My dad had the same kind of attitude to me becoming a musician like the plumber has to his son
if he wants to continue in the same business. That attitude that you cant get a good way of living of it.
That could have been very true cause we surely had a lot of luck later with HIM that we went this far.
My dad didn’t give any bad advices and on the other hand one should do things
that really feels good even if it doesn’t always work out that great.
Even that is better than not try at all.
My mom then again thought that I had lost my mind when I told her that after school I will start to play music.
Well, I can understand it in a way cause the music we played in the very early days
didn’t exactly sound like The Beatles. We rehearsed in the basement and mom heard it upstairs
and said that well it is ok what we are doing.
Everything went the way it should have gone when I started to play music.
It would have never worked out for me if I had started to play classical music
or something where you have to rehearse like a maniac 15 hours a day.
After school I decided to move away from home. I didn’t like to live together with mom anymore
and I also tried to live with my dad. That didn’t work out either so I moved in at a friends place in Kallio,
near Karhupuisto.The time I spent there was fun as hell. We drank a lot and smoked some pot.
When I moved into that apartment I was a real Kallio freak. I thought that I will never move out from that place.
When I had lived there for a while, I realised that you can really get stucked in the area.
That melancholines really can eat you up. I stayed there for a year and felt like I was stucked already,
which can easily happen if you stay too long somewhere and really don’t have anything to do.
Kallio is definitely not the place where to freak out.
During the time when I hanged out in Kallio it didn’t go that well
either for some other friends of mine who played in some band.
But now wonder, the people from Oulunkylä wasn’t that cleaver minded in general.
Kinda funny cause Oulunkylä is supposed to be the ideal suburb
but not one of my friends has become a engineer or something like that.
The school of ”Ogeli” was a pretty weird one and pretty old fashioned with some snuff in the roof .
They also had music classes that not many of the schools in Helsinki had at that time.
Maybe that place later on drove people a bit mad and weird.
When I no longer had any buddies to play with, I had nothing.
One fine day I understood that this will simply lead to nothing, I moved alone to Vallila.
I have always liked that area and there I will probably end up later on as well.
I lived there for a while but didn’t go to work anywhere.
The employee’s office wanted me to go to work to Esso so I rather moved back to my mother
who at that time already lived in Helsinki. I also managed to get my certificate of matriculation,
I have no memory of that graduating party.
I hated that scene already then, you stay there with that white hat on and smile.
That Kallio time also taught me that alcohol isn’t a very good thing.
I got bored of drinking and for some reason alcohol doesn’t fit me that well either,
I get kinda mad. That kind of a guy I would myself want to hit if I see one.
I’m really embarrassed of myself when I’m drunk. My dad gets the same, he doesn’t drink at all anymore.
I can still hang out with people who drink and go to a bar, that’s not a problem at all
since I like to freak out when I’m sober as well.
When I was younger, I had to drink to be able to show some balls.
I simply like to show my balls, it gives you a nice feeling.
I later on started to do that when I was sober as well which wasn’t that healthy for my mind.
I learned that thing actually from the friend I lived with in Kallio.
He just stand in the line outside some hot god stand with his pants down,
ordering some food and talking to some people.
I couldn’t stop laughing, something inside me changed. I realised that was something real awesome.
Some people get mad if you show your balls which I cant understand at all.
Later on the whole band got into this as well and peeing everywhere.
Unfortunately when you have done it long enough, it looses the feeling and it doesn’t feel that good anymore.
That made you try to do it in all different ways, it’s like a drug to some other people I guess.
Always want more and more effective.
I have no regrets, my balls have been showed in so many weird situations. That hobby has almost died out now.
I do it sometimes but its not that fun anymore.
Oh, did I get lost in that subject Let’s go back to the school time after graduation.
I started to play with Ville in our first band called HIM, it ended up when I had to join the army

Rehearsal for the first album..(pee & poop stuff)

