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HIM - WE LOVE SABBATH
Interview by Paolo Bianco
H.I.M., His Infernal Majesty. And yet the two members of HIM seated in front of me in a rainy day of the end of September don't seem so diabolic: the singer Ville Valo and the bassist Migé Amour (his real name is Mikko Henrik Julius Paananen, would you think is other than finnish?) are in Italy to promote the band's new album "Venus Doom" and stay quiet around a table, drinking ginger and water or smoking while they answer my questions. They are not diabolic, then, but they are damnedly intelligent: very seldom I met an artist able to quote Voltaire, Dante and The Holy Bible, ant to know when it's the moment of laughing at himself as well. But Ville Valo is like this: far more well disposed by person than you could ever imagine, always ready to laugh (it's a pity: with a finnish humor!!!) and to talk about his passion for the extreme metal, while Migé is drawing on a paper and speaks just to make some specification. I think HIM, even in the sector of metal, are known by everyone as the inventors of "love metal" with all that such a definition brings (accusations of being 'commercial', teenagers and goth fans and so on). The risk is to lose the real point, which is music. About this everyone has an opinion, but I think it's music the most surprising element in the band's new album, since the atmosphere is changed and the Black Sabbath's influence can be heard in a clear and unexpected way. Let's start just from here....let's talk about music, finally!
MS: "VENUS DOOM" MARKS A WELL DEFINED MUSIC CHANGEMENT, TOWARDS DOOM ATMOSHPERES IN PURE BLACK SABBATH STYLE. DO YOU THINK YOUR FANS ARE READY FOR SUCH AN ALBUM?
MIGE': We were ready and that's the point.
VILLE: We obviously are grown up either as a band or as people, so for us it is impossible going on to compose songs in the same way we did at "Razorblade Romance" times. Many of our fans are grown up with us so they'll see this our new step towards tha maturation as a natural process of evolution. Other people, who maybe knows us for a short time...I don't know how they'll take the cd. It will be a good test, maybe, to understand how deep they are interested in our band.
MS:DO YOU THINK ANY FOURTY YEARS OLD FAN OF BLACK SABBATH WOULD EVER APPRECIATE YOUR NEW CD?
MIGE': We will know it during our tour. It would be great if after a gig someone around fifty years old comes closer with his jeans jacket full of patches of Meat Loaf and Lizzy Borden saying our concert brought him back in time to thirty years ago, to the Black Sabbath days...
VILLE:We're getting closerand closer to that period of life that many call "middle-age crisis", when you go back in time to re-discover the myths you had when you were a teen ager, hoping to feel the same. For us, this means listening to Black Sabbath, we listened to Sabbath again and again before entering our studios to record "Venus Doom" and the effects can be heard. Obviously we don't even think to recreate those sounds, but we clearly are inspired by them, yet keeping our mood and our peculiar sound.
MS: I CAN REMEMBER THAT AT YOUR LAST ITALIAN CONCERT, TOWARDS THE END, VILLE STARTED A SORT OF MANTRA INCITING THE AUDIENCE TO REPEAT 'BLACK SABBATH', WHILE THE BAND PLAYED A JAM SESSION IN A DOOM STYLE. THE AUDIENCE SEEMED QUITE PUZZLED THEN, MANY DIDN'T SEEM TO KNOW EVEN WHO 'BLACK SABBATH' WERE...
VILLE:It's not important if that experiment has failed. Maybe in the whole club, which was sold out, just 200 people knew who Black Sabbath are and finished to appreciate more our gig. Maybe other 200 went back home and took information about the band I mentioned, discovering a band that, according to me, changed the history of metal. The fact is: if I succeed in showing to someone that there is good music out there even if it's no more on the charts and has been composed thirty years ago...well I'd say my mission is done!
MS: AGAIN, ABOUT YOUR MUSICAL SUGGESTIONS, I REMEMBER LAST SPRING DURING AN ENGLISH FESTIVAL YOU PLAYED A COVER OF NAPALM DEATH'S 'YOU SUFFER' AND THEIR FANS DIDN'T SEEM TO APPRECIATE IT...
VILLE: It's all about having sense of humor or not. 'You suffer' is a song that lasts 20 seconds, if I wouldn't have announced it as a Napalm Death's cover none have noticed it, but we are great fans of this band so we wanted to pay homage to them in their hometown, Birmingham.
MS: LET'S TALK ABOUT THE ALBUM. FIRST OF ALL I KNOW THAT A 'SAMPLE' OF THE CD HAS BEEN HEARD AT THE END OF JULY IN THE "TRANSFORMERS" SOUNDTRACK WHERE THERE WAS 'PASSIONS KILLING FLOOR'. BUT HONESTLY: DO YOU THINK IT WAS THE RIGHT PLACE, AND THE RIGHT MOVIE, TO RELEASE YOUR SONG?
MIGE': Well we don't care so much where our songs appear, we are interested in reaching the largest possible number of people. They said
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