The Jump Into the Basement Hole - article translation continued
Hei guys, I just though I might continue noone76’s translation of the Starfacts article, since so many of you seem to be keen on reading it.
Photo’s not mine, of course. The ‘story‘ hasn’t reach that stage just yet, but anyway....
2. The Jump Into the Basement Hole
Finding the exact starting point isn’t easy, because -as always when something fascinating happens- coincidence has not only a hand, but also its feet and ears in it. Same holds true for HIM.
In 1984, the band HIM didn’t yet exist. Just like any other seven-year-old boys, Ville, Linde and Migé attended school in their hometown Helsinki. In discos and at parties, the older ones listened to Talking Heads, Duran Duran, Van Halen and Billy Idol. The Sisters of Mercy had only just released their single “Walk Away” and if you were brave, you put on Judas Priest -which played for about twenty seconds until someone stopped it because they wanted to fidget to Kajagoogoo instead - hard times for rockers. Listening to Slayer still was considered some kind of perversion by the lower and good middle class. But given the strength displayed by the whole scene, all missionary work by the caring members of YMCA where foredoomed to failure, once you acquired a taste for it.
In a flat in Helsinki, Ville Hermanni Valo (born 22.11.1976) sat in front of their parents’ TV with his little brother. A live video of American hard rock legend KISS was running. Though Gene Simmons, just like the rest of the band, dropped his mask for the “Lick It Up” album, the bass player still maltreated his instrument just like he always had and stuck out the gigantic organ that supposedly is his tongue at the audience. Ville could barely believe it - he was infected. “I saw him there for the first time and I realised that I wanted to be like Gene Simmons! It was incredible, he was the coolest guy I’d seen so far”, he later remembers.
The hard rock scene had reached a glamorous peak in those years that some even call its zenith until sometime, everyone had to accept that there was more. Coming from the US and England, new heroes crawled slowly into the limelight; the alternative scene started its suspiciously-eyeballed ascend from underground to public. Some years still had to pass until they took over mainstream, but it didn’t go without notice that the rise of diversity and strange genre categories had started.
It was in 1984 that Ville tentatively perambulated between the shelves of a record shop when the small speakers blasted a song, “I’ve Had Enough”, the opening track of the sixteenth KISS album “Animalize”. Nothing special for KISS, really, just another album of their already long career, another song that effortlessly got in the long line of the band’s classics. But for Ville, it was like a hammer blow, a turning point and that album became his first own record - infectious music.
Even if he most likely didn’t know for what his plea laid the foundation for, Ville begged for it so long that his parents bought him a second hand bass guitar and a small combo amplifier. At that age, you change your hobbies as often as you change your underwear and you try out everything until you stick with something. That’s at least what his parents most likely thought. If they were hesitant at first to buy him the instruments, it was probably more because of the amp than because of the bass - until now, a completely ordinary story.
Ville remembers his first instruments: “They were a Gibson SG copy form DIA and a small Marshall combo, I don’t remember the specific series. The bass was full-sized, bigger than I was, but I was totally happy and ultimately played every day since then. Somehow, I already felt that I wanted to become a rock musician.”
He wasn’t the only one his age interested in music, so he was bound to meet like-minded people at school sooner or later. Ville met Mikko Lindström. They got to know each other at music school that provided, apart from the lessons, also the usual arsenal of instruments. Mikko quickly committed himself to the guitar and Ville continued to play the bass diligently. But there also were all those other instruments that interested him, too: drums, guitar, virtually everything he could get a hold of and could handle to some degree, he took a shot at.
At this school, there was another boy two years older than Ville, that was equally into music: Mikko Paananen. They met up regularly, talked about everything and anything and of course music. The longer the three talked about it, the more they became to realise that they wanted to get something up. To hear some starchy teacher talk about the theoretical basics of something they imagined much more exciting themselves was not their cup of tea, anyway. After all, what did they have a bass, a guitar and drums for?
Ville: “I hated school and school probably hated me back, even though I liked some subjects like history and maths. Drawing and music where OK, too. When I was nine, they forced us to lean Swedish, but I wasn’t keen on it at all, so I still can’t speak one word of it today. It’s not that I didn’t like the language itself, but the teacher was a kind of pin-up model, it was kind of strange, anyway. English had always been much easier for me, because I already knew it from television; in Finland, they don’t dub American movies, they just put in subtitles. Actually, I always had pretty good marks, but the teachers hated me because I fought with other students once in a while. I was some kind of misfit, really.”
