Him, Kerrang! January 16, 2010
THERE ARE those rock stars who look like rock stars, and there are those who could be anybody. Ville Valo, HIM’s frontman, songwriter and driving force, is of the former camp. Skinny to the point of almost defining the term elegantly wasted, he has a way of sweeping into a room, long coat trailing over a beautifully cut John Varvatos suit jacket, and becoming its focus.
The cheekbones are maybe a little less sharp than in the days when he was drinking, but the green eyes are steadier and the brain faster. Somehow, the fact that a pint of ‘wife-beater’ – as he refers to his formerly beloved drink – is no longer an ever-present attachment to his hand fails to do much to destroy the whiff of debauched romance that has always been a part of his appeal. Perhaps it’s the constant cigarette in his other hand that helps maintain the aura.
It’s a persona that has developed over the years. The son of a man who ran a sex shop, it’s perhaps no surprise that Valo’s earliest appearances gave rise to sensual, if satanic, comparisons. From the Finnish band’s second album, Razorblade Romance, in which they made inroads into Europe, to 2003’s Love Metal, in which the UK began to take notice, Valo’s charisma and increasingly romantic inspirations and aspirations painted him as a frontman with a curiously Byron-esque allure.
2005’s Dark Light introduced this magnetism to America while 2007’s dark and brooding Venus Doom, in which the break-up of Valo’s stormy long-term relationship played its part, made HIM a more mainstream player in the US. In the meanwhile the singer became something of a cult star, his increasingly (pre-rehab) self-destructive behaviour very much a dangerous draw.
But unlike many rock stars of enigmatic and storied charm, Valo is not one of those who inhabits his image uneasily, arrogantly or stand-offishly. Today, in a pre-Christmas Helsinki in which temperatures have dropped to a sharp minus 16C, he is, as ever, full of complaisant charm. Comfortable in his home town, he chats of this and that, he asks after the families of those present – Kerrang! and his record company representative from the UK – and then he good-naturedly scolds at our choice of bar the evening before, laughing at the subsequent and inevitable hangovers.
Then he remembers that, though he was once a fabled and famous alcoholic, those days are behind him now. “It serves you right for drinking in such a place,” he says amicably. Then he trails off. “Of course I don’t go out much anymore…”
Because these days Valo is off the booze and happy to be so. Rehab in 2007 put pay to what was once a habit he believes was destroying his band. He has been blunt about the effect it was having, too, saying recently that, through drunkenness, “I had fucked up my work, I had fucked up my relationships and I nearly blew up the band because I was a drunken moron. I couldn’t deliver and I sang shitty but I didn’t realise it because I was so deep into it.”
He still chain smokes of course, stopping just short of lighting one cigarette from the end of another. But only just. And now he drinks Coca Cola as though it were a life-giving elixir. Bottle after bottle go down, punctuated by the odd coffee. Caffeine, it seems, is now the thing.
Food, however, seems rarely to be of much importance. “I eat microwave pizzas,” he says with a shrug, “when I remember.” From the looks of his waist line, he doesn’t remember often.
But then Valo has been very busy of late. Too busy to remember to eat. There was first the recording of the band’s new album, Screamworks: Love And Theory In Practice in Los Angeles last year; it is, says Valo, a “sonic Valentine’s card” to the girl whose brief but possibly unfinished relationship with the frontman inspired many of the songs it contains.
Since then, there has been the inexorable business of promoting it. A few days ago, Valo spent a total of eight hours talking on the phone to journalists about what is his band’s seventh album. Later today he will be involved in meetings and decisions about the details of the album’s packaging. This afternoon’s discussion will be about the stickers that will be placed on the outside of the CD. This is not the sort of thing with which most musicians concern themselves. Valo, evidently, is not a man to leave the small details to others. “Well it’s our band’s name on the album,” he reasons. “No-one is going to blame mistakes on the cover artwork on the sticker designer or the record label.”
In fact, to listen to Valo talk about his life now, it seems he is always working. In days gone by evenings would have been spent in bar or pub in order, as he puts it, to “drink away the melodies in my head. I thought that going drinking was a good way of zeroing the mileage. That’s what we call it in Finnish: zeroing. We zero everything out of our heads and start over”. Now though, sober, he is like a dynamo. He wakes at 11am. He smokes. He drinks coffee. Then he checks emails, business and personal, before he settles down to make more music throughout the day and deep into the night.
