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Translated by Sandra M.
HIM, HIS INFERNAL MAJESTY
taken from heartagram.com news
Name problems, satanic verses and prayers (page 1)
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.
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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.
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