The EBM.gr team had the honour of spending a weekend with the front man of VNV Nation in Athens, where he was invited as a guest DJ on the 5 year anniversary party at Club Underworld.
The following day, after the party (a great success we must admit), we had the chance to go out for lunch and coffee, where Ronan told us some of the most amazing and hilarious stories - and it's really a pity we can't publish them all here. So we asked for an interview for which he said yes!
As I have seen in many many interviews about Ronan Harris on the internet as well as on printed magazines, I can surely tell you that everybody shares the same opinion: a down to earth person, full of energy, extremely talkative and *very* clever... but I could never imagine how truly approachable he is until I met him in person! Moreover, one of the most amazing things about Ronan is that he has an opinion on everything! From high-tech gadgets to ancient Greek philosophy and history, to linguistics, well he more than definitely knows his way around.
Here's Part 1 of the text version of the interview. You can see the video interview here:
Ronan Harris Video Interview Part 1
(If you've read this part, continue with Part 2 )
Ladies and Gentlemen Mr Ronan Harris!
EBM.gr: Hello Ronan, Thank you very much for being here, for taking the time to answer our questions and for coming to Greece to play as a DJ... So... what do you think of last night?
Ronan: It was wonderful! Ah....(laughs)... that sounds sooo weird! "How was last night"! Well...
EBM.gr: (laughs)
Ronan: Well, it was great! I think the only times I've been here, I've been in clubs which were...erm, I didn't expect this kind of club... in Athens, because my experience from the clubs here so far was more... I went to either "scene" clubs, which were more gothic, or I ended up in clubs that were playing wild techno. So I've never seen an EBM club yet. I love the location, I love the design, the whole styling of the place, the "seven deadly sins" in it... It's great! Great atmosphere, great people, I had a lot of fun. As I said to you guys today, people were very afraid to come up and talk to me, I was sitting at the bar like: "Here I am!" and people would walk up and be like: "Erm, I-I I am really sorry, I-I don't want to interrupt...". Well, you are interrupting nothing! I am sitting at the bar drinking, you know! So the people were very polite, and as I told you earlier, in some countries there are some people who believe that if they don't get the autograph now they never will. The only other country that was like this, outside of maybe Germany, was Argentina. People were very very polite and well-behaved, and they would walk up and say "excuse me", "pardon me", "may I"... and I think you guys know me already, I am down-to-earth, well I try to be...
EBM.gr: So it's like that everybody sees you as a celebrity, and, well... you don't want that, do you?
Ronan: Erm, I don't, but it's... me... when I live in home, or when I lived at home, I do normal things, and I hang out with my friends, and go to same places as other people, and do the same things as other people do, there's nothing different about me, except that I write music, and people hear that music and I think it's because maybe of what I think, and as we've spoken, the lyrics affect people that creates this sense of...they don't know what kind of person I am... plus I think that some people can have negative experiences meeting celebrities, and I don't see myself as a celebrity, I really don't and I don't want to.
EBM.gr: Do you think there's a legend behind an artist and people are afraid that this "image" might be somehow... you know... might change?
Ronan: Mmmm, yes, but people don't know what to expect, and I think that's the problem, how many people meet... I mean...I can talk from my own experiences. I've met many bands that I really liked, you know when I was a fan, when I was a teenager, when I was in my twenties, and I really didn't know what to say to them, because they don't know how to talk to you... and you don't know how to talk to them, and it's very uncomfortable and very awkward and it becomes "fan meets band". Uhm... I think the only person I've met who was in a really big band at the time that was very cool, totally laid back, was Richard from Front 242. I met him in Toronto, and he was sooo laid back, so cool, just talked to me like a normal person, and I really respected him for that because any other bands that I've ever met treated me like a fan looking for an autograph, you know... I even had the experience of meeting Underworld in a festival in Holland and I didn't know what to say! I walked up to Karl Hyde and I said: [tells this in a very awkward expression] "urgh, erm..." because all I could think of was all the nervous fans coming up and talking to me! And I didn't know how to speak to them, and I got really nervous! Yeah... anyway.
EBM.gr: You told us you're building a new studio in Hamburg?