Yesterday, for example, he was recording B-sides in his bedroom. He normally does this until 4am or 5am. Then, exhausted, he’ll crash out fully-clothed on his sofa (he got rid of his bed to make more room for microphone stands) before waking again at 11am, still clothed, and beginning the process once more.
“I sleep about four to six hours a night, which is way too little for me. I always sleep in my clothes because that enables me to wake up early in the morning and start the day faster.” he says, then shrugs. “At least it works for me.”
TODAY, IF Valo is tired, he doesn’t appear it. In an expansive ten-room hotel suite more often used by prime-ministers and dignitaries visiting Helsinki, he is talkative and lively. He poses for photos with the practised air of one who enjoys the attention of the lens, taking direction, coming up with ideas, indulging lighting delays like a gentleman.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be here but in Valo’s house. At least that was the plan, however the singer decided that perhaps that would be an intrusion too far and he politely suggested an alternative location. It’s understandable for a man whose fans can lean towards the sectionable side of obsessive, yet still a shame because Valo’s house sounds like a Gothic wonder.
The place HIM’s singer calls home is a 19th Century watchtower once used by the Finnish military to keep a look out for invading ships. A cellar, ground-, first- and second-floor are topped by an attic and linked by winding, spiral staircases. From the sounds of it, Valo has chosen to decorate it in a style best described as eccentric. He talks of the taxidermy collection that litters the place, the art on the walls, the curious collections of bits and bobs he picks up and hides in scattered cubby holes.
“I’ve got a few stuffed animals, thousands of books and CDs and a lot of instruments,” he says. “There’s nothing of great value for anyone else, but lots of things with great sentimental value for me. I’m one of those people that can’t throw things away. It can be anything too: I’ve got some nails from an old 18th Century painting I found, for example. I always hide things in places where I think I’ll find them, then completely forget all about them. There are a lot of nooks filled with hidden things.”
He lives there alone and somehow the idea of him padding around his attic, composing songs until the early hours and sleeping where he collapses further endorses the image of a Romantic poet in his creaking Gothic castle.
“It’s not spooky; it’s got a good vibe. It’s messy. In fact, it’s a bit like our music, it’s full of contrasts,” he says. “It’s got some art, some fucked up things I’ve found, some antiques. It’s mix and match. I’ve always lived in places where I can look around and feel inspired. At home I can look up and, in one glance, see a stuffed bear, the artwork for Venus Doom, a grand piano with a stuffed deer on it, and a ‘70s Danish porno called New Cunts. I had to have that porno, I loved the name so much. It’s so wrong it’s fabulous. I keep it propped up on a children’s organ next to an altar for St Francis Xavier.”
IT WAS between Finland and Los Angeles that Valo composed much of the music for Screamworks, hiding himself away from the world in either an American hotel room or his Finnish tower, a place he occasionally refers to as his “hermit-hole” given his proclivity to seclusion there.
The music itself, though, was inspired in part by a girl Valo will talk about only in vague terms. The affair, early in 2009, was his first since the break-up of his frequently turbulent long-term relationship with the Finnish actress Jonna Nygren that ended in 2006. The new relationship, it seems, was unexpected, rewarding and brief.
“There was suddenly someone I wanted to play footsy with,” he has said. “That’s not an experience that’s happened to me in a while and it was lovely. I didn’t pursue the possibility too far though because it had already given me lots of inspiration to write songs about it. That sums up my perverse sense of being – I ended up spending more time writing about it than actually doing it.”
And he wrote and wrote, on his own, almost obsessively and to the detriment of the relationship that had so stirred him. “I can only concentrate on one thing at a time,” he says, “when I’m concentrating on music, I can only concentrate on that; when I’m concentrating on sex, I can only concentrate on that”. It is, he says, just the way he operates.
“I get onto a form of autopilot when I work and I like that,” he says. “What stresses me out are the everyday things, like paying bills. I’m trying to escape real life as much as I can. I find it peculiarly entertaining to stay up until 6am recording in my tower among the taxidermy. That’s where I can be who I am. Some people are at ease with their partner; I feel at ease with music, with my guitars around me. I forget about everything. I forget the pressure of real life. Music has always been the escape.”
He finds that he drifts off into what he calls his “surreal world” when he’s writing, a world dominated by the theme that has always inspired his music – love.
“I create a weird place where I can go. It’s like an Alice In Wonderland type feeling where all my memories, the colours and different musical associations come back to me. That’s where I like to spend my time. I can’t multi-task, the real world and the surreal world can’t co-exist for me. I need real life as little as possible. Just for the essentials. I find it hard to sort out normal shit.”
