HIM

Ville Vallo’s art has always taken him to the brink of sanity, but during the making of the new Venus Doom, the singer almost fell headfirst into the abyss

By Dan Epstein
Photo by Travis Shinn

The car pulls away from L.A.’s Paramount Studios, heading west towards the Chateau Marmont, the legendary Sunset Strip hotel/den of iniquity where John Belushi took his fatal speedball back in 1982. HIM frontman Ville Valo has been staying at the Marmont for the first half of May, putting the finishing touches on his band’s monumental new album, Venus Doom (Sire/Warner Bros); apparently, the establishment’s self-destructive juju is beginning to rub off on him.

“Do you want a good story?” Valo inquires, with all the nonchalance of someone announcing an upcoming haircut appointment. “I’m going into rehab at the end of the week—some place in Malibu, I think. No one knows about it yet, so please don’t print anything until I’m done.” Before Revolver can even begin to digest this unexpected confidence, Valo directs us into the parking lot of a nearby liquor store. “Do you mind if we stop here for a minute?” he asks. “I want to pick up some beer before we get to the hotel.”

Truth be told, Valo wasn’t exactly looking the picture of perfect health earlier this afternoon, when he and producer Tim Palmer treated Revolver to a full-length preview of the new record. Then again, finishing an album on a tight deadline rarely brings out a person’s rosy-cheeked best, and at first glance Valo’s grey-green visage simply seemed like the inevitable result of pale Finnish skin subjected to what the late, great Frank Zappa used to refer to as a “studio tan.”

But upon closer inspection, Finland’s most famous rock import appears to be in pretty hurtin’ shape. Aside from the sickly pallor and the large black rings around his eyes, Valo’s face is inordinately puffy, and his long, greasy hair looks as if it was recently used to mop up a leaky cellar. And even though he’s currently wrapped in an unseasonably bulky wool garment that’s like a cross between a bathrobe and a Starsky and Hutch–style belted sweater, his physical presence seems worryingly ethereal, as if he might simply dissolve into the ether at any second. Er, Ville, have you been eating much lately?

“Oh, I never eat,” he laughs, as he unlocks the guest gate at the Marmont, and leads us down a narrow garden path towards his bungalow. “Eating’s for cunts! I’m, well, what’s further away from vegetarian? Air-atarian? Plants have feelings, you know …”
As it turns out, a steady diet of air might be a bit of an improvement over Valo’s current intake. Mired in a deep depression, Valo reveals that he has essentially been living for the last few weeks off a winning combination of Marlboro Lights, asthma medication, and assorted antidepressants—and about two cases of beer a day. “I went to a doctor today,” he chuckles, “and she was like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I told her that I was from Finland, and she said, ‘OK, fine, thanks—that explains it all!’ I got a blood test done, and she was on the verge of getting me into the emergency room, but I said, ‘No, I can’t, I’ve got interviews to do.’”

Though he tries to downplay the situation with his usual self-deprecating wit, it’s clear that this shaky, scraggly figure pulling on a rapid succession of cigarettes and beer bottles is in a great deal of psychic pain. Valo has a long history of crippling panic attacks and depressive “meltdowns” during HIM recording sessions, something he’s ascribed to the deep emotional investment he has in his songs. “I always get depressed, because I’ll work on a particular song for many years,” he explains. “You write and write and it still doesn’t feel right, it’s not quite there. And then, like kids, you finally have to let them go, and hope they find a good home.”

In the past, however, the dark moods and panic attacks have always lifted upon the completion of the record. When Revolver interviewed Valo around the release of 2005’s Dark Light—HIM’s U.S. major-label debut, which became the first album by a Finnish band to go gold in the States—he seemed relaxed and happy, as if the demons populating such morbidly romantic songs as “Rip Off the Wings of a Butterfly” and “Killing Loneliness” had been purged forever. In reality, though, he’d merely escorted them back to their dungeon; this time, when he let them loose on behalf of Venus Doom, they turned out to be too unruly to be easily returned underground. In other words, the man who’s made a career out of bathing in cosmic despair has suddenly found it very difficult to turn off the tap.

“This album almost fucking destroyed me,” Valo says of Venus Doom. “The record’s beautiful, I’m really happy about it, and everybody’s proud of it. But it’s just a tough process. Usually, making an album is like a cathartic thing—you open the door for the demons, and everything just fucking comes out. But now the meltdowns are getting worse, and the depression won’t go away; it’s like being haunted by the most vile creatures ever created by H.P. Lovecraft, and I don’t know how it’s gonna end.

“I’m not complaining. I’m not fucking whining about it,” he continues, while Jethro Tull’s melancholy “Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of the New Day)” spins quietly on the stereo in his Marmont bungalow. “I’m not the first [to suffer from depression], and I’m not the last, and it’s not a competition when it comes to mental issues. I’ve had depression before, but when you’re so overwhelmed that it’s taking you over… I just don’t know if I’m prepared emotionally or mentally to write another song.”

Perhaps this was bound to happen. While the rest of HIM (guitarist Mikko “Linde” Lindström, bassist Mikko “Migé” Paananen, keyboardist Janne “Burton” Puurtinen, and drummer Mika “Gas Lipstick” Karppinen) have always done a fine job of shouldering the musical load, everything else—lyrics, artwork, press interviews, and label meetings, not to mention overseeing the final mix and mastering of each album—has always fallen to Valo. And while he plainly revels in the enormous responsibility (“It’s not a dirty job—it’s exactly what I’ve always wanted!”), he’s essentially been in overdrive for the past decade without any real break. One has to ask: If the guy is already this burned out at the beginning of the Venus Doom promotional cycle, how fried will he be by the time the band comes off another world tour?

The label apparently asked that question as well, which is why Valo is booked into a month-long stint at Promises, a $40,000 a month rehab facility in Malibu that’s been dubbed “The Ritz of Rehab” by ABC News, and has famously hosted the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan in recent months.

“It’s not about booze and drugs, in that sense,” Valo says of his decision to check himself in. “It’s about stress—stress, and caring more about other people than I do about myself. Unfortunately, there is a breaking point, and I’m very close to it, so I’m glad to be going into a situation where people can help me. And I need to do that for myself. I need to read books and calm down and be myself—and you know, just get rid of all the stress. Because I want to feel better, and I do feel the need to feel better, because of all the people around me who love me. I’ve got the greatest parents in the world, and I don’t want to disappoint them.

“I don’t like life,” he says, finally. “I like music. And music is my life—which I don’t like,” he laughs. “It’s complex, man. It’s a marriage made in full-blown hell.”

“Making Venus Doom was a real adventure,” says Tim Palmer. “It has been a creative, rewarding, revealing, and sometimes scary journey.” A longtime HIM collaborator, Palmer (who’s also worked with everyone from Ozzy and U2 to Eighties pop icons Duran Duran and Tears for Fears) is justifiably proud of the new album, whose highlights include the “love metal” heart-punches of “The Kiss of Dawn,” “Passion’s Killing Floor,” and the title track, as well as a couple of epic, quasi-psychedelic excursions into the deserted cities of the soul (“Sleepwalking Past Hope,” “Cyanide Sun”). Ville’s vocal performances are more impressive than ever, encompassing everything from fluttery falsetto notes to doomy sub-sonic growls, and the guitar-heavy instrumental mix really brings Linde’s nasty riffs and searing solos to the fore. “It’s only a question of time before people realize Linde as the guitar hero he truly is,” says Palmer.

When Revolver speaks to Palmer, it’s been two weeks since Valo entered Promises; the producer visited him recently, and says he’s doing remarkably well, considering how badly his mental and physical state deteriorated during the making of the album. “Ville would always have a beer or six at the studio, and he would smoke like a chimney,” Palmer explains, “but that was the norm and had been for quite some time. It was when he started to arrive already drunk or not arrive at all that I began to get concerned.”

Things finally came to a head when Valo first attempted to record the vocals for “The Kiss of Dawn.” Recognizing that the singer was too inebriated for the task, Palmer called his friend aside for a heart-to-heart talk. “I told Ville that I had to be honest, and that I felt he would sing the song better if he was not so drunk,” he recalls. “Instead of fighting, he just apologized and told me that he had been going through a really tough time. I tried to encourage him to talk about it, as he seemed really sad and was close to tears. He told me how life had become a struggle, but I was still not aware of how extreme his feelings were. I learned that he had been feeling low for many years now.

“I encouraged him to get some sleep and try to cut down on the booze, but over the next few days he didn’t seem to be getting better. All I got was the stock answer again of ‘I’ll be fine.’ Now he was needing at least three beers to just leave the house, and was really not eating well at all.”

Once the tracking sessions at Helsinki’s Finnvox Studios were completed, Palmer and Valo headed to Los Angeles to mix the record. Palmer hoped that a little Southern California sunshine would do Valo some good. Unfortunately, the same “black dog” that plagued Valo in Helsinki simply got on the plane and followed him to L.A.

“I figured that he would be alone and have time to eat, relax and recuperate,” says Palmer. “But that never happened, and he got worse. He was not eating at all, [he was] drinking very heavily and just smoking all day. It all became extremely serious when I learned from Ville that he had been waking up and feeling like he didn’t want to carry on with his life. He told me that his wrists felt like they were burning.”

Having already lost his brother-in-law to suicide just a year earlier, Palmer strongly encouraged Valo to get help. “One of the [biggest misconceptions] about a suicidal mind is that people need to have good reasons to want to die,” the producer says. “On the surface of it, why would a talented, good-looking, successful singer of a globetrotting rock band be feeling low enough to take his life? But that’s the point—suicide, in many cases, can have nothing to do with having good reasons to do it.

“When somebody gets that low, it is so important to find a friend or doctor or family member and just get help. Ville took a massive step by coming clean to me and just admitting to these feelings. I really hope that others can learn at least this one small thing, from his experience. I am so happy that he is now getting the help he needs.”

“It’s remarkable how fast you can sort yourself out,” Valo laughs. “I’m 30, and I’ve been getting fucked up on a regular basis for half my life, so five weeks is nothing.”
It’s now mid-June, and he and Revolver are sitting by the pool at the Sunset Marquis hotel, where Valo and the rest of the band are staying while preparing to shoot the video for “The Kiss of Dawn.” Valo checked out of Promises a few days earlier, and the physical transformation is astounding; the sickly, homeless-looking guy from last month now looks like the sharp-cheekboned romantic poet from HIM’s album covers and videos—only stronger and healthier. “I should have done it 10 years ago,” he says. “Not the rehab, but just taking some time off.”

Which isn’t to say that Valo didn’t need to dry out, as well—the day he arrived at rehab, his blood test came back from the doctor, with disturbing results. “She said my potassium level was so low, it was either rehab or heart failure,” he says. “I was stupid enough to put myself in a position where those were my two choices, but wise enough to pick the right one.”

The detox process, he says, was fairly simple—if not exactly fun. “Those first couple of days were fucking horrendous,” he recalls. “You feel like shit, and you’re nauseous all the time—but I did that to myself, so who am I to complain? They gave me a drug called Librium for a couple of days, which stops the shakes and helps you sleep and stuff like that. I was eating my own vitamins, and eating food, which I hadn’t done for ages. A lot of coffee and a lot of water, and after two weeks, all the puffiness started to go away, and I could fucking see my bones again.”

More difficult, for Valo. was the adjustment to the facility’s daily routine. “It was kind of mellow, but I would have liked it to be more mellow,” he says. “The days started at 7 o’clock with a meditation or prayer, and ended at around 9 or 10, so they were actually pretty long. There was a lot of talking to counselors, going to AA meetings, stuff like that. They had equine therapy, where you go on a walk with a fucking horse, and that’s supposed to sort out your stuff. I didn’t go, because I’m allergic!” he laughs. “You had 45 minutes off here and there, but that’s not enough time to watch a movie, or really read, or anything. I spent a lot of time sitting by the pool, smoking and exchanging war stories with the rest of the inmates.”

While many folks come out of rehab swearing that they’ll never drink again, and praising the lord for their deliverance from the demon alcohol, Valo makes neither claim. “I’m not touching alcohol or drugs until the end of this tour,” he says. “That’s my plan. We’ll see how it works; I’m not promising anybody anything. Touring’s a lot easier when you’re sober; you have more energy, and you can get up early and see some museums. And when you’re sober, you’ve got a lot more time to read and get yourself educated in the matters of the utter darkness,” he laughs.

Perhaps predictably, Valo’s affinity for all things dark turned out to be somewhat at odds with the standard AA philosophy. “‘God grant me the serenity’—if I hear those fucking words again, I’ll kill myself,” he laughs. “AA works for some people, and that’s fine. There’s really good meetings and a lot of class people out there, and it’s a way you can meet people with the same problems, and share your stories …

“The problem is that basically all the rehab shit is based on AA, and all of that is either based on religious belief or agnostic belief. But I’m a full-blown fucking atheist. I don’t like churches; I don’t like what religion has done to the world. The first step of the 12 steps is that you’ve gotta turn your will over to a ‘higher power,’ and the second step is that no human power can take this disease off of you. Which is bullshit! I believe in people; I believe in my friends, and I believe in fucking Black Sabbath.”

When Revolver jokes about naming Black Sabbath as his higher power, Valo’s face bursts into a mischievous grin. “Oh, I actually did that,” he chuckles. “Somebody has to lead the prayer at the meetings, and when it was my turn I would say, ‘Ozzy grant me the serenity,’ or ‘Black Sabbath grant me the serenity.’ People were kind of pissed off at first, but they got it eventually. I was thinking about maybe starting a rehab in Scandinavia for atheists—you know, with inverted crosses!”

While Valo is understandably happy to have his health back, the root of his earlier depression is a riddle that remains willfully unsolved. “I don’t want to sort it out—that’s how I make my living,” he snorts. “The staff [at Promises] were really understanding, and we had a couple of really good chats, but they were trying to fix a lot of things I don’t want to get fixed. You’ve got to shed some tears every now and then, you know—and I’d rather analyze it through music.

“For me, life and love have to be chaos,” he continues. “There’s got to be surprises around every fucking corner; you’ve gotta be in doubt, and then lifted up again, by somebody else or by yourself. Otherwise, it would be fucking boring …

“It’s so funny,” Valo laughs. “I’m in a rock band, I write songs about getting my heart broken, I go to rehab… I’m turning into a fucking cliché. I have an agreement with Migé that on the next record I have to go to an insane asylum, following in the footsteps of Iggy Pop. I’m not sure what happens after that—I probably have to die under mysterious circumstances, or something, where they never find my body. Trust me, I’m working on that already.”