Ronan: Yes. I've moved studios a lot the last few years, and we wanted a permanent
home for a long time. But it seems that every album is written in a new place, and recorded in a new place. Maybe that's part of the magic, I don't know, maybe it's a lucky charm. But we came back from the tour, and the studio complex we are in, was closing, which was unfortunate because there's a whole constellation of people there, very happy working together and inspiring each other. So what we all did, we said "We don't want to break the magic" so we went to the building in Hamburg, near where I live, and renovated the whole thing, and it's actually a very therapeutic almost psychological thing, in that we are controlling what we put in there, we are not renting from anyone else, we are designing our studios, we are building them all together as a group project, very much like a joint effort, and... yeah, the atmosphere is very much more of a community, because we are the musicians who are in a studio complex together, and the building feels very energetic and very inspirational and it's really nice to have your own place and say "this is gonna be our home" and we are building it and we can do what we want with it.
EBM.gr: Do you plan to install any new hardware that you haven't worked with in the past?
Ronan: Yeah, I bought some things last year that I haven't had the chance to work with because I came back from the tour and I also had to move, but... uhm... in terms of synths.... Uhmmmmm... I don't think there's anything amazingly new that I am dying to work with right away. There's a couple of tools that I worked with in the album and I really didn't get as far as I wanted to, like for example there's a synth called "Evolver" by Dave Smith, and I have this version called the "Poly:Evolver" and I love it! It's like a pure analogue synth but almost in the way that synths are made today. Lot's of very controllable features, you can edit in the computer, and everything like that and I love playing with it! So I want to get back into using that, because to be honest it's not how much equipment you have, it's what you do with it, so... I got a lot of items that I bought to, kind of, develop the studio up to the level where I don't need another mixing desk or studio, a big studio that I could do everything in the house. And that was more for the sense of freedom, because you don't have to go out looking for the right situation to mix... the engineer who mixed the album "Judgement", is helping built the studios and he is going to be in the house, and his knowledge and his way of working is very technical so, I say how I want something to sound and I don't know how to get it, and he knows exactly how to do it! So, he is not artistically trying to tell me how *he* wants it to sound, he is happy when he shapes it exactly as I want it. And that was a great way to work together. So, we are working on putting in a thing called a "Summing Mixer", a really technical device that I got from a big company in America that they gave to me for a small amount of money, because they think that by me using it other people would want to use it, but this normally costs...
EBM.gr: So, it's kind of an advertisement...
Ronan: Yeah, but it's way beyond the reach of a lot of people, but it's the idea of "Summing Mixers"... Anyone who uses a computer to make music should really think about using a "Summing Mixer". In the dance world it's the normal, it means you don't need a mixing desk when you are mixing down, you just mix everything out through an effect unit, well not an effect unit, it's a mixer without the controls. It's like eight separate channels, combining them into a stereo pair. And if you want to know why, and I am sure there are people reading this who make music, computers are terrible to calculate base, and you use a "Summing Mixer" to get clarity and to get definition in your mix and it makes a really big big difference... I think the most important thing you need in the studio besides the computer, you should mix like this, like eight or 16 channels... look for a "Summing Mixer" online, read about it and see what you think.
EBM.gr: So you are not turning into analogue hardware then?
Ronan: I've always used analogue hardware in the days when I made "FuturePerfect", I was trying to make a statement for myself, like a futuristic statement by trying to use what the new technology of the day was, which was to do almost everything on the computer, to have just this flat screen monitor, controller, keyboard and that was it. The ultimate minimalism! And having all the synths on the screen, at the time it felt, you know, kind of revolutionary. I didn't want to use a mixer, I didn't want to use any kind of big production. I only wanted to use tools that were available on the computer. But it has come a long way, the quality then wasn't particularly fantastic, so now the need for external hardware, like dynamic processors... I only really own them, if the do something specific I cannot get with a computer plugin. Because to be honest there are still many issues with latency and the speed of the transmission of sound, and when you work internally with a computer, the quality of the plugins available today are incredible. So the main thing for me in analogue is still using a lot of analogue synths and I still love using the modular systems, which we will be probably going to get to when you talk about Modcom. But it's the organic feel of working with the synthesizer and the sounds you get out of it... I have a personal connection with this kind of sound, and it inspires me to go further. And there are some synthesizers I just don't connect with... I just don't like the sound.
EBM.gr: OK, the next question is the one I always wanted to ask for about a year now... what happened to the remixes of Chrome and Homeward? You were supposed to release them at some point...