The problem, as he acknowledges, is that he needs love to inspire his trips into the surreal world. But, once he’s there, he has little time to act on that love.
“You have to have a relationship to write music. Well, perhaps it doesn’t always have to be a relationship, but it does need to be an interesting situation. Usually that has to do with ladies for me. That’s what makes my heart tick faster. But when I make music, I need a lot of space alone – not physical space, but space for my head. I need to be able to work at funny hours. It’s impossible [for me] to live with anybody during these kinds of periods. I don’t have a spare moment in the day to hang out and eat ice cream or whatever. I let people down so easily because of the music. I don’t want anyone to be sad, lonely or unhappy because I’m always away doing what I love.”
And so Valo is single at the moment, the love that inspired Screamworks ploughed only into the record. If you ask him whether he’s happy to be alone, he answers first yes, then no, then gives a maybe. “Well… it’s challenging,” he says. “No, it’s okay. I enjoy the solitude.” He does, however, admit that he is looking “for the right one”.
“I’ve never been interested in flings,” he says. “I find them problematic because I don’t think a relationship can be rewarding if you don’t know the other person. It’s just in and out otherwise. You may as well just use your own hand. I find it disgusting to wake up next to a person I don’t know. I’m disgusted by the situation. It just doesn’t feel right.
“It’s love that inspires me,” he adds, “I need a muse. The problem is that you can’t hunt for a muse on date.com.”
IF ALL this sounds very solemn and navel-gazey, that would do Valo a disservice. Because, though he takes his music very seriously, he is always self-deprecating. He can go on long and sombre rambles about the way he works, his influences and his character, and then, cracking a broad grin, he can wave it all away as “pretty arty-farty”, calling his music “pompous and stupid”. It’s this self-awareness that makes him a more interesting character than some musicians.
Frequently when he answers questions he will say something, stop, then crack up laughing, asking, “What the fuck am I talking about?” It’s perhaps this grounding that prevents him from drifting off for too long into the surreal world his creativity inhabits.
“At the end of the day, you have to understand a song comes down to three and half minutes on a piece of fucking plastic. It’s essential to be able to see the fun side of it,” he says. “You might put a million man hours into an album but, when you put it onto a CD, you compress it down into a series of binary computer codes to put on a piece of plastic. All of those emotions, experiences, inspirations, traumas… all of it boils down to a string of computer code in ones and zeros. The right sequencing of those numbers can be life-changing for some people and hell on earth for others. The order of the zeros and ones are different when you download Black Sabbath than when you download Britney Spears, but they’re still just zeros and ones.”
But though Valo may force himself to look at his music this way when he becomes too embroiled in describing its various moods and currents, it would be wrong to suggest he doesn’t care about it deeply. In fact Valo hopes Screamworks is his band’s most successful album yet.
“It’s not so we can go out and buy nice cars but because a pat on the back from the record-buying audience is a nice reward,” he says. “You really work your ass off for an album so to see people dancing to it in a club is a really nice reward. I’m hoping it will happen with this one.”
What happens, though, if there is no success? Valo has been sober for over a year now but stronger men than him, you suspect, have fallen off the wagon in the face of lesser adversities.
“No, if it fails, I think I need to experience that sober too,” he says. “It would be way too easy to give in then. If and when I start drinking again, I want to do it when I feel good. I want it to be when I’m stable and not reacting to positivity or negativity. That would be the easy way out. I want to celebrate the album’s success or failure while sober.”
Before that, though, he’ll have to go on tour sober – a potentially much trickier endeavour and one that he is yet to try. “To be honest, I’m not thinking about it because I don’t dare to,” he says. “I don’t want to see an itinerary, I just want someone to tell me where to go, and then I’ll pack my bags and head off. I haven’t missed drinking but I do miss ending up in very Dali-esque situations, at weird parties for example. But I’ve had a lot of those experiences so maybe that tank is full for a while. I have no reason to start pounding Stella Artois again – it’s a waste of time and money. I know what it does and I know how it tastes: it tastes okay and it gets you drunk. But no, I have no regrets. I don’t glorify the days of yore. I had a blast but I’m still having a blast, it’s just a different kind of blast now.”
He stops once more, laughing to himself, as he realises he’s again drifting into seriousness. He shrugs, leans back on the sofa in the plush hotel room, then lights another cigarette. He seems cheerful, content with his lot at the moment, which is not an accusation that could have been levelled at him until recently.
So is he? Is he happy?
“I’m a moody person, so I’m up and down,” he shrugs. Then he stops again and sighs the sigh of a man who’s found a solution that, though it may not be perfect, works well enough for him.
