| takes from Heartagram.com Name problems, satanic verses and prayers 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. 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. |