Pages 61 - 67


part 1



HIM´s first record was released the same day as Kari Vepsä won a Finnish schlager contest.
Soon also Antto came in the band and had to worship the peeing altar in the rehearsal room.
HIM´s first EP got the name 666 Ways To Love:Prologue.
Stigmata Diaboli,Wicked Game,Dark Secret Love and The Heartless were the chosen songs.
The picture on the cover is Ville´s mother when she was about 19 years old
and worked in a shoe store in Aleksi.
-The Ep was recorded in 5 days and not very well,Mige says.
A guy named Oki from a band called Charged plays the second guitar on that EP.
Oki had to leave when his tooth brush was found in Pätkä´s girlfriends house.
HIM would not have needed another guitar player anyway
when they had such a good bass player Mige says.
The publishing party of 666 Ways To Love was held in Tavastia klubi 19.10 1996.
-That was actually the very first gig I saw from HIM,says Asko Kallonen from BMG.
The guys put on a great live show and we said after that gig that they will become big one day.
There were no journalists that night but still Wicked Game was
played pretty much on radio after that evening at Tavastia.
The EP got into top 20 on the single charges so the guys started to rehearse seriously.
-I was surprised how much attention 666WTL got, Asko says
.Even more surprised I was about the attitude to work hard like Ville has.
This was the first time a band had come to this firm and
suggested that can we do a Demo tape of some songs.
Usually bands want to do a record right away.
They had already done a Demo with Hiili and I said that go ahead,
take all the time you need.
That EP turned out very good.
Tiina Vuorinen from Welldone happened to hear Wicked Game on radio one day
and thought that this sounds good, wonder from what country that band is from.
Katja Ståhl worked at BMG then and she gave the EP to Tiina.
-When Katja threw the EP on my desk,I listened to it right away wich I usually wouldnt do.
I thought that so this is the band from the radio
and I promised to take the guys under my wings if they just wanted to.
-I later met the guys and of course they were very excited,
Pätkä was the only one who talked.
The others were too shy and just stared at their shoes.
After getting to know them better I noticed that Ville was very serious about this thing,
he seemed much older to his age.
Many times when I was supposed to tell him something
he had already said it and I only had to say yes.
-I had myself no idea of the business how to sell gigs, says Ville
.I had only heard that Tiina had took care of bands like Hanoi Rocks
so I thought that was pretty fucking cool.
Then we met and had some coffee, signed the papers.
The cookies Tiina served us were so good and we were sold.
Before having anymore gigs they would need to rehears
so they found a place in Kruunuhaka (Helsinki).
At that time the band also decided to take a keyboard player in the band.
The guy they hired was Antto Melasniemi,Ville´s old buddy from school.
It still took a lot of time until Antto became an official member of the band.
Until the first record was released the record company still wrote
that HIM was Linde,Mige,Pätkä and Ville.
-Pätkä drank at that time a lot of white wine to loose some weight
so there was a lot of empty bottles in the corner of the room,says Mige.
It was not a long way to the bathroom,
maybe 10 meters but still too far so we started to pee in those bottles.
When those bottles became full, we started to pee in those empty boxes and later on the walls.

-We had this orange chair in the corner and we had drawn a picture of the band
on that chair and that became like a peeing altar for us.
We put this coffee can on the chair and it was supposed to be filled up with pee and poop,
to kinda bring us good luck.
I did shit in that can and everyone else spit and peed in it.
There was no sweat there, that was too lame.
-It was fun to watch it ”grow”, how the different stuff in there found eachother.
There were many layers after a while,
we also put some plastic to cover it cause we
really wanted to see what happened with all that stuff.
-It started to smell so bad in that room after a while
so we decided to get rid off that altar.
We spread the shit over other garbage and
some also fell on Pätkä´s drums and some on Asko´s things


