Star: And did you see that with previous albums…?
VNV Nation: Never, never.
Star: …back here in the States?
VNV Nation: Never. I mean the thing was when we did the first, when we did the Future Perfect tour, we played before Future Perfect came out, people didn’t know the new songs so they didn’t know how to react to them or where the breaks are and what's going to happen in the songs and what have you. they were a lot sort of less, there was less emotion in the audiences at those times than there is now. People are actually getting into it, we have a lot of new fans coming to the shows who have never seen us before, people from all different varieties of alternative culture, which is really strange to us, it’s something that we find very, very… yes, I mean it’s fascinating. When we meet people before the show, we’ve got a lot of under age people coming because we’re doing a lot of under age shows. And people of sixteen coming in with different perspectives on music who’ve never really come through the whole industrial Goth genre, and they like what we do and they like a couple of other bands and it forms part of their pallet of musical tastes. And they have very, very unique perspectives on it. So I love that, I really find that fascinating.
Star: It adds a lot to the crowd. Going back to Advance and Follow and Praise the Fallen, those two albums, I felt, were really heavy in the battle imagery and like the war imagery, the sounds. A lot of people said it was very militant.
VNV Nation: Well Praise the Fallen was intended as a metaphor, which a lot of people didn’t get.
Star: What was the Battle? I guess this is my question.
VNV Nation: It was actually, it was very obvious in the song Joy. I even wrote this on our website that the album theme was the battle for the control for one’s own soul and destiny. I used the metaphor of remembrance, not war, and that was the thing that some people mistook very, very much. I mean I guess our teutonic rhythms, as some people call them, on that album, it was very kind of like left, right, left, right, you know, pounding EBM sort of stuff. It gave people a very, very false impression. We didn’t use any military samples or any kind of obvious military music on that, I think it’s just this kind of type of beat and the sort of structure of music that gave people that impression. I used the album as a sort of an overlying metaphor for something very spiritual, which is that all through my life I have struggled to be who I am, I’ve struggled to find acceptance or to understand what it means, where I fit in this world, what kind of pigeonhole I’m supposed to fit in to. The album was actually an attempt by me to document myself at a time in my life when I was struggling to wake up from a sort of monotony, a mediocre lifestyle that I had chosen for myself, thinking it was great without realizing that it was actually harmful and damaging to myself. I was playing the image that had been portrayed in black and white movies all my life, and I’d given up on myself and who I’d always been as a teenager and a child and with my defaults or whatever and my deep feelings, and going through the whole teenage thing. And I woke up and thought I am so not happy. But I, it was my battle call to actually become myself and to struggle to be what I am, to win control of my soul and my destiny. And that may sound a bit grandiose…
Star: No, not at all. I’ve had disagreements with many people before about what the album’s about…
VNV Nation: Right. Well to be honest there's a lot of people that take things at face value. I mean it would be like, for people to have taken the album as being about the military would be like taking the song Joy and meaning Oh, the song’s about being happy. It’s not about being happy, so how can you take an album at face value when you realize that the song title doesn’t reflect what the song’s about. Even Solitary wasn’t about being alone, it was actually those split second moments in your life when you see… I saw where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be in the future, what I was about to do and how I was about to change my life vastly. And they were hard times, but they weren’t like wallowing hard times, they were about times of both of strength and the triumph of the spirit. Because, you know, within us we all have this drive to be who we are. You wouldn't be an alternative person unless you felt that you were someone in your teenage years was different or there's something about you that is not like the mediocre image that’s portrayed to people through television of these boring kids with boring lifestyles who’ve got no opinion about things. We don’t feel part of that background right?
Star: I’d actually always struggled to be a part of it, I’ve always wanted to, I’ve always wanted to be normal, it’s always been a struggle for me.
VNV Nation: What is normal?