Ronan: There were live tracks on the CD, it was originally called "Reformation". At the
time when the album was made there was a lot of chaos happening, around the album "Matter + Form", and we were on tour, and we came back from the tour and again some chaos happened... One of the problems was that there were live tracks planned to be one very big part of it. And I didn't want to just release a CD with a couple of remixes of each track. So I wanted to put this together as a valuable pack, like something that is worthwhile for fans... But a lot of venues charged a fee for *using* the audio, not for recording but for using it. But in Germany this is almost unheard of. In America most venues, professional venues do it, but if you ask them in advance they should tell you. So we certainly wanted to do this, I won't say which country it was in, but we recorded everything in a really high quality way, and afterwards they asked... about three months after we recorded it, they asked for a *lot* of money. Which would have meant that we would have made nothing on the CD. They would have made everything from just the use of the live tracks! So instead of saying "No!" we tried to negotiate. And we thought we'll take it for some months and eventually what happened was we reached a deal but it was so close to the album... it took so long, and we had no alternative... I had to decide "OK this will interfere with Judgement's release campaign if we release this now" because it would be too late in 2006 and then the album is coming out in 2007... this is stupid because it is a CD from an old release. And I have no choice but to make a decision and I wrote this online, you know and I hoped this would explain it to fans, and this will be packaged together, the CD will come, but now what's happening is that "Reformation" had tracks that were not used on "Matter + Form", extra tracks, and now there are extra tracks from "Judgement" that were never used... Most of this is 70 or 80 percent finished. So once the studio is up and running in a couple of weeks, I want to get all of these things together, and put together a big fan pack. So it's all the bits and pieces that people haven't had for years... To be honest I hate singles. Singles are pointless to me. I mean they are nice for collectors but I don't believe there's ever enough valuable content on them... just maybe three tracks. An EP is OK.
EBM.gr: Well it is nice to promote your work...
Ronan: It is, but to be honest you can promote it better online by putting out one track and having everybody have it and send it to each other and download from each other, and this way everybody gets to hear an example of what's going on the album rather than a single which, you only limit it to the people who buy it.
EBM.gr: So, you've got lots of tracks you haven't used from "Judgement" and "Matter+Form"...
Ronan: Oh yes!
EBM.gr: Talking about "Judgement", it's been nearly ten months since the release of the album. How do you feel after all this extensive touring? What do you think of the album? Do you think it is VNV Nation's peak up to this point?
Ronan: Peak? Peak implies that the rest is a downhill...
EBM.gr: Not necessarily...
Ronan: No... My understanding of the word "peak", it means that we've reached the highest point... Uhm... For me personally the album was a tremendous success because I felt from the beginning to end, the album was everything I wanted it to be. To me it flows like a book. It starts out with this nice intro but it ends like a film. You expect almost credits! The really cool thing is when I listened to the album with about 15 people I invited over to listen to with me, and we had the feeling that we had no idea how long the album was! It was like a long stream of music. I heard it almost through their ears, that these tracks flow into one another like a story. Making the album and the final results of the album, I felt it was finished. I didn't feel like "Oh I don't have enough time and if I had another two weeks..." I mean there was a part in the end when I was awake for three days non-stop working to finish the album. Really no joke, awake for three days! Don't try this! Ever! It's weird, and when you hit the third day you get the most amazing feeling of calm... I guess because of the job we're doing... and I never felt so emotional. I get emotional now even thinking about it but I remember making the album, I remember how I felt when I finished it and I still feel the same way... I mean I heard two tracks last night in the club and I still feel the same way about them even after playing them on stage over and over for ten months. People always ask if we get bored of the songs...we don't! I don't. I mean I love playing for example "Darkangel" live, I love playing "Standing" live, I feel this song every time I sing it! I love playing "Beloved" live. It still feels as much to me now as it did then. That's the beautiful thing for me. Because I don't feel bored. So... how do I feel about the album? I still think it's one of the best moments, *one* of the best moments in our career. And I put it on the same level as "Empires" because from my side the feeling I had making "Empires" and the feeling I had making "Judgement" were identical. It was a very emotional, very energy-consuming process, but the end result was this greatest feeling of satisfaction. It's this turmoil and this anguish, where you are trying so hard to finish something and try to get everything in it you wanted. At the end I felt the most amazing feeling of contentment, I came outside the day it was totally finished and uploaded to the mastering company... and it had been snowing and all I could hear in my head playing over and over was "As It Fades" and it was a very weird... I felt asleep in the cab on the way home! The cab driver tried to talk to me and I was falling asleep and I said "I am from Ireland, yeah, yeah, yeah"... and then I went [makes snoring sound]... it was like me body said "enough"! And then four or five weeks later we were going on tour and I had no rest. I was like getting up and going out to do the next thing... it's like making a movie in a way...