Part 2




The narrow minded man who rented that place for us kicked us out
after finding out what we had been doing there.
The rumour was spread pretty fast around so we had a bit difficulties finding a new rehearsing room.
We had to keep it down for a while.
HIM also did their very first video during that time.
The chosen song was of course Wicked Game and it was filmed in Arabian puisto.
They also had Ville´s parents dog in it and Ville wears a suit and holds a glass of red wine.
The other guys were fooling around and playing in the background.
You cant see Antto on that video cause he was the one who filmed it.
Some guy they knew did edit the clip and then they took it to Jyrki, the Finnish music program.
Later on they made a bit more professional video of that song in Germany,
even Antto can’t be seen in that either cause the director had forgot
that they have a keyboard player in the band.
Well there is a very short clip of him but he isnt playing in the video.
In Summer 1997 we thought of a new single release, which song it would be.
Asko Kallonen do remember when Ville gave him a tape with 4 new songs,
including The Beginning Of The End and Don’t Fear The Reaper
which was a huge hit of Blue Öyster Cult in the 70ies.
They thought that Don’t Fear The Reaper worked so well
that Asko would have wanted to release that as the next single.
After thinking a bit more about it, that didn’t sound as a very good idea after all.
They did not want HIM to be known as a cover band.
The other songs were really good songs for an album
but there were no song to suit as a single so they thought to wait
and see again after the summer.
We decided that the first album would come out before Christmas
so the summer could be used for rehearsing and recording.
HIM did have a few gigs meanwhile, the first one sold by Tiina Vuorinen was in may at Lepakko
and the band got a huge payment of 4000 old Finnish marks (670 euros).
HIM did have 3 gigs that spring.
In the summer it was time for the first festivals: Nummirock, Ilosaarirock and Ankkarock.
In august they did also some club gigs.
-When we came home from that festival in Nummirock,
this guy named Nalle Österman
who also played drums in a band did sleep in our bus, Mige tells.
For some reason he forgot his boots there,
he did ask for them back but we never returned them.
The boots were lying in our rehearsal place and of course we did shit and pee in them,
we didn’t have any other places to do that anymore.
We also made his boots to an altar, like the old coffee can.
For some reason Nalle never wanted his boots back.
HIM also created this small group inspired by their hobby.
It was Linde´s job to write down the rules cause his girlfriend at that time had a computer.
Everyday you had to pee in a different place,
no toilets were allowed anymore after you had signed the paper.
-We had a big goal, Ville says
.Linde had still his job left which did some air condition for buildings like Hartwall Arena.
We found the drawings on the computer where you could find the best place
to put some poop in the air-condition tubes
so we decided to break in to Hartwall Arena that night and fulfilled our goal.

Ville´s tattoos


pages 152-157


Ville Valo´s huge tattoo on his left arm is familiar from many pictures
but he also has other ones.
My first tattoo was the heart on my right hand wich I took when I was 20.
It started when I met Hyge,
who makes tattoos and when he moved from Oulu to Helsinki.
Later the same guy has played guitar in a band called United Underworld
where Ville from Sub-Urban Tribe was the singer.
We became good pals with Hyge and we started to hang out and drink together.
I asked him if he wanted to make a heart tattoo for me.
The next day he made one.
I was attracted to the shape of hearts and I absolutly wanted one.
There is no more of an filosofic explanation to it,
its just a nice picture and in a nice place.
I did not even think of getting tattoos before that even if I have always liked them.
That thing was certanly not an addiction.Later on I got hooked on them.
The next pic was the one on my lower belly.
It started out when this TV program called Jyrki asked me if they could film it
if I wanted to have a new one and they would also pay for it.
I thought that it could be good for Hyge when he was just starting out
with his own business in town.
Then it was made in front of TV cameras.
The third one is this fucking left arm.It was a pain in the ass to make it.
We had some promo stuff and gigs going on in Germany
at the same time so it took 4 months to finnish it.
One session was about 4 or 5 hours,
we drank a lot of beer during the making process
so it was fun but it still took away too long.
Its not quite finnish even yet,there are still some things that should be fixed.
I had once this thought that I wanted a fucking big pic on my arm,
in the first place it should have been on both arms
and continue on the back.
It just took so long to make one arm
so we never even started to make the other one.
It doesnt actually mean anything,
its just an ornament to make the arm look beautiful.
I have my tattoos in places that if I wanna hide them, I can.
They may not be suitable to all occasions.
One German guy called Hyge a while ago and
said he wanted a tattoo like mine on the arm.
Hyge said that it cant be made,
that one is unique but I can make a similar one if you pay me 4000 Euros.
The guy never called back again.
The next tattoo was the S letter around my nipple.
It was a birthday present for my girlfriend I was dating then.
I had been on tour for 6 months and I thought that mayby this
was a better idea than to bring some roses home.
Im not that good in saying that I Love You.It did work pretty well.
I think its kinda scary when some people has thought
this letter might mean something magical.
I have seen a few girls who has made the same tattoo as mine,
one wich was made for my girlfriend!
I also have this small Heartagram on my neck.
It was also one of those free ones,this German mag
called Bravo made an article of making it.
It took about 15 minutes to make,its that simple.
On the cover of Razorblade that pic is in a bigger size.
On my dick I have this small Heartagram aswell,it didnt hurt at all.
It did hurt much more when they made The Cosmic Pope.
My feet arent ready yet,will get some other one at some point.
When my feet looks as heavy as my arm,then Im in balance.
Im not the only one of us who has tattoos.Mige has some and I think 3 on his arms.
Linde has 1 on his arm and 1 on his knee.
Gas has Heartagram on his foot,
poor guy probably thinks he can never get fired now.
Juska also has a Heartagram,
he never gets rid of this brotherhood even if he would want to.
Burton,Antto or Pätkä dont have any.
I havent regret any of these,I like them and they are a part of my personality.
Still I also like bodies that has no tattoes or no piercing,
not even ear rings.Almost every teenager has some these days.
I dont like piercings on tits or dicks,they dont look good.
If it makes your partner enjoy it or it feels nice wanking it then its ok
but it has to have some meaning to make one,not just for the looks.
Once I actually thought about to take a Prince Albert (dick piercing)
as a present for my girlfriend but I never did.
Or actually Sin City was closed that day.
I have this feeling that the only thing I might regret in my life someday
could be these tattoos or ear rings cause a human body is fucking beautiful
when nothing has been made to it,when its natural.
But now when I already look like this,why stop here.
Think about how people will look at the old people homes in 20 years or so.
There will be tons of tattoos and piercings jingeling on old,ugly dicks.