If you want to borrow the usual clichés, then that are pretty good presuppositions for a rock star career, but still not all of them. If you know what you want, you just have to get started, and that’s what Ville and Mikko Lindström, nicknamed Linde, did. Migé’s first band was called Bullshit Ass, and he later describes that this name mirrored the situation and the feeling he was in for a long time pretty accurately. Ville and Linde, on the other hand, formed B.L.O.O.D. in 1986. They were ten years at the time and met up in the afternoons to try and cover songs of then-trendy hard rock and alternative bands.
In each and every Interview HIM gave in the last past years, they named, apart from KISS and Black Sabbath, countless other bans to be their favourite influences. Ville, Linde and Migé did the same thing everyone did: They listened to a new band and if they liked it, it automatically became another, new, small influence.
But back to B.L.O.O.D.: This project might well have been a liberating beginning, but it was far from satisfying. It was, however, a good opportunity for the two boys to get used to the principles of a band, to play together, to become a team, to convey own ideas to the other. Yes, it was the perfect rock’n’roll playground for Ville and Linde, playing Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” with the amps turned up all the way and thus getting rid of all the aggressions and forgetting about the tedious mornings at school. A completely ordinary hobby band, still a completely ordinary story, apart from the young age of its protagonists. But they didn’t want to end up as an ordinary story, so in 1989, Ville and Linde made a decision.
They were fed up with always just covering other bands’ songs, so they brought a new project into being, which they hoped to be more fun: Kemoterapia. So Ville and Linde at risked making the break from a sheer cover band to something of their own, but who should they make a band with just two people in to work? They needed more musicians. It became apparent that it was a big advantage that Ville had never been solely interested in playing bass, even if it was his main instrument. Depending on who was there in the fast-changing line-up, he could switch from bass to drums, which happened fairly often, since the experimental phase of Kemoterapia was pretty long.
Ville: “I used to play drums and Linde played guitar back in the day, that was the beginning. We really needed new songs, but apart from me, no one in the band wanted to write, so I ‘sacrificed’ myself eventually. The first things I ever wrote myself were in the beginning mostly like the stuff we listened to, like Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. What I didn’t dare back then was writing own lyrics, that was something somebody else had to do. It went that way for some time, but at some point, Linde and I came to realise that this band wouldn’t lead us anywhere. It was more punk and friendship with all the guys there that kept us in the band. If you looked at it matter-of-factly, they didn’t know as much about music than we did, and they didn’t master their instruments as well. That was the main reason why Linde and I eventually left the band to start something new together with Migé.”
So, that was part two of the fairytale that lead up to the band we all love today :)
Love, liz
Photo’s not mine, of course. The ‘story‘ hasn’t reach that stage just yet, but anyway....
2. The Jump Into the Basement Hole
Finding the exact starting point isn’t easy, because -as always when something fascinating happens- coincidence has not only a hand, but also its feet and ears in it. Same holds true for HIM.
In 1984, the band HIM didn’t yet exist. Just like any other seven-year-old boys, Ville, Linde and Migé attended school in their hometown Helsinki. In discos and at parties, the older ones listened to Talking Heads, Duran Duran, Van Halen and Billy Idol. The Sisters of Mercy had only just released their single “Walk Away” and if you were brave, you put on Judas Priest -which played for about twenty seconds until someone stopped it because they wanted to fidget to Kajagoogoo instead - hard times for rockers. Listening to Slayer still was considered some kind of perversion by the lower and good middle class. But given the strength displayed by the whole scene, all missionary work by the caring members of YMCA where foredoomed to failure, once you acquired a taste for it.
In a flat in Helsinki, Ville Hermanni Valo (born 22.11.1976) sat in front of their parents’ TV with his little brother. A live video of American hard rock legend KISS was running. Though Gene Simmons, just like the rest of the band, dropped his mask for the “Lick It Up” album, the bass player still maltreated his instrument just like he always had and stuck out the gigantic organ that supposedly is his tongue at the audience. Ville could barely believe it - he was infected. “I saw him there for the first time and I realised that I wanted to be like Gene Simmons! It was incredible, he was the coolest guy I’d seen so far”, he later remembers.
The hard rock scene had reached a glamorous peak in those years that some even call its zenith until sometime, everyone had to accept that there was more. Coming from the US and England, new heroes crawled slowly into the limelight; the alternative scene started its suspiciously-eyeballed ascend from underground to public. Some years still had to pass until they took over mainstream, but it didn’t go without notice that the rise of diversity and strange genre categories had started.
It was in 1984 that Ville tentatively perambulated between the shelves of a record shop when the small speakers blasted a song, “I’ve Had Enough”, the opening track of the sixteenth KISS album “Animalize”. Nothing special for KISS, really, just another album of their already long career, another song that effortlessly got in the long line of the band’s classics. But for Ville, it was like a hammer blow, a turning point and that album became his first own record - infectious music.