EBM.gr: So, "As It Fades" represents the calmness that you felt after you finished the album...
Ronan: No, it doesn't represent it. It was written as a finale to the album. And I like that albums in themselves are an album! Like not a collection of sounds but is one concept. And "Judgement" was a concept. It is ten interpretations of the title. And "As It Fades" to me, it was the perfect way to the album should end... it should fade out in the most meaningful... it should be like a reflection. Like you think about what you've just heard. If you listen to the album like that.
EBM.gr: It doesn't not imply anything that you will... stop with VNV Nation?
[at this point Ronan gets rather upset with this question]
Ronan: Why would you read something like that?
EBM.gr: Well just making sure!
Ronan: "As It Fades" is something like... actually the very first track was going to be 
called the opposite of "As It Fades". But I actually felt that I had done... OK this is going to be complicated: The cover of "Judgement" is a very cloudy experience, very dark, cloudy experience, with a threat of sunshine coming through. Actually the song "Secluded Spaces" is a soundtrack to a sunrise. Because metaphorically speaking sunrises and visual themes have always been very common to VNV's music. "Arclight" is about watching almost the sun come up over an empty landscape and sing in it like you see in a fresh day... it's the psychological feeling that you have a new start. Something fresh. So "Secluded Spaces" to me as a song had already expressed this idea of the sun coming up and the sun going down... it was basically a reprise in musical terms, the first was called "Prelude" and the last was called "Reprise" and I wanted it. They are both the same melody, they are just variations one another. There is a third and a fourth version of it, one has a piano with vocals which is not in the album and it's the original of that piece. Those two were the variations of the original track. And that song I wanted to save for some special moment because it would have been too much to put that on the album. It would have overnailed the topic, the idea of what the album is about. And *NO* there is no end! We are not finished!
EBM.gr: So you are preparing your new album?
Ronan: I am! Oh yes! I mean I am writing songs all the time... believe it or not I had a song melody playing in my head the whole time I was flying down here and the first thing I did when I got here you know, when you guys dropped my to the hotel was to setup my computer and I have this system where I write everything I imagine about a song, all the sounds, the feel of it, how it might sound like, melody in lines or even just an instrument sound from a song that I know, and then I play a melody to Garage Band on my Mac and I actually play the chord structures and then just leave it so I have this idea I can come back to. And I have these simple sounds that I use for just writing the pieces. It's like a notepad for me. So I am always writing new material and I don't know why [looks like he gets a bit upset again], no offence to you, I don't know why anybody would assumed that for example "Oh my God!" - you know - "VNV Nation are finished". I remember everyone said this about Depeche Mode when Alan Wilder left... I have no intention, no need or even wish to even think about the end! I love what I do! I adore it! And here we are after ten years of the release of "Praise The Fallen", which I regard in many ways to me as our first album, because "Advance and Follow" was this collection of tracks I had been working at home in different ways for ten years, and then put together on a collection, on an album, not really trying very hard... just "Oh I am so happy! My God I've got an album!". "Praise The Fallen" was the first album I wrote from the beginning to end and said: "Right, I am going to write an album" and I have this concept, and that was to me the first definitive VNV album. So here we are ten years later... and we haven't lost speed. Put it that way.
EBM.gr: OK, you made yourself clear. You are still working with Modcom?
Ronan: Oh yeah, I did a concert at Christmas, just before the New Year's, in Germany. There will be an album. It was basically a hobby project but then suddenly all this expectation came, like "oh, when is the album?", "when is the single?", "when is the...". Aaah... it's fun! It's me, paying tribute to what inspired me to do electronic music, I was always so fascinated by these major musicians in their modular systems in the 70's, that looked so technical but so cool, like a piece of science. And it was the size of the synthesizer, I guess, that always impressed me like when you see pictures of Edgar Froese...
EBM.gr: From Tangerine Dream?
Ronan: Yeah, or...
EBM.gr: Jean Michel Jarre?
