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There isn’t much one can say about VNV (Victory Not Vengeance) Nation that hasn’t already been said a thousand times.  In fact, their name is currently almost a misnomer, as they’ve conquered alternative charts all over the world.  In many industrial dance clubs, their songs receive obligatory weekly play, and pack floors like nobody’s business.  At their shows, the crowd rides each song like a comet, as they sing along with every word, reach out with their hands, and sometimes even cry.  Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson have shouted above the mess of generic noise that pollutes the EBM scene to prove that they actually have something to say.  This isn’t just another NIN off-shoot or the club-stomping flavor of the week: these guys are on to something special.

Harris, the voice behind VNV, has unwittingly tapped into the collective psyche of his fans.  In a scene where lyrics are often sacrificed for dance-value, and those who do bother with them hash out cynicism and paranoia in abundance, he has emerged with the proof that there’s room for poetry and optimism.  His lyrics are flooded with emotionally-driven humanist commentary that projects a message which is conscious, introspective, and ultimately hopeful.  And his message is in high demand.

Following the success of their seminal 2002 album Futureperfect, Mark and Ronan announced that their fifth album, Matter and Form was set to be released in early 2005.  The band then embarked on a mini-tour in late 2004, promising hoards of eager fans that they would be among the first to hear some of the brand-new material.  Knowing that they had only scheduled eight dates in the U.S., I had no choice but to travel to Manhattan last December.

What did you want everyone to get from you’re the new album Matter and Form?

When I start out with an album, I think: “This is how it’s going to sound. This is how I imagine it’s going to sound.” And you start writing a song and suddenly you go off on a tangent. You end up writing something else. I don’t want to say it’s the combination of things. It’s got a lot of aggression in some parts, very hard-hitting unrestrained aggression. In other parts it’s ethereal lightness. It’s very soulful, very emotional. Not to say that it’s very optimistic. It’s not all happy and light.

There are songs on there that are quite gritty, like “Chrome,” which is going to be the next single, and “Entropy,” which is like VNV meets Ministry in a way. Trust me; there’s variety on this album like you’ve never heard before. Listening to it, you might think: “OK, this could be VNV …” But it doesn’t sound too shocking. It’s still in the same kind of orchestrations, or whatever you want to call it— arrangements. It’s very dark and very gritty in places, and very light and ethereal in others. It’s got a lot of different vibes on it, but it has nothing but vibe. I absolutely adore it. I’m sorry, that sounds very arrogant …

When I write music, I want to like it first and foremost. If I write a song, it has to be something I enjoy. If I don’t have any personal satisfaction out of it, there’s no point. If I don’t want to hear those songs over and over again because they’re my thoughts or feelings or whatever, there’s absolutely zero point in doing it, because I’m not doing it for anyone else’s benefit. I got into doing this because Praise the Fallen was an outlet for expression at a time when I badly needed it. Empires was written at a time when I needed it even more. I was saying all the things I needed to say, and singing about all the things I wished I had, rather than what I had. Kind of like picturing a nice place when you want to get yourself out of a situation. It’s sort of like a mental trick to avoid negativity when you’re stuck in a hole. 

Initially there’s going to be a single coming out sometime in February or March called “Chrome.” We’re actually unable to play it tonight because of a digital error on my computer, which we play the videos off of. We’re playing “Homeward,” which is going to be towards the end of the set. I don’t know how to describe it. One of my friends described it as “Beloved” times 20. Now one of the reasons we’re not on a major label is because I don’t believe in writing hits. This is going to sound really weird …we got offered a lot of money to go to major labels in Europe after FuturePerfect. 

All the major labels are f*cking up at the moment, and they don’t know how to make money, so they say, “Oh, that’s working. We can bring it on to our label and make more.” VNV Nation works because it’s speaking personally to be people in the genre without trying to sell it to them like they’re idiots. People choose, in the genre, what music they like, and if it speaks to them, they like it, and that’s great. That’s what I love about it. If you go to a major label, it’s like a stock company. You’re there to produce hits. You’re there to make them money. That is not what I make music for. Granted, I live from this, but I don’t go out with the intention of making millions. If I don’t feel it, you’ll know it when I sing it. So I can’t, with any dishonesty, go out and write some fake hit, and sing about something that never happened to me.

Just out of curiosity, how much were you offered from the majors?

