Written by Former Him frontman Ville Valo has been reflecting on the band’s early years as he celebrates their thirtieth anniversary. Speaking to Metal Hammer in their new issue, the singer-songwriter reveals that it was the loss of a fluffy loved one that sent him down the melancholic path that’d lead him to becoming a goth metal icon.
“All the melancholy and darkness of Him could be traced to my dog, Sami,” he explains. “He was my furry brother. He passed when I was six, and it was my first real brush with melancholy.”
Him formed when Ville, Mikko ‘Mige’ Paananen (bass) and Mikko ‘Linde’ Lindström (guitars) decided to form a morbid new project while still at school. Inspired to write music by discovering Black Sabbath‘s legendary, self-titled debut album, Ville tells Hammer that there was another, less obvious influence that defined the band’s early days.
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“Chris Isaak helped us find our own musical identity,” Ville says, the US singer’s dark-hued croon and twanging presenting a kind of gothic Americana. Him would eventually cover his classic track Wicked Game. “I’d heard Wicked Game on the [1990 David Lynch movie] Wild At Heart soundtrack,” Ville notes, “so I went to the public library, took out the LP, and me and Linde sat down working out the riffs.”
Chris Isaak helped us find our own musical identity
Him made an impact early on in the Finnish metal scene, though they made the wrong kind of impression with some parts of the media. The notorious Norwegian black metal scene was making headlines across Scandinavia at that time in a flurry of murder and church burnings, and Ville found himself having to separate Him from that movement, despite the fact their romantic goth metal leanings had absolutely nothing to do with black metal at all.
“I got some of my first TV interviews explaining to people that Him was more to do with the infernal aspects of the heart than burning down a church,” he says “Black metal was the punk rock of the 90s – it was the big spiritual vomit over everything. I loved it, but a lot of those bands took themselves very, very seriously. I was in a pub once with a guy from a black metal band and he goes, ‘You’ve never experienced darkness until you’ve strangled your own cat and looked into its eyes as it’s dying.’ That’s a terrible thing to do to an innocent critter. We were just pussies – Satan worship lite.”
Read more from Ville in an extensive, celebratory look at Him’s entire career in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, out now. Get yours here.