Ville about being famous

pages 239 - 243

When a Finn gets enough alcohol,
he is brave enough to meet a celebrity and come to advice him.
When a fan gets scissors in her hands, it can be much more dangerous.
-I don’t notice it in Helsinki that people do recognize me.
Everyone here stares at each other, no matters are they famous or not.
It’s nice to just sit and watch different people around you.
Sure, I have learned how to get rid off unwanted people
who comes and talks with me.
Its something that has to be done in this business,
to learn to do that kind enough.
Not that much in Helsinki but if we happen to be somewhere else in Finland.
When people get drunk, they come and explains things that I just cant listen to.
Anyway I just can’t tell them to fuck off, that’s the most terrible thing to say.
Well I do that sometimes but not that often.
I rather just walk away myself and tell them that there’s someone I have to meet or whatever
,I’m very sorry and I don’t take the beer you wanted to buy.
If you take the beer, it means you should stay and at least talk for a while.
A good example of the shitty part to be famous.
An old friend who plays in a punk band walked towards me
in a bar after not seeing him in ages.
He was so drunk and we talked for a while.
The point of it all was that he wanted to show to some girls at his table
that he knew me so he asked me to join them.
I stayed for a while but then I went to another table where my friends were.
After a while this guy comes back and tells that there are
a few guys over there who don’t believe that I know you, could you come and say hi?
Then I just told him that no thank you.
I have never understood the fact that what the fuck does it mean if you know someone or not.
Its ok if someone just asks for an autograph and then leaves,
not starting to tell how good or bad we are, then I only get bored.
When I’m abroad I can usually be just like anyone else
because we don’t have time to walk around that much.
We are usually in the hotel, at the gig place or in the bus.
One time in Camden, London, some guys came and asked if I play in a band.
There’s also not the same drinking mentality in other countries
like in Finland that first we get drunk, then we can talk.
I mean you can talk without being drunk also.
Also in other countries people don’t tell you to fuck off.
If I don’t like someone’s looks or whatever I don’t go and talk to him either.
If my face happens to be on magazine covers,
it doesn’t mean that people really knows who I am.
I don’t tell anything personal in interviews and I lie all the time.
The fans usually leave me alone except a few.
One girl we call The Polish Motherfucker,
a freak who has been following us for a long time.
Few times when we have left the hotel very early in the morning
she sits in the lobby and just stares at us.
Once we sat in a bar in Reeperbahn when Mige got this terrifying look
and then we suddenly heard this noise when someone cuts with a scissor,
there she stood with my hair in her hands and cried and laughed in the same time.
Then I almost did hit a girl.
I have never even talked with her but she seems to be obsessed anyway.
Maybe I remind her of her dead grandmother or something.
Sure, someone thinks I’m selfish and only thinks what’s best for me.
I can be pretty hard when it comes to that but I have always been like that.
It’s a negative side of my nature and I try to get rid of it.
Also my profession has something to do with it,
there is just so much going on around me.
Also my youth has to do with it, we got to play with the guys very fast in different countries
and everything happened pretty quickly.
Some guys has tried to reach this for 10 years, we were just lucky I guess.
On the other hand I can also be critical about why some bands never made it.
Of course record companies, good connections
and luck plays a big deal but still its not enough.
You also have to think about other things than the music,
you have to think about the image and create a picture
and stay behind it, no matter what.
I have many friends in the music business
and come along with different kind of people.
There is also bitterness in this business am also a basic jealous person
as we Finns are and I get pissed off when some musician like
Darude has his songs in the charts around Europe.
Then again you just have to like the guys from Bomfunk Mc:s,
they have worked very long to get to this point.