One person offered us a $650,000 budget. We have people hunting us around all the time. They’re all looking for bands, then they find bands and they never work for them. I don’t care anyway; I don’t need that. I don’t ever want anyone telling me what to do about my music. I don’t want anyone else saying to me, “I want your songs to sound like this.” I don’t want anyone telling me how my cover art should look. I design the cover art, I write the songs, I sing the songs, and no one has ever told me how they should sound. 

I think all my favourite artists are people who determined what their music sounded like. In the early ‘80s, bands could be as creative and inventive as they wanted while being on majors, and it just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s turned into a money machine. Major labels, in the past, meant distribution. And we’ve got distribution, and we’ve got people who want to put our records in every single store in the world. So why do I need to be on a label?

Why do I have to give someone else my hard-earned cash? For what? So they can go off and buy nice cars for themselves? I don’t own any cars. I invest all our money back into the band. I just bought ourselves a studio, so we can work properly, like actually have a professional place to work from now on, which is exactly what I’ve always dreamed of. Rather than having to use other people’s facilities, or having a half-assed writing room, I’m inclined to invest in it and make it sound as good as possible. 

I’ve got a lot of side-projects I want to work on, two of which are half-finished. One is kind of like … you know the orchestral songs on our albums? It’s kind of like that. It’s all kind of like slow, emotional stories. Every song is a story. There are times when I’ll do these B-sides that are more orchestral-oriented, very melancholy. I don’t want to do a depressing album where it’s got a picture on the front of a razor blade or something. I do not consider my singing with a lot of emotion … I do not consider that miserable. I like singing with soul and feeling. It makes me see that I’m alive. Laughter is another form of that. You can do a stand-up album, or you can do an album like Leonard Cohen. Both albums indicate how a person feels a great deal. That’s one side-project. The other one is something else called Low-Rider, which is just like the name suggests. It’s like slowed-down, groovy, industrial bliss, totally vocal-less mental stuff.

Does Mark live with you in Hamburg?

No, he lives in the south of France.

Do you see each other often?

We meet up at gigs, we meet up by email, he flies into Hamburg every now and again. It’s pretty cheap. I mean, we’ve got so many budget airlines in Europe so he’s able to get up to Hamburg very easily. We spend a couple of weeks talking about stuff, and I send him stuff … I’m the one sort of grinding away in the studio, and I play him stuff, and he says, “I love that, I hate that …”

With all those budget airlines, are you able to revisit Ireland from time to time?

Oh yeah, I go see my family when I can. It’s nice, I can go from Hamburg directly to Dublin. I don’t have to go through London anymore. Europe, in the last couple years, has just opened up. Whole major airlines are going bankrupt, so now we’ve got budget airlines, and it’s the best thing in the world. I can fly to Dublin from Hamburg for $30. 

You really like living in Hamburg, don’t you?

It’s a great city, the second biggest in Germany. Very cool vibe, something to do every night, great scene … It doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re into, whether you’re into punk, industrial, goth, or dance music, or whatever, there’s something there for everybody, and it’s never superficial. Every scene I’ve seen in Hamburg is a real community. Everybody knows everybody, everybody talks to each other.

The one thing Europe doesn’t have, and I really salute them for this, is bickering, backbiting, and gossip. It doesn’t exist. I mean, in London they have it, but in Germany it doesn’t exist. People just don’t gossip. They don’t make up stories. It’s incredible; people in Germany are like, “Livejournal? What’s that?” Like we don’t care—it’s amazing. I’m sure that people who are frustrated and tortured will be prone to that kind of activity, like they need to externalize their pain onto other people, externalize the torment that they’ve got inside themselves, but why don’t people find other outlets for it?

The other thing that makes Europe very different from here is that America is a very homogenous society, and you are trained every day on TV to be part of a homogenous society. In Europe you’re more encouraged to be an individual. Being an individual is fine, as long as you pay your taxes and work with everybody, you won’t get stared at for looking different in Germany. Not at all, in fact.

Were you brought up with an appreciation for Irish cultural icons like Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and Turlough O’Carolan?