Even if he most likely didn’t know for what his plea laid the foundation for, Ville begged for it so long that his parents bought him a second hand bass guitar and a small combo amplifier. At that age, you change your hobbies as often as you change your underwear and you try out everything until you stick with something. That’s at least what his parents most likely thought. If they were hesitant at first to buy him the instruments, it was probably more because of the amp than because of the bass - until now, a completely ordinary story.
Ville remembers his first instruments: “They were a Gibson SG copy form DIA and a small Marshall combo, I don’t remember the specific series. The bass was full-sized, bigger than I was, but I was totally happy and ultimately played every day since then. Somehow, I already felt that I wanted to become a rock musician.”
He wasn’t the only one his age interested in music, so he was bound to meet like-minded people at school sooner or later. Ville met Mikko Lindström. They got to know each other at music school that provided, apart from the lessons, also the usual arsenal of instruments. Mikko quickly committed himself to the guitar and Ville continued to play the bass diligently. But there also were all those other instruments that interested him, too: drums, guitar, virtually everything he could get a hold of and could handle to some degree, he took a shot at.
At this school, there was another boy two years older than Ville, that was equally into music: Mikko Paananen. They met up regularly, talked about everything and anything and of course music. The longer the three talked about it, the more they became to realise that they wanted to get something up. To hear some starchy teacher talk about the theoretical basics of something they imagined much more exciting themselves was not their cup of tea, anyway. After all, what did they have a bass, a guitar and drums for?
Ville: “I hated school and school probably hated me back, even though I liked some subjects like history and maths. Drawing and music where OK, too. When I was nine, they forced us to lean Swedish, but I wasn’t keen on it at all, so I still can’t speak one word of it today. It’s not that I didn’t like the language itself, but the teacher was a kind of pin-up model, it was kind of strange, anyway. English had always been much easier for me, because I already knew it from television; in Finland, they don’t dub American movies, they just put in subtitles. Actually, I always had pretty good marks, but the teachers hated me because I fought with other students once in a while. I was some kind of misfit, really.”
If you want to borrow the usual clichés, then that are pretty good presuppositions for a rock star career, but still not all of them. If you know what you want, you just have to get started, and that’s what Ville and Mikko Lindström, nicknamed Linde, did. Migé’s first band was called Bullshit Ass, and he later describes that this name mirrored the situation and the feeling he was in for a long time pretty accurately. Ville and Linde, on the other hand, formed B.L.O.O.D. in 1986. They were ten years at the time and met up in the afternoons to try and cover songs of then-trendy hard rock and alternative bands.
In each and every Interview HIM gave in the last past years, they named, apart from KISS and Black Sabbath, countless other bans to be their favourite influences. Ville, Linde and Migé did the same thing everyone did: They listened to a new band and if they liked it, it automatically became another, new, small influence.
But back to B.L.O.O.D.: This project might well have been a liberating beginning, but it was far from satisfying. It was, however, a good opportunity for the two boys to get used to the principles of a band, to play together, to become a team, to convey own ideas to the other. Yes, it was the perfect rock’n’roll playground for Ville and Linde, playing Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” with the amps turned up all the way and thus getting rid of all the aggressions and forgetting about the tedious mornings at school. A completely ordinary hobby band, still a completely ordinary story, apart from the young age of its protagonists. But they didn’t want to end up as an ordinary story, so in 1989, Ville and Linde made a decision.
They were fed up with always just covering other bands’ songs, so they brought a new project into being, which they hoped to be more fun: Kemoterapia. So Ville and Linde at risked making the break from a sheer cover band to something of their own, but who should they make a band with just two people in to work? They needed more musicians. It became apparent that it was a big advantage that Ville had never been solely interested in playing bass, even if it was his main instrument. Depending on who was there in the fast-changing line-up, he could switch from bass to drums, which happened fairly often, since the experimental phase of Kemoterapia was pretty long.
Ville: “I used to play drums and Linde played guitar back in the day, that was the beginning. We really needed new songs, but apart from me, no one in the band wanted to write, so I ‘sacrificed’ myself eventually. The first things I ever wrote myself were in the beginning mostly like the stuff we listened to, like Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. What I didn’t dare back then was writing own lyrics, that was something somebody else had to do. It went that way for some time, but at some point, Linde and I came to realise that this band wouldn’t lead us anywhere. It was more punk and friendship with all the guys there that kept us in the band. If you looked at it matter-of-factly, they didn’t know as much about music than we did, and they didn’t master their instruments as well. That was the main reason why Linde and I eventually left the band to start something new together with Migé.”
So, that was part two of the fairytale that lead up to the band we all love today :)
Love, liz