part 2



Fame doesn’t depend on how much you show your face in the magazines.
I hardly never get any invitations to some parties anymore
cause I never go and people are used to it already.
I rather spend my spare time with my friends at the corner bar.
I couldn’t care less to go to those parties;
most of the people there just suck anyway.
There are not many famous persons outside the rock business that I know
but one nice one is Henry Saari, he is a good friend of Ismo Alanko.
He is not a best buddy of mine but he is nice to talk with,
have a few beers and just hang out.
When he is not a musician, we don’t talk about that
and since I don’t sing about the porn business,
we don’t have to talk about his work either.
I’m glad the record company doesn’t expect me to go to their parties anymore.
When BMG Finland had a Christmas party just after we had released our first album,
we went to the party to see what it is all about.
The after party was in one of the restaurants in centre of Helsinki.
There was also Niko Ahvonen and Maki from Aikakone.
Linde doesn’t like Aikakone that much.
He went to”talk” to Maki after drinking a half bottle of Jack Daniels
and said he will kick his butt later that evening.
Then when Linde was just starting to hit Maki,
Katja Stål from BMG came and tried to calm him down
but she was the one who got hit by Linde in the end.
I took Linde away from that place before things had gotten even worse.
This happened the day before our first gig in Tavastia..
We thought that we would go there and check it out
if there was some band playing that night.
Suddenly Linde was disappeared when we had been inside for a while.
I saw him making his own drink in the wrong side of the bar
and he was kicked out from there of course very soon.
Linde got pissed off and he started to yell that”I will never play in this fucking place”,
forgetting that we actually would have our very first gig there the next evening..
After Tavastia, we went to Lost & Found and Linde promised to behave.
He went to actually order a drink this time, took it,
walked towards the wall and took this big framed Robert Mapplethorpe painting down
and broke it in 2 pieces, fell backwards and passed out on the floor.
They almost called the cops but I convinced them that we can work this out somehow,
I took Linde home and the next day Linde girlfriend’s mother
went and paid for the damage he had done.
Now that’s a reason why we even didn’t get an invitation
at some point from BMG Finland.
The other guys have a pretty healthy opinion about being famous.
Mige is from an artistic family and he could not care less
about all this going on around him.
He hates photo sessions and making videos.
Linde doesn’t want to give any interviews
and isn’t interested because he is a very quiet person.
He talks when he has been drinking enough.
Gas then again loves the promotion stuff.
I can imagine though that the press isn’t that interested
to hear 5 hours about ice hockey, food, his drum set or about HC punk.