Ronan: Yeah, Jean Michel Jarre... well to an extent... he never really had a massive amount of equipment that everybody thinks he did, when he did "Oxygene" he was mostly using a big organ and using a VCS3, which is for a lot of its weird sounds, but when you read the equipment list on "Oxygene" -which is a really crazy thing that he included the equipment list, most people would never know any of them- [at this point a car sounds beeping from outside the conference room] thanks!... Yeah he didn't have as amazing equipment as... I mean Tangerine Dream were like a warehouse of equipment... but I was impressed by what Giorgio Moroder did, or there were bands like Curved Air... even what Brian Eno was doing...and all these people ...Isao Tomita would be a could example, or Klaus Schulze... and when I could buy their albums, like second-hand or whatever, as a kid, I mean I was ten years old, and totally fascinated by synthesizers, so I would buy anything that had a picture on it of a synthesizer or I would understand that these guys were making music that involved it. And it inspired me, so Modcom became my... you know I have modular systems, I have been using them for years at home, personally and then it became part of the sound process for making VNV's sounds, but I wanted to make music that was made totally using the modulars, whereas VNV is there being used for sounds and melodies... I think some of the best sequences in VNV's music were done with some of these really very rare or very complicated analogue synthesizers...
EBM.gr: Your favourite group from that era?
Ronan: From that era? Well it depends on what period you'd say... I mean I would say...
EBM.gr: The 70's?
Ronan: In the 70's, I would still say it's Kraftwerk, but oddly enough they had their moments but they weren't my favourite. In the 70's I was crazy when Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene" came out. Because "Oxygene" and "Equinoxe" were ground-breaking. But I think it was when I first heard the Human League and I think it was 1978 on a radio show from the UK and because I like synthesizers, as soon as I saw synths that was it! I was hooked! I was awake. And it was the early Human League playing a song from "Reproduction" on a weird british TV show, and I thought "This is incredible! This is just punk, mad stuff"... So... there are too many to say one was better than the other but I would say in the classical side of electronic music it would be Vangelis. Not you... [Ronan looks at the one of the two interviewers whose name is Vangelis]
EBM.gr: (laughs)
Ronan: The other one! The truck driver...[laughs] [note: this comes from an earlier talk we had with Ronan about Vangelis also being a very common greek name sometimes connected to a rather "macho" stereotype, like a truck driver!]...in the, kind of more, classical electronic process, yeah, Vangelis. And in the more kind of industrial side I would say it would be the early Human League.
EBM.gr: Moving on to today, what do you plan to do with Anachron Sounds?
Ronan: It's basically just a vessel for VNV. One of the reasons why we never signed other artists was because we were running a label ourselves. And we didn't have help, because at the time it wasn't generating... like you know, we would re-invest all our money back into VNV and into new equipment or to stage production or to producing CDs, you know it's not cheap... so it would be too expensive to bring in help, plus we had some very weird and bad experiences at times when we asked people to come and assist us. We never really always ended up with the best results. So we are very careful about that. But we would like to develop it, to bring another artist. We've met many artists that would maybe fit a concept, and that concept became clearer and clearer, but it's really down to time and we were on tour for ten months last year so it's impossible to run a record label and run a band and run a release for other bands. Well I would, leave that for someone else, but it's a lot of administrative work. And I would rather someone running the record label, now we have the promise of someone doing that for us. Which, hopefully, will work out the next couple of months. And if that happens, then we would basically take Anachron Sounds into another stage, which we thought we will do eventually, which is to make it a unique record company, catering to a niche sound, asides from VNV. Some people thought we would release just our favourite bands, but that's a good thing because you love the music and you really want to do the best for it.
EBM.gr: Could you name any bands that could actually...
Ronan: I am not going to do that. I am not going to do that now.
EBM.gr: But you have something in your mind.
Ronan: Oh yeah, I've met a lot of bands I always thought would fit together in a concept, if it was marketed correctly, but the problem is... those are the bands I saw then, whereas when we decide to finally go into a label, things will have changed. So it would be basically building up a concept, building up artists and slowly developing. Because what I am waiting for is to see how the music industry is going to change. It is "in flux" at the moment. It's not at the end, it's not at the beginning, it's just in a chaos position, where nobody knows where it's going. I had a very long discussion last night with a guy who came up to me and said: "I bought your albums and put them online, how do you feel about that?" [pause]...and I said: "What do you mean?"... [and the guy said] "I let everybody download, how do you feel about that?". And he was saying that like kind of expecting me to get angry and I said "Alright I'll tell you what I think, now you tell me why you did it." [and the guy goes] "Oh, I wanted everybody to hear your music". Oh that's bullshit! Because they can hear it from 20 different sources, they don't need to hear it from one guy who's doing a charity. Everyone else is sharing it, so why does he need to? So... I said "you are not killing major labels, you kill small bands, you really kill small bands". Because there's so much dilution of the music industry now that all the industrial labels don't have the money to afford to develop new bands, and the bands themselves don't get enough royalties to see that this is a career, that they can concentrate on, to develop their own techniques, their music, or to drop a stage show or to anything. They have no money to do it. I mean most of the bands I know make little or no money from what they do, so... Thanks downloaders!
