In Ville Valo’s mind, the night of July 12, 2007 was going to be special. Standing in the wings as his band, Him, prepared to walk out onstage in front of 14,500 Metallica fans at Stockholm Stadion, the singer felt a mixture of nerves and excitement as the Finnish quintet’s dramatic intro music boomed around the venue: this would be their moment.
“So we walk out, and the crowd is cheering, and our adrenaline kicks in, and… I realise that there are no instruments on the stage,” he says. “Our guitar tech had his wristwatch set at the wrong time, and he was having lunch, thinking that we still had an hour before we played, and the guitars were still in their cases. So we walk on from one side of the stage, and then have to walk right off again, pure Spinal Tap. I’ve never been so ready to kill somebody.”
Sitting in front of a well-stocked bookcase in his Helsinki apartment, Ville laughs at the memory. Now carving out his own path as VV, having called time on Him in 2017, the 46-year-old singer is freshly returned from a holiday in Mexico and is in good form, able to laugh at the absurdity of the journey he’s undertaken across three decades in the music industry.
“I think if you can keep the comedy/horror aspects of this business in balance with the artistic and the beautiful elements of making music, you might just survive and make it through