Ville Valo – A Millionaire Without A Bed

pages 244 - 245

The guys from HIM owns Vosko Oy which made over 1 million Euro year 2000.
The firm pays salary to the band the same amount every month,
regarding are they on tour or not.
Vosko Oy is a very well taken care of company.
It also takes care of HIM merchandise and the Heartagram web site.
Daniel Lioneye album was released under Vosko Records.
Actually there is no record company yet called Vosko Records officially
but the guys dreams about make it official
so they can release other crazy side projects under their own label.
The other firm is called Heartagram Oy wich handles Ville Valo´s stuff.
You can call Ville as the first Finnish Rock millionare actually.
He says that unfortunally it made it more difficult
to become a millionare since we got Euro´s.
But he says he do has some income for sure.
Thats why Ville writes all the lyrics himself.
He wants all the money.
When I lived in Pietarinkatu I had to count every single penny all the time.
To the day budget I had cigarettes and 1 bread which I warmed up in the oven
after I had put some butter on it.
Now it feels nice when I do have some more money.
You can go out for dinner every once and a while and
dont have to count the price of a beer bottle.
Someday all this will end so why dont enjoy it now.
Ville tells he still lives a quite simple life.
When he dont have a drivers license,he dont have a car either.
He also complains about the high rent of his apartment
and is thinking about to move to a smaller one.
I dont buy loads of stuff.If you spend too much money it just gives a bad feeling.
I already feel bad if I buy too many cds.
Should start to copy them from others but thats againts my moral.
Its also stupid to pay 150 Euros for a Gaultier t-shirt
when you get just as nice ones when you dye Mige´s old t-shirts.
I dont even have a bed at home,I sleep on the couch or on the floor.
No curtains either,just big black plastic bags.Ofcourse I have sometimes thought
that a Hästens bed would be nice but the floor or the couch is also a good reason
why not take a girl home with me after a night out.
You really have to have a very good reason to bring home one.
On the other hand I am a very un-sexual person at my sparetime.
Living this way the music I make becomes sad and melancolic.
No food,no curtains,no bed.I have nothing in my home.
Well I have soap and my stereo.

Ville tells that sometimes it can be shown that he do has some money
when he buys his friends drinks in the bar.
I dont buy them women but beer´s or cigaretts.
In Finland theres no point to live a glamourus life.
You get these non-called,unwanted buddies wich I hate.
That some friend of mine earns 1500 euros in a month,
why should I tell that I can spend that in 1 day.
He do wish that someday he owns their family first summer house/cabin.
Would be nice to have a place where you could be fishing and have a small boat.
A nice hideaway place where you could go with an old guitar to make some sad songs
while the water would turn to ice.
I would very much also wanna get into porn buisnes,just like my dad.
That interests me actually much more than some record company work
which takes so much time and effort.Porn business is very interesting,
especially now when we have the internet.
My main idea would be that I would hire some good workers
to make special made dildos and vibrators.
You know design stuff,like Bang & Olufsen but it would just be porn.
If you would have a dildo made of eben tree,
wouldnt that be something to show to your buddies.

and here is a short translation from what the author , Juho Juntunen says about working with the guys & the book, in Soundi magazine november 2002 :