EBM.gr: So, what is the main source of income in your job? Is it the CD sales? Is it the live shows?
Ronan: Are you going somewhere with this? Because I know you have a question about something else to do with...
EBM.gr: Well yeah, it's just a rumour...
Ronan: No go on! It's alright! Don't be afraid to ask me anything, we'll have a good discussion about it, that's what I like. Uhm... where do we get our income? Well to be honest, when you sell CDs you decide... OK, this is how any record label works: Your distributor will say to you "we expect to sell a thousand" - let's just say for example. And that means we will get the following amount of money, that's your budget. And you look at that and say "OK that's my budget, this is gonna be realistic and I am going to be safe and secure with this". If I sell less, I lose money, if I sell more I make more money. So you don't spend all of your money based upon the hope you are gonna sell twice, you don't spend your whole budget, you have to leave some for this profit. So you decide: I can place this number of adverts, this is what my CD costs are going to be, to produce the CDs, this is what my publisher royalties are going to cost me, this is what advertising, artwork, packaging, band royalties - if you are not the band releasing. And you have to add all these long costs and there's a big long list. Everything has to get paid out. And in the end, the record company and the band split what's left and the rest is, you know, the advance to the band to record, there's a recording cost as well which is in most labels the advance the band gets...
EBM.gr: From a new band's point of view, something like that can be discouraging...
Ronan: It's not discouraging if you are with the label. If you are with the label... to be honest, there is a lot of labels who were once really big, and they can't afford to be really big anymore... There are a lot of small labels that make niche music where the person who runs it does it part time, does it after work, he never has to do it at any other time, because there's no big demand, there's no big pressure. And these survive quite well, selling two thousand copies of each release. The label does well because they know their budgets, and they make enough money out of it, they sell two thousand copies of five of your releases... well ten thousand copies is a lot of money! You can get roughly about seven... seven and a half euro per CD after distributor and CD production deductions and royalties, mechanical royalties - publishing royalties they're called- so you can decide what to do... say you work with a budget six euro per CD... that's the label. The band usually gets screwed, because the band usually gets 30 percent of the price the distributor sells it, maybe one euro, one euro fifty, which means they sell two thousand copies, wow! They got two thousand euro. Or two to three thousand euro. That doesn't go very far. So you either doing it for love, and you're having fun with it... when we started out I honestly thought we were going to sell one thousand copies of "Praise The Fallen" and that was it. In fact I've always underestimated our sells. I always thought "we're gonna sell less, nobody likes us anymore"...I am always not the "doom" guy but I guess I can't accept what we've become. And everybody knows it, everybody says it to me. And I still, even though I say and talk about it, I still can't get it into my head what people think we are. It just doesn't make any sense to me. But, uhm, where do we get our income from? Different sources, I mean live pays for... you know on a live tour you deduct your travel costs, your bus costs, your production... we are really not millionaires! That's maybe one answer I can give to you... we spent money accordingly. From the CD income we spent it on all CD costs or promotion costs and for a lot of the general running costs that you have. And with a live tour, you're hoping to walk away with a profit. Merchandise is always the big profit area for any band. In fact most bands operate on a philosophy that they get a certain income for every show to a tour, break even, and make all your profit on merchandise. And it's actually the best method.
EBM.gr: Mentioning live shows, the rumour I was talking about before is that you are the highest paid act in this scene.
Ronan: Yeah, we are not. Well, compared to who? You can always say.. I remember six or sever years...
EBM.gr: You can do the comparison...
