VNV Nation: Arena would be a very good example because it’s a long list of, each line is an element of a place that has happened in my life where I felt… it’s a description of a situation. Even a couple of words, like, you know, above the waste with my hands raised or something, I can’t even explain to someone what I did except that I was stood on a cliff on the edge of Ireland doing an old, ancient tradition where you tempt the wind to take you. And this island is on the very, very, very western coast of Ireland, there's nothing further than that except the United States. I discovered that's where my name, Ronan, comes from, because the king who was named Ronan was named on a beach on the one side of the island. My name is little seal, which might sound a bit weird, and I actually had a really cool conversation with a native American about this the other night, about the origins of our names and where they come from and the whole idea that we have spirits in Celtic mythology that inhabit us, that we find out spirit. And he was named because a king brought him to the shore, he brought his son to the shore and said how do I name my son? I asked the seals who are the wisdom from the sea because they have sympathetic faces and sympathetic eyes, but they always seemed wise but yet melancholy about the future of us and the future of the world. And a little seal came running up to him and he named him after the little seal, and the boy and the seal developed this relationship where he would be given advice throughout his life and then he became a benevolent king who was murdered by his wife, because she was a power-hungry woman and all this kind of fun stuff. So we… yes, sorry, that was my moment that I was mentioning. It was like this was the time where I felt my life was part of a giant arena, but I wasn’t on a stage, but I imagined people having revelations all over the world. Giant, you know, moments where giant thoughts hit you, without the use of drugs, because I despise drugs. I think it’s quite capable for a person to come up with really, really revolutionary thoughts without the use of, you know, smoking weed and saying hey, isn’t ‘dog’ ‘god’ spelt backwards? You know what I mean, right?
Star: Yeah, I was 13 once…
VNV Nation: In Ireland we didn’t do things like that at thirteen, not in my era, it’s kind of, it’s changed since then, but more’s the pity. So trying to swing everything back, because I go off in twenty thousand tangents but I’ll eventually come back if the conversation goes on for about eight hours. With Future Perfect I wanted to say a lot of things about my dissatisfaction with all the things we’ve lost. There was this great optimism that the beginning of last century, where the youth was responsible for coming up with all the great ideas and how we should build the world and how we should make it, and it should be a wonderful place. And futurism and modernism and all these things which are revolutionary said well, you know, everything was an evolution on its own… Well, let’s stop that. Let’s design it, let’s make it. It went wrong because, you know, people, you know, the First World War happened…
Star: Everybody has their own idea…
VNV Nation: Right, but it became appropriated, it became, you know, had there not been wars we might have achieved it, you know. The thing for me was that the cover was a reflection of, it was a mixture of a poster for the Chicago World Fair in 1933/34 and a Soviet fair of futurism at the same time. and to give you a sense of prospective, at the Chicago World Fair you have all these movies about, you know, gee son or like gee dad, what's electricity? Well son it’s going to make your mom’s job a lot easier. I watched these movies and I swear to you, now the horrific imbalance of sexism in that world was just astounding. But what I wanted was this idea of we can build a better future for ourselves in which everyone is smiling. It’s naive optimism, but if you achieve fifty percent of it you're still doing well. I wanted to say that this perfect, bright future that we were all going to make for ourselves had never happened. But in actual fact we’re living in a nightmare world where the bright, shiny city that they built had decayed because people had lost their soul and their sense of direction, we’ve lost the sense of direction and thought. I wanted to say that to people I think had listened to VNV because they'd really listened to the lyrics and saw them along those lines, not to the kids who listen to VNV because other kids listen to it and think it’s popular or need to because it’s one of the prescribed bands that you must be listening to to be in the scene. If they like the music and they hear something from it and one day it hits them, then fantastic. If they're doing it for trend and they come up and tell me oh, why can’t you do more songs like Fragments? Why, because it sounds cool.