The answer to that is completely 100 percent yes. I grew up with traditional music. My mother is a country woman, my dad is also. He loves literature, he loves books. He’s a very educated man. He loves knowledge and books, and I love the same thing. In school we learned about Yeats. In school we learned about Patrick Kavanagh, who’s my favourite poet. Yeats is someone I sometimes find very boring, sometimes not. Whether it be any aspect of Irish culture, we’re a very proud country, and very patriotic. We also have a very serious complex about ourselves: We always think of ourselves as second-rate; we’re always trying to prove something to somebody.

Six hundred years of domination and occupation will do that to you. It’s very bizarre. We don’t think of ourselves in terms of fifty years, or a hundred years, in terms of culture. Germans have a serious identity issue. Most Germans don’t even want to believe that Germany existed before 1945. They are so disgusted by it. It’s incredible. You can make all the stereotypes you want in popular culture, as Hollywood does, and then you go there, and those people live every day with absolute guilt and shame. The thing is, they are the most passive people I’ve ever met. They are very nature-oriented like “Let’s live peacefully with one another,” and they really try to do that. Ireland, well, we just have a party, we just drink. [laughter] We’re in no shape to be sent anywhere in the world. We think of ourselves in terms of how many thousands of years old we are, as a culture.

We’ve got the oldest building in the world there. We all know it. New Grange beat the first pyramid by about 800 years. The sun shines through a hole about three feet across on the winter and summer solstices, and goes down a passageway and lights up the chamber, which was for some ancient king or somebody. This is many thousands of years before anyone was around with any kind of technology to measure these things. We have the oldest fortress in Europe, which is five and a half thousand years old. The walls are something like sex feet thick, and over twenty feet high. It’s on an island about 10 miles from the shore. Anyway, that’s Ireland. It’s full of mystery, and it’s full of a lot of weird stuff, and we don’t even know who these people were, but we still think of them as a part of us.

When you performed “Carbon” on the FuturePerfect tour, the screen behind you displayed messages about the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and its effect on the planet. What were your sources for the information?

United Nations. It was actually the International Committee for Climate Control. They’re the guys who meet up every couple of years. Those were the conservative statistics; that’s the sad part. And those statistics, since then, have changed dramatically. The thing is that the last five years have shown a weather change that has never been seen in all of recorded history, in precedence of intensity of storms, in precedence of ice caps melting, at the rate at which they’re melting. The nay-sayers will say, “Oh this is just a standard fluctuation in the atmosphere because the climate has changed over the last couple million years in numerous ways.” We don’t know how, we don’t know why, but what we do know is that there hasn’t been this level of pollution in the atmosphere—ever. We know that from ice cores.

I think it’s pretty sad that we know what happens in a garden when we do certain things. The same principle applies to the world. Now, I’m not trying to be a hippie, ‘cause my whole point is that if you try to be a hippie, people in general who can affect change won’t even care. People want to be socially accepted, and they want to feel that it’s a movement they can take part in. They have it trained into their brain that being a hippie is something wrong, that you’re a sensationalist, and you’re over-the-top. So I think a more moderate view will be more likely to change things.

Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

I’m not a fanatical mental lunatic that goes out and chains myself to a log or whatever. I believe that progress is inevitable. The more of us there are, the more of us will need food, the more of us will need cities. Population control is something that Mother Nature comes along and does for us every now and again. Wars are a really good source of that too. Or plagues; the population of Europe in the 1300s got decimated by about 80 percent. It was pretty good. Well, well done Mother Nature there! We had cholera in the 1800s. It’s great, you know, that’s how it works. I’m worried about these things. I don’t want to stand up and get blambasted as a hippie, or as a raging moaner.

You also have these people who listen to music, and they don’t care about what you’re saying, and they don’t care about any of the lyrics. They just think, “Oh, funky shit! I like it because Person B likes it.” Or maybe they really like the melody, and they like the song, but they’re not listening. Somebody out there was listening. You at least read it, and I’m very happy about that.

FuturePerfect focused strongly on themes of courage and responsibility. Did you receive a lot of mail from people claiming that it had a profound impact on their lives?

It was also very depressing … how should I put this …”disillusionment into perseverance” would describe it absolutely perfectly. I notice in retrospect that this is an album with an awful lot of songs describing just how bad things are. A lot of people thought that I’d given up hope, which is something that I cannot do, and I never will do. I’ve got serious survival instincts. And I’ve gone through some pretty tough shit at one time, as a result of what I do. You know, everything has its price.