Ronan: I mean there's a lot of bands who get similar fees to us. I don't see us getting more money than a lot of other bands, you know your fee will always go up, 'cause your booking agency is trying to make more money and that's the thing! Everybody has a financial interest in you. And you have more friends the bigger you become, because you have the possibility of making more money from people. But that's not fair to say that for a booking agency because the booking agent wants the band to do really well, they have a personal interest in seeing a band become a very successful item. And the bigger the band... to be honest there's a financial cost associated with it, in that the band is going to attract a lot of people. Fees for gigs are based upon the expected number of people coming. Not on how big the band is. There are some bands who play festivals who get ridiculous amounts of money. Just because that's what they think they are worth. Now, I know what bands, who've played below us or before us, have gone to festivals and they got five times what we've got. We do not command huge fees, it's just that this is what people think we are worth. We have to deal with that. On a tour, it's always based on the number of tickets sold. So we get money based upon how many people come to the concerts. But our expenses, and you really have to see this, they can be ridiculous! Because the bigger the band the bigger the expectations that you have to put on a big show and you have to pay for a lot of things. And the bigger the band becomes... you can't pay your friends, like "Ah, I'll give you 50 euro if you help me out at this gig" or whatever... you can't do that anymore, you have to pay some people at professional rate, to have professional crew, because you can't afford any mistakes. And you have to buy equipment for the tour, you have to make sure that everything is up-to-date and everything works great. I don't believe in doing the same thing twice, so we always have a nice new stage show, new projections or something like that, they all cost! But at the same time we are very DIY band. And this is a very important point. DIY comes from the idea that we... it's a punk mentality actually, I never really knew this but we did our own website, we did our own covers, we did our own promotion, we run a record label but we added onto their own work. They just promoted us like any other band. We were networking, trying to get DJ to play us, doing as much work as we could do, we were motivated and ambitious. We wanted to be big, we want people to hear us. That's all we wanted. And any band who's starting out has to do something like that. Some people can, some people can't. I guess we were very lucky. We have designed our own covers, for the most part put the concepts together, we do our own website, I do the videos for the live shows, we decide our setlist, we decide what equipment we are going to use, nobody is telling us what to do, we decide all of this for ourselves. We run our own record label, which is a good thing, because we cut out a record label that we don't need. We can do it all ourselves. Honestly! So easy for us to do, but we have to be successful in order to do it, because you cannot run a label if nobody wants your product. Your record label will close tomorrow.
EBM.gr: So, you do most things yourself, you prefer that way. And when it comes to playing live what other challenges do you see?
Ronan: Uhm... God, I forgot what the challenges are! I don't think there are challenges. The main challenge is, well not for us, I am saying for a band who's thinking about their live show... developing your own unique personality. Everyone has their own personality, it works the same with a band on stage a person on a street. You walk into a room of crowded people, if there's something interesting about you, something different about you, someone will notice it. And the same happens when people are looking at you on the stage. Because it's not like you have five bands all competing and everyone can decide who they want to watch. You have one band, they are all watching you and they will analyze you. So you have to look comfortable, you have to look like you're confident, or if you are unconfident then you really... your music is coming from your heart and soul. I always believe that music should come from your heart and soul. And that it should show that you love what you're doing and you put a lot of effort into it. And we always decide at the beginning, when they were only two of us, that Mark could play electronic drums and I could sing because I wanted to be the person demonstrating the passion and the emotion of the music and I wanted Mark to demonstrate the rhythm and the tempo and the power behind the music... the driving, the engine. That's why I always called him the "engine room" of VNV Nation. And to me, to avoid copying, I think these are big challenges, because it is very easy to do this without thinking and you love your idols but you want to be like them, but you don't think that... I've heard bands "We are different from all these bands, we have blue shirts while they have yellow" and I say: Oh, c'mon! Just develop your own thing, just what feels right. Don't think all just image and work back from that. Think about what you need to demonstrate on stage, what you need to play and how people are going to perceive it.
EBM.gr: When you hear a band that sounds pretty similar to VNV Nation, how do you feel about that?
Ronan: That's a rhetorical question! Do you want me to answer that? (laughs) No, I think it's a compliment. There are bands I've heard with the singer was trying to copy me! And that really amazed me! I was shocked for about two hours after that, I couldn't speak, I didn't know what to say! There's this guy trying to sing like me, intonating his vocals like me... If I hear a band using similar melodies or something like that, then I think: that's a compliment! I mean what else is it? It's not an insult. I was hearing other bands in 1996 or 1997 when we were starting to push towards making "Praise The Fallen". In any time, I would hear bands that sounded like another band I knew. And I'd think: "Why you're doing this? Why not make your own thing?" And it's lack of originality, it's lack of the ability to come up with their own unique ideas. I think this is a sad thing. I think that's the biggest challenge for a band to avoid the pitfall of sounding exactly or too much like your heroes, or bands you like, or an album you like. I think "Empires" was a very influential album. But there's no reason for that to be the only album people could be influenced by. To take a little hint to it, as an influence, a reference to it, "oh that's a kind of a cool sound", I like that. But putting it into music that is your own. You will never be taken over by someone else's album. You'll never copy it. You will be truly coming up with your own unique thing.
