When songs from Razorblade Romance were starting to be made into videos, the atmosphere was quite chaotic, and for example two different versions were made of Join Me in Death, one in Germany and another one in England.

In Amsterdam, Ville Valo got to experience how dangerous business meetings can become.

- We met Billy Yukich, who had been chosen to direct the English Join Me video, in Amsterdam, and we were supposed to go over the shoot, the script, and other details, Ville Valo says. – That’s how it started. We went to a million different bars and finally ended up in one with a swimming pool. The place was unbelievable, there really was a pool in the middle of the bar, and people were dancing techno around it.

We went to float in the pool with our clothes on, and the staff kept bringing us more Jack Daniels. At seven a.m., we felt like going to a strip club and then back to the hotel.

The people at the hotel reception wondered how we could be in such a rough shape, but they were too polite to ask anything. I went to my room and ordered a chicken sandwich because I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Then I locked the door and passed out.

When I woke up, I was lying on the hotel room floor cuffed and shackled. Seven policemen were standing around me, and there were also paramedics with bandages and stuff. They had broken down the door because they had thought that I was some stupid tourist who had taken some bad dope and I wasn’t alive anymore because I hadn’t opened the door when they brought me the chicken sandwich.

There I was trying to explain that I’m just drunk because I’m Finnish, don’t be afraid. I was in my underwear, and it was the most horrible way ever to wake up. Eventually the policemen released me and started leaving. Before I had a chance to recover from the shock and close the door behind them, it was opened one more time. The hotel manager came into the room. He asked whether you would like your curry chicken sandwich heated, sir. I told him to shove his sandwich where the sun don’t shine. Then finally I got to go to bed.

We stayed at the hotel for a few more days, and the whole staff kept laughing at me right to my face the whole time. I had to pay for the door that they had broken down myself. I was extremely insulted.

When we later shot also the video for Gone with the Sin with Billy Yukich, he made fun of me and what had happened in Amsterdam even in the video itself. In the video, you can see a tomb stone with the text “from the pool of life into the bonds of peace”. The ‘pool of life’ was naturally the pool in the bar and the ‘bonds of peace’ the shackles that the cops puts me in. That’s the explanation for that philosophical obituary. It was just an inside joke about one hideous night.


From the book HIM - Synnin viemää by J.K. Juntunen (WSOY, 2002).