"Ville Valo called me last february and asked me out for a beer.I was at that time in another city and had some vodka so I couldnt go but we met the next night when I was in Helsinki again.So we went for a beer to different bars and Ville showed me his cosmic pope tattoo on his leg.At some point we were both getting sentimental and Ville asked me if I wanted to make this book about HIM.Some other people had also asked Ville if they could write a book but the guys had say no at that time.I thinked about it over the night and the next evening we were having a night out again with Ville and then I told him yes,I wanna write the book.Ive been asked before to write some books about bands but they didnt intrest me.HIM in the other hand did intrest.I wasnt a fan directly but I had always liked the attitude the guys has and their records and also that everything has happened so fast.In the upcoming book you wouldnt have to write about the boring years when nothing did happen.
Now someone may think that well this is a dream job.Spend nights with the guys having a few beers,talking & make some money.Sure I did all that but everything wasnt still like a dream.Even if HIM was basically on a break at that time,they still did the Finnish tour and a couple of gigs in UK so it was pretty hard to put up a schedule to meet up,especially when Ville never answers your phonecalls.Also you would have to write and sit at nights in front of the computer.Then you had to go through the material with the band,listen to lots of tapes full of interviews and also try to reach the former members of the band.Theres nothing bad to tell about the HIM guys.I got probably through this pretty easily when Mige and Linde had decided to spend a complete sober period so they didnt drink any alcohol,both can be pretty unpredictable when they are drunk.Ville didnt do that and he also tought me in the first place that you should always try to urinate beside the toilet.That gives a freedom,theres a message in that.We met many times at my place and I always checked out the toilet in the morning and was pretty careful.
Ofcourse we did also fight with Ville a few times but it wasnt that bad.He told me a couple of times to go to hell but I didnt.At times we also spent the night out in bars when we didnt work on the book.I also fought with the publisher Kaisa cause she did have an unplesent way to tell that you also have to work at some point.With Kaasu I didnt fight.We listened to Matti Nykänen when we were drunk and he tought me Swedish and talked about hc-punk.There wasnt much sencured in the book.One part was left out,the one that was supposed to start the book out but mayby it was good it didnt make it after all.
The first thing that came out in public before the book was released was the headline " Ville Valo tried to kill himself",front page in Ilta Sanomat.That headline didnt thrill Ville or his parents.But the release party was fun.Burton celebrated at the same day his birthday and he got a cake formed like an ass.Me and Ville told in the ATV interview that we have moved together and we sit naked at home with only a hood over our heads.Mige then again told STT that I had moved with him and we sit and watch tv together at nights. Ilta Lehti wrote that Ville doesnt wanna see me for one year. Well tonight I will meet him again. But I wont sit naked with him cause Im busy getting to watch tv with Mige.


Ville and Mige about the author Juho Juntunen in interview at Tammerfest 2002


Question : And soon the book about you should be published. Do you take part in it?

Ville: Well, sort of.

Mige: He's very famous writer.

Ville: He's the most famous Finnish rock journalist - Juho Juntunen. He's pretty cool fellow.

Mige: He likes to suck people hard.

Ville: He did it last night.

Mige: Yes, I know. It's pretty scary.

Ville: And he's got a band called "Satana and the God Fuckers".



Juho Juntunen website :

http://www.juho.com/


The book is re-released in 2007 and can be ordered online :

http://www.bookplus.fi/product.php?isbn=9789510273043&&lang=EN

Wow, thanks for the whole translation. Don't have time to read it now, but the little bit I did read was funny.

much of it you must already know ,because this is the source of most of Him biographies , but it's a great read , and thought it would be nice to have it here
great collectible this book , and a very good thing it was reprinted , i hope they will consider making an official translation too and release it in english

do you have it?

i couldn't help myself after seeing these gorgeous close-up pics and I just ordered it !

where from? i want it , too

from the link i posted before :

http://www.bookplus.fi/product.php?isbn=9789510273043&&lang=EN

it's 40 euros including the shipping from Finland to Romania

let's hope it will come soon !
haha , my coleagues at work told me i'm crazy to buy a book that i can't read , but for me it's a treasure , isn't it

of course it is, being it the history of what we hold most dear to us: H.I.M.

Well hope you'll enjoy it

And you payed by card? Did they request PayPal?

no ,without paypal ,by card directly

I'm so happy!!!!!!!!!!! I got mine today!!!!!

beautiful

i received my notification too , but did not have the time to go get it , maybe this weekend ..

forgot to tell i've got mine too
i think i'll post some more pics of it as soon as i have time to do it
the surprise is that it is a pretty big book ( i thought is smoller from the pics ) , the package was of about 1 kilo and a half
and it's beautifull , and makes me think seriously of learning suomi ..i don't know but as i see it , there are lot o things missing from the translations made untill now

yes, it's really big, it's about the size of a magazine, just that it's square, and it has a lot of pages, I don't think it's translation in English is even complete.

hellen, I hope you'll enjoy it!

I have started to learn some finnish, it's a little hard, but I hope I'll manage... I won't be able to learn it properlly until after I'll finnish my exams though

this is good , if we learn , it will be of much help when we'll go to Tavastia ,
which we'll do , i feel it !!