EBM.gr: Have you ever come across bands that were either influenced by VNV Nation, at the best, or copied VNV, and you were satisfied with the result of their work? And you said "OK I could have done that instead of them" ?
Ronan: I think what was missing was that people heard the sounds and the melodies in the way they were played and were using that in their music. But what they were not doing was... those sounds and melodies were being used as instruments by me to express the feeling I wanted to put into the songs. And the feelings and emotions were to begin with. And they were working backwards. And it's not a production style that I am doing, it's an emotion that needs different tools, so... I listen to a lot of different types of music, and this sound and this melody and this way of playing it works for me. But I've heard bands who maybe are heavily influenced by the style, and I kind of think "No, there's something missing... there's really something big missing...You have to have that emotional power..."
EBM.gr: ...that feeling...
Ronan: That feeling that you're putting, that you're creating your own thing. And that comes through in anyone's music. Even bands who sound like other bands. There are examples of bands who were influenced by a band, adopted that style but did a better job than the original band. And took that style even better because the original band went down, lost their focus, lost the point of what they were doing. And I guess we could have suffered the same thing. Around the time of "Empires" suddenly there was 4000 bands that had the same idea. And if we'd continued doing the same thing, we would be just a little bit different than them, if you look from a distance... Obviously to our fans they would never think another band would sound like us, but that's our fans, God bless them! We wouldn't be unique anymore. I've always been bored after I've done an album, I can't do the same thing again, I have to come up with something nice and different and new... not totally alien to what we've just done, but still has a connection to our original music but it's still moving very much forward.
EBM.gr: It's a balance between experimenting and innovating? Evolving?
Ronan: Oh, no it's doing what feels right. To be honest it's not about the innovation, I've never called ourselves, we are not innovators. We are not doing anything that has not been done before. I've always admired great songwriters, I've always admired people who used their voice in beautiful ways to express an emotion, whether that was singing as a cookie monster or singing like an angel. An emotion comes through... The singer of "Tool" would be a good example. Amazing voice but packs so much power and emotion in it! There's an example of a band totally unrelated to our scene but yet where that kind of emotion can be heard by somebody like me... I am not a total metal freak or anything like that. And I could hear it and say "Wow! This is amazing!". Or you could hear "Nirvana", or you could hear... "Metallica"! Simple example! Their balance... You hear how the guy uses his voice and you think: "He sings like a folk singer", in a way, he could sit there with the folk guitar, sing that song and everybody would sit there and say nothing! They would listen to it and be amazed. "Radiohead" are a great example as well. His voice... If you like that kind of thing it makes you sit there and listen to it. Peter Gabriel... These people write great songs. They express that song beautifully. That's all what we've ever wanted to do, to write songs but in our own style and music, a style of music that we like, EBM style.
EBM.gr: You mentioned Radiohead... Do you think that this band is rather overrated?
Ronan: Ah, they are popular for a reason and I think when they did the "The Bends"... I mean "Creep" was a huge hit, when they came back with "OK Computer" it was a really competent album. It was amazing! There's a lot of bands who didn't do something like that, they did one great album and after that they were kind of trading on the success of the first album and it didn't work out. Anyone who's heard the new "She Wants Revenge" album would tell you that...Oh... So...to me I don't think they are overrated. One of the great things they didn't fit pop formula, they were an alternative band at the top of the charts. And that was amazing for me, because I'd rather them than fucking Beyonce or something else that's just meaningless... Mariah Carey crap - "Let's sing every note on the piano, in a random order and that's music!" I can't stand it! It just drives me mental. It's like, seriously, like someone scratching their nails on a board when I hear that kind of thing...
EBM.gr: You prefer structure in it?
Ronan: No, it's not structure, it's an actual genuine emotion in it. I mean even Thom Yorke does his own solo project which are really different and really creative. And he's doing it because he wants to do creative stuff and it's amazing that this is appreciated, it's not pop, it's not formula stuff. And he's appreciated because he is doing something different but it still has a huge audience. I give him ten points for that!
Continue with Part 2 of the Interview...
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