I wanted the album, oddly enough, to reflect the idea that we’ve tried to build a perfect future for ourselves in the past, we wanted to build this perfect futuristic world for us, and it turned to crap. We haven’t built a perfect future, you cannot look around the world and go, “Wow, it’s a great place!” We still can’t, but we can try to do something about it. It echoed on a world level, and on a personal level.

The worst thing a person can do to themselves is self-hatred. If you’re an alternative-thinking person, you have an incredible amount of potential to change things. I think it was Matt Stone and Trey Parker, and I don’t care for their sense of humor. I think it’s vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, like “let’s shock the majority.” It’s a reaction to the culture that existed before. Every comedy is … every music, every style, whatever you’re wearing becomes a reaction to something before it, or it’s inspired by something before it. It cannot take place without precedence, it doesn’t just pop out of the air.

Punk, for example, was a reaction, and new romantic music in the ‘80s was a reaction to punk. It was the roxy music kids from the early ‘70s reaching a certain age and thinking, “Hey, let’s be stylish and wonderful!” and so the ‘80s became fashion hell. The ‘90s was like …”Well, we’ve all played video games, and I actually don’t know what the hell I want to do, but let’s sit around and listen to music all day and do nothing.” There are always kind of like vibes going on in different eras, and the ‘90s was completely more superficial than the ‘80s could have ever been. In the ‘80s at least we had a lot of really cool alternative music that was sort of mainstream. We had The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, and I loved all that. Where is all that now? 

Well, there’s Interpol.

I saw Interpol twice in Hamburg in small clubs, which is exactly where they need to be. They were beautiful. It was really sad, going to see Interpol, me and my friends. We stood there at the gig. They were three guys wearing suits, and they’re clean-cut (that’s what they dress like, normally), wearing kind of trendy-looking suits, and you’ve got these kind of Strokes look-alike kids in the audience who are like, “I want to dress as crap as possible. I want to look as ugly and as un-groomed as possible.” When I see girls leaving with these guys, I think, “How are your standards so low? You are not going to touch that, are you? You don’t know if that’s been washed.” It’s just not a pleasant thing. I chalk it up as “anti-commercial music.” It’s more of an image reaction than a movement. I think it’s kind of an interim phase, or I hope so … But people in the audience are looking at my friends and going like, “What the hell are you doing here? You’re not part of our movement.”

When you’re 18, the history of the world seems very short, and you don’t see what’s led up to it. I was talking to this one kid, and I asked him, “You see those 1980 ADIDAS sneakers you’re wearing, the ones that look like they’re just about to fall apart at any second? And the crap jeans you’re wearing, and the really bad t-shirt? And your hair that looks like you just brushed it with a pork chop? Why do you dress like that?” He was having a go at me. He was interviewing me for a local student TV station. “You like that music, you know in the late ‘70s people dressed like that, and they had this style, and it means a lot to you, and you try to emulate that. How much does it cost, just out of interest, how much do those 1980 ADIDAS sneakers cost? Oh, about $500? Do you know why people dressed like that in 1978? It was because they had no money. That’s why they looked like that.

They didn’t get a haircut because they were poor suburban kids who had no money and played in garages because it was the only thing they could do to liberate themselves from where they were. They were singing about it ‘cause it came from their heart. You guys are just a fake pastiche of that shit.” I asked him what his favourite band was, and he said “Joy Division.” I said “Well, I saw Joy Division before Ian Curtis died.” You look back now and think, “Oh, I’d like to have seen that,” but at the time it was part of a huge movement. You had the Buzzcocks, you had Joy Division, you had A Certain Ratio, you had Factory Records putting out all these bands, and everything was new, and everything was different, and it felt great.

I admire Interpol for what they do, because they have a lot of new flavors here. I thought the first album was great, the second album was just brilliant. I really fell in love with it, because I grew up in that era, so I knew what the vibe was about, and they captured the element of that vibe without even trying. You can’t copy it, it has to come from the heart, and somehow they’ve done it, so ten points for them.

Your website makes it clear that the band does not advocate any type of ideology. Have you had problems with people misinterpreting your lyrics?

To be honest, at one point we had die-hard Christians thinking that our songs were all about serious Jesus stuff, and I said, “We’re Humanist.” I don’t advocate any religion. I have my own spirituality, my own view of the universe and how it works. I respect religion, and I’m probably closer to Buddhism than I am to anything. I’m fascinated by religion and how it motