Daniel P Carter:[talking about Sonisphere] … Playing their only UK show of the summer, HIM. We called up with Mr. Valo earlier today. So what have you been up to since last I spoke to you?

Ville Valo:Late February of this year we headed over to Australia to play a beautiful festival called Soundwave. They had like Rob Zombie and they had all the legends there and we did that for about a week and a half, two weeks. Then we flew over to North America and we toured the west coast first then the east coast – it was beautiful! We toured all of the House of Blueses around. Then we went, for the first time, Puerto Rico then toured Mexico to Argentina, Chile, and we went to Brazil as well. You know, all the ice cream and all the sun – all the things that kill Goths!

D:Yep! Have you done much of South America before this though?

V:No, never. We lost our virginities, sonically speaking, when it comes to HIM and South America, so yeah, we didn’t know what to expect and we’ve been getting tons of e-mails and tons of letters from there for many many years and we didn’t have the chance to go there before. It’s a bit of a hassle to go there since, you know, have to ship the musical gear from country to country – it always takes time and there’s always some hassle with the customs and that sort of stuff. But we were spared from any “super despair” so to speak. We were treated fairly well. The food was wonderful, the people were lovely and noisy and rowdy and everything you would want from the rockdom. It was amazing to be honest with you, it was brilliant. We just came back a few weeks back and we went to China for the first time, I’m not sure if you heard about that – our troubles in China.

D:No.

V:Yea, there’s a festival there called Strawberry Festival or whatever and we flew over to Shanghai for the first time to play a concert and nobody there spoke English, obviously, and there was a ton of people in the audience and about 20 minutes, the cops said we had to pull the plug because there were too many people at the festival and you know – it was a security risk. At the end of the day we were like, “oh well, thank god we got more day in Beijing and one more gig to go and we flew over to Beijing and went to play the gig, there was a terrible dust storm. It was so bad that it tore the roof off the festival stage off and it cancelled the whole gig! We flew all the way to China for the first time, we ended up playing 25 minutes which was like 5 songs, and the whole trip took 5 days, so it’s like 1 song per day.

D:Well that’s a fairly good ratio!

V:Yeah! For a song, I guess – like Gun ‘n Roses. But it’s a sad thing; we’re trying to make up that whole incident. It wasn’t our hands, obviously, but we’re trying to go back later this year to do some club gigs, hopefully indoor ones that would be great to be on the safe side of things because we clearly offended the Gods - the ancient gods of China.

D:Yeah, that would annoy mother nature.

V:Yeah, so that was a bit of a hassle. So yeah, now we have to go back directly to the rehearsal place to make sure our rock and roll muscles are still intact for our trip over to the UK in a few of months.

D:Amazing! I’m looking forward to it! And it’s going to be your only show here at Sonisphere?

V:Yeah! It will be, it will be. Thankfully enough, I was actually hoping we would be able to play that particular festival because you know - the area is fairly historic and it’s the anthology of rock and roll for the Isle of the Brits. And then the whole line-up is really good and I don’t know what happened, maybe we prayed, for once, to the right Gods and we got the offer about a week and a half ago, and so obviously we jumped on it and said “yes yes yes, we definitely want to be a part of it,” because not only for ourselves but as fans.

D:Well. I will see you in July. Take Care! Alright, mate.

V:Alright. Hail Satan! Bye bye!

D:See you later!