Interview with Ville Valo, lead singer of H.I.M.
Campus Philly: I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times, but for our readers who might not know, can you give a little background on the name of the band and how it came about?
Ville Valo: No ones been asking that in the past gazillion years, so it’s great. We first called our band Black Earth because Black Sabbath was first known as Earth. We’re huge fans, and they gave us courage to pursue being a band and the hope that maybe a bunch of weird looking guys from the middle of nowhere could make it because Sabbath were a bunch of weird looking guys from the middle of nowhere. [With the name change], we wanted something similarly horrific for the band. I don’t know where exactly it came from, but someone came up with the name His Infernal Majesty, and at 15-years-old it sounded ridiculously cool.
CP: Why did you decide to go by the abbreviation?
VV: In the 90s when all the churches started to burn in Scandinavia, people started to think we had something to do with it, so we instituted H.I.M. Then afterwards we found out that a gay porn magazine from the 70s was called Him, so now we have the death aspect and the gay aspect going for us.
CP: Your heartagram symbol is everywhere now, from tattoos to shoes. What’s its origin and what does it mean?
Valo: The day I turned 20, which was about 13 years ago, I was just doodling. I loved the four symbols Led Zeppelin had and White Zombie with Rob [Zombie] had a lot of visual aspects of rock and roll. So I just threw it down on November 22. It’s one of the more fun things for the band and I’m really super proud of it. My dad was an artist and I was brought up appreciating art. I was hoping some of that would rub off on me and I’d get to incorporate it into the band and I’m glad that it has
CP: You guys are a pretty internationally known band and I know you hail from Helsinki. Do you think you have a greater following in the U.S. or elsewhere, like Europe?
Valo: I think it keeps on changing with the albums. It’s kinda cool in the sense that something might work in the U.S. and then no one gives a [expletive] in Europe, and vice versa. And it’s also broken down through certain countries in Europe. Our first album years ago was appreciated in Scandanavia and the next in Germany and the next in Spain and the next in the U.K. and the next in the States. We’ve never had one album that is appreciated all over the world, which is a good thing because A) it keeps you grounded and 
makes you more like a growing success. It keeps us from being a global success which pisses me off, haha.
makes you more like a growing success. It keeps us from being a global success which pisses me off, haha.More of this interview can be read, here. Enjoy. =]
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