“Remember,” he says. “Everything comes down to binary. All of this boils down to ones and zeros in the end. You know what else? Fuck it all.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
The cheekbones are maybe a little less sharp than in the days when he was drinking, but the green eyes are steadier and the brain faster. Somehow, the fact that a pint of ‘wife-beater’ – as he refers to his formerly beloved drink – is no longer an ever-present attachment to his hand fails to do much to destroy the whiff of debauched romance that has always been a part of his appeal. Perhaps it’s the constant cigarette in his other hand that helps maintain the aura.
It’s a persona that has developed over the years. The son of a man who ran a sex shop, it’s perhaps no surprise that Valo’s earliest appearances gave rise to sensual, if satanic, comparisons. From the Finnish band’s second album, Razorblade Romance, in which they made inroads into Europe, to 2003’s Love Metal, in which the UK began to take notice, Valo’s charisma and increasingly romantic inspirations and aspirations painted him as a frontman with a curiously Byron-esque allure.
2005’s Dark Light introduced this magnetism to America while 2007’s dark and brooding Venus Doom, in which the break-up of Valo’s stormy long-term relationship played its part, made HIM a more mainstream player in the US. In the meanwhile the singer became something of a cult star, his increasingly (pre-rehab) self-destructive behaviour very much a dangerous draw.
But unlike many rock stars of enigmatic and storied charm, Valo is not one of those who inhabits his image uneasily, arrogantly or stand-offishly. Today, in a pre-Christmas Helsinki in which temperatures have dropped to a sharp minus 16C, he is, as ever, full of complaisant charm. Comfortable in his home town, he chats of this and that, he asks after the families of those present – Kerrang! and his record company representative from the UK – and then he good-naturedly scolds at our choice of bar the evening before, laughing at the subsequent and inevitable hangovers.
Then he remembers that, though he was once a fabled and famous alcoholic, those days are behind him now. “It serves you right for drinking in such a place,” he says amicably. Then he trails off. “Of course I don’t go out much anymore…”
Because these days Valo is off the booze and happy to be so. Rehab in 2007 put pay to what was once a habit he believes was destroying his band. He has been blunt about the effect it was having, too, saying recently that, through drunkenness, “I had fucked up my work, I had fucked up my relationships and I nearly blew up the band because I was a drunken moron. I couldn’t deliver and I sang shitty but I didn’t realise it because I was so deep into it.”
He still chain smokes of course, stopping just short of lighting one cigarette from the end of another. But only just. And now he drinks Coca Cola as though it were a life-giving elixir. Bottle after bottle go down, punctuated by the odd coffee. Caffeine, it seems, is now the thing.
Food, however, seems rarely to be of much importance. “I eat microwave pizzas,” he says with a shrug, “when I remember.” From the looks of his waist line, he doesn’t remember often.
But then Valo has been very busy of late. Too busy to remember to eat. There was first the recording of the band’s new album, Screamworks: Love And Theory In Practice in Los Angeles last year; it is, says Valo, a “sonic Valentine’s card” to the girl whose brief but possibly unfinished relationship with the frontman inspired many of the songs it contains.
Since then, there has been the inexorable business of promoting it. A few days ago, Valo spent a total of eight hours talking on the phone to journalists about what is his band’s seventh album. Later today he will be involved in meetings and decisions about the details of the album’s packaging. This afternoon’s discussion will be about the stickers that will be placed on the outside of the CD. This is not the sort of thing with which most musicians concern themselves. Valo, evidently, is not a man to leave the small details to others. “Well it’s our band’s name on the album,” he reasons. “No-one is going to blame mistakes on the cover artwork on the sticker designer or the record label.”
In fact, to listen to Valo talk about his life now, it seems he is always working. In days gone by evenings would have been spent in bar or pub in order, as he puts it, to “drink away the melodies in my head. I thought that going drinking was a good way of zeroing the mileage. That’s what we call it in Finnish: zeroing. We zero everything out of our heads and start over”. Now though, sober, he is like a dynamo. He wakes at 11am. He smokes. He drinks coffee. Then he checks emails, business and personal, before he settles down to make more music throughout the day and deep into the night.
Yesterday, for example, he was recording B-sides in his bedroom. He normally does this until 4am or 5am. Then, exhausted, he’ll crash out fully-clothed on his sofa (he got rid of his bed to make more room for microphone stands) before waking again at 11am, still clothed, and beginning the process once more.
“I sleep about four to six hours a night, which is way too little for me. I always sleep in my clothes because that enables me to wake up early in the morning and start the day faster.” he says, then shrugs. “At least it works for me.”
TODAY, IF Valo is tired, he doesn’t appear it. In an expansive ten-room hotel suite more often used by prime-ministers and dignitaries visiting Helsinki, he is talkative and lively. He poses for photos with the practised air of one who enjoys the attention of the lens, taking direction, coming up with ideas, indulging lighting delays like a gentleman.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be here but in Valo’s house. At least that was the plan, however the singer decided that perhaps that would be an intrusion too far and he politely suggested an alternative location. It’s understandable for a man whose fans can lean towards the sectionable side of obsessive, yet still a shame because Valo’s house sounds like a Gothic wonder.
The place HIM’s singer calls home is a 19th Century watchtower once used by the Finnish military to keep a look out for invading ships. A cellar, ground-, first- and second-floor are topped by an attic and linked by winding, spiral staircases. From the sounds of it, Valo has chosen to decorate it in a style best described as eccentric. He talks of the taxidermy collection that litters the place, the art on the walls, the curious collections of bits and bobs he picks up and hides in scattered cubby holes.
“I’ve got a few stuffed animals, thousands of books and CDs and a lot of instruments,” he says. “There’s nothing of great value for anyone else, but lots of things with great sentimental value for me. I’m one of those people that can’t throw things away. It can be anything too: I’ve got some nails from an old 18th Century painting I found, for example. I always hide things in places where I think I’ll find them, then completely forget all about them. There are a lot of nooks filled with hidden things.”
He lives there alone and somehow the idea of him padding around his attic, composing songs until the early hours and sleeping where he collapses further endorses the image of a Romantic poet in his creaking Gothic castle.
“It’s not spooky; it’s got a good vibe. It’s messy. In fact, it’s a bit like our music, it’s full of contrasts,” he says. “It’s got some art, some fucked up things I’ve found, some antiques. It’s mix and match. I’ve always lived in places where I can look around and feel inspired. At home I can look up and, in one glance, see a stuffed bear, the artwork for Venus Doom, a grand piano with a stuffed deer on it, and a ‘70s Danish porno called New Cunts. I had to have that porno, I loved the name so much. It’s so wrong it’s fabulous. I keep it propped up on a children’s organ next to an altar for St Francis Xavier.”
IT WAS between Finland and Los Angeles that Valo composed much of the music for Screamworks, hiding himself away from the world in either an American hotel room or his Finnish tower, a place he occasionally refers to as his “hermit-hole” given his proclivity to seclusion there.
The music itself, though, was inspired in part by a girl Valo will talk about only in vague terms. The affair, early in 2009, was his first since the break-up of his frequently turbulent long-term relationship with the Finnish actress Jonna Nygren that ended in 2006. The new relationship, it seems, was unexpected, rewarding and brief.
“There was suddenly someone I wanted to play footsy with,” he has said. “That’s not an experience that’s happened to me in a while and it was lovely. I didn’t pursue the possibility too far though because it had already given me lots of inspiration to write songs about it. That sums up my perverse sense of being – I ended up spending more time writing about it than actually doing it.”
And he wrote and wrote, on his own, almost obsessively and to the detriment of the relationship that had so stirred him. “I can only concentrate on one thing at a time,” he says, “when I’m concentrating on music, I can only concentrate on that; when I’m concentrating on sex, I can only concentrate on that”. It is, he says, just the way he operates.
“I get onto a form of autopilot when I work and I like that,” he says. “What stresses me out are the everyday things, like paying bills. I’m trying to escape real life as much as I can. I find it peculiarly entertaining to stay up until 6am recording in my tower among the taxidermy. That’s where I can be who I am. Some people are at ease with their partner; I feel at ease with music, with my guitars around me. I forget about everything. I forget the pressure of real life. Music has always been the escape.”
He finds that he drifts off into what he calls his “surreal world” when he’s writing, a world dominated by the theme that has always inspired his music – love.
“I create a weird place where I can go. It’s like an Alice In Wonderland type feeling where all my memories, the colours and different musical associations come back to me. That’s where I like to spend my time. I can’t multi-task, the real world and the surreal world can’t co-exist for me. I need real life as little as possible. Just for the essentials. I find it hard to sort out normal shit.”
The problem, as he acknowledges, is that he needs love to inspire his trips into the surreal world. But, once he’s there, he has little time to act on that love.
“You have to have a relationship to write music. Well, perhaps it doesn’t always have to be a relationship, but it does need to be an interesting situation. Usually that has to do with ladies for me. That’s what makes my heart tick faster. But when I make music, I need a lot of space alone – not physical space, but space for my head. I need to be able to work at funny hours. It’s impossible [for me] to live with anybody during these kinds of periods. I don’t have a spare moment in the day to hang out and eat ice cream or whatever. I let people down so easily because of the music. I don’t want anyone to be sad, lonely or unhappy because I’m always away doing what I love.”
And so Valo is single at the moment, the love that inspired Screamworks ploughed only into the record. If you ask him whether he’s happy to be alone, he answers first yes, then no, then gives a maybe. “Well… it’s challenging,” he says. “No, it’s okay. I enjoy the solitude.” He does, however, admit that he is looking “for the right one”.
“I’ve never been interested in flings,” he says. “I find them problematic because I don’t think a relationship can be rewarding if you don’t know the other person. It’s just in and out otherwise. You may as well just use your own hand. I find it disgusting to wake up next to a person I don’t know. I’m disgusted by the situation. It just doesn’t feel right.
“It’s love that inspires me,” he adds, “I need a muse. The problem is that you can’t hunt for a muse on date.com.”
IF ALL this sounds very solemn and navel-gazey, that would do Valo a disservice. Because, though he takes his music very seriously, he is always self-deprecating. He can go on long and sombre rambles about the way he works, his influences and his character, and then, cracking a broad grin, he can wave it all away as “pretty arty-farty”, calling his music “pompous and stupid”. It’s this self-awareness that makes him a more interesting character than some musicians.
Frequently when he answers questions he will say something, stop, then crack up laughing, asking, “What the fuck am I talking about?” It’s perhaps this grounding that prevents him from drifting off for too long into the surreal world his creativity inhabits.
“At the end of the day, you have to understand a song comes down to three and half minutes on a piece of fucking plastic. It’s essential to be able to see the fun side of it,” he says. “You might put a million man hours into an album but, when you put it onto a CD, you compress it down into a series of binary computer codes to put on a piece of plastic. All of those emotions, experiences, inspirations, traumas… all of it boils down to a string of computer code in ones and zeros. The right sequencing of those numbers can be life-changing for some people and hell on earth for others. The order of the zeros and ones are different when you download Black Sabbath than when you download Britney Spears, but they’re still just zeros and ones.”
But though Valo may force himself to look at his music this way when he becomes too embroiled in describing its various moods and currents, it would be wrong to suggest he doesn’t care about it deeply. In fact Valo hopes Screamworks is his band’s most successful album yet.
“It’s not so we can go out and buy nice cars but because a pat on the back from the record-buying audience is a nice reward,” he says. “You really work your ass off for an album so to see people dancing to it in a club is a really nice reward. I’m hoping it will happen with this one.”
What happens, though, if there is no success? Valo has been sober for over a year now but stronger men than him, you suspect, have fallen off the wagon in the face of lesser adversities.
“No, if it fails, I think I need to experience that sober too,” he says. “It would be way too easy to give in then. If and when I start drinking again, I want to do it when I feel good. I want it to be when I’m stable and not reacting to positivity or negativity. That would be the easy way out. I want to celebrate the album’s success or failure while sober.”
Before that, though, he’ll have to go on tour sober – a potentially much trickier endeavour and one that he is yet to try. “To be honest, I’m not thinking about it because I don’t dare to,” he says. “I don’t want to see an itinerary, I just want someone to tell me where to go, and then I’ll pack my bags and head off. I haven’t missed drinking but I do miss ending up in very Dali-esque situations, at weird parties for example. But I’ve had a lot of those experiences so maybe that tank is full for a while. I have no reason to start pounding Stella Artois again – it’s a waste of time and money. I know what it does and I know how it tastes: it tastes okay and it gets you drunk. But no, I have no regrets. I don’t glorify the days of yore. I had a blast but I’m still having a blast, it’s just a different kind of blast now.”
He stops once more, laughing to himself, as he realises he’s again drifting into seriousness. He shrugs, leans back on the sofa in the plush hotel room, then lights another cigarette. He seems cheerful, content with his lot at the moment, which is not an accusation that could have been levelled at him until recently.
So is he? Is he happy?
“I’m a moody person, so I’m up and down,” he shrugs. Then he stops again and sighs the sigh of a man who’s found a solution that, though it may not be perfect, works well enough for him.
“Remember,” he says. “Everything comes down to binary. All of this boils down to ones and zeros in the end. You know what else? Fuck it all.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
