VNV Nation:Future Perfect sold sixty thousand copies worldwide, if you think of what Front242, Nitzer Ebb, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly & all those bands are selling, we were selling, we ain’t even ten percent there. So this perception we’re some huge, arrogant, rolling in a band to drive Audi TTs is a complete fabrication. We’re not the highest paid band, I mean that's absolute, that's an absolute fallacy. I don’t think our fees are greatly different than they were on the Future Perfect tour, to be honest. I don’t know about our audiences getting bigger, but this tour around obviously there's certain things. We knew that with the mini tour we’d play to people and there’d be people that would say, ok right, I’ve seen them, I don’t need to go. We’ve had really good numbers, we’ve had really good reactions. What I want is people to come to the show who want to hear the music. Charlotte has played Nashville tonight, never been here, peope are going to enjoy the show I hope, and it’s going to be all good. The cool thing is we’re playing at a lot of places we’ve plaid already on the mini tour, we’re coming in with a new stage show, with a lot of new songs, and their numbers look really strong. There's obviously a lot of places we’ve played where, you know, we were never strong, but we’re building, that's what we continue to do. So we’re still on the persona rise, we’re nowhere near, you know, we’ll reach god status or something like that.
Star: Well with doing live shows, do you ever find it difficult to balance doing a live show with electronic music, I mean has there ever been a challenge?
VNV Nation: Never really. I mean, to be honest, our format is of this drummer and vocalist thing was something we chose a long time ago because, you know, there's only two of us and we thought… well Mark can play keyboard and I can sing, well that's boring, Every other band does it. That's not what we’re trying to get across, we would just look like every other band which defeats the purpose of people noticing that there's something different about the band that's on the stage, and that they’ll want to maybe know more. That that's unusual, OK, I’ll have a listen. You know, it opens a small door and allows you further in. It was also that we could travel light with that. And I wanted Mark to be like the tempo, he was the energy of the music, I was the passion, and that's the way we wanted to express it. We’ve upped the lineup now because we wanted keyboards, we want more stuff playing live. We did this with Electronaught, with Mark playing keyboards in Beloved and Holding On and songs like that, but we wanted to up the keyboards, you know, so that we have guys, we have the technology and the ability to play loops on stage and having people playing melodies within the songs and it’s working really well. In Europe people were going mental about it, so it’s good.
Star: Very cool. So about the clubs, what role do you think the club plays in promoting the music? And the same question with radio.
VNV Nation: Well radio isn’t. I think, I don’t know, college radio isn’t something I know a vast amount in North America, I think it depends on the college radio. College radio, you have the benefit in North America, at least from what I know of college radio, at least having one. We don’t have alternative radio in Europe, it just doesn't really exist. The benefit of college radio has always been there to play what is not mainstream, half of it’s played on every other bloody commercial station, and you have people playing a style of music that means a great deal for them and you have people who are DJs who do it for passion, not for money. That is the greatest thing, I mean otherwise we would have never heard of all the new, you know, bands and what have you. College charts mean more to me than Billboard, absolutely. I think they are vastly important and if a DJ wants to play you, they're playing it because they like it and they think the fans out there will like it, not because it’s going to bring like business to the show. It’s the variety, it’s the fact that you play something different, that you play music with an intelligence that brings people to listen to your show. OK, the clubs. The clubs, I think, since the early 90s, even the late 80s when I was going to a club in London call The Hardcore, dance music wasn’t really a defined culture, it was something that happened with house music in the late 80s and acid house and what have you, and it was this underground cool thing that everybody went to these clubs, but as one of many different nights out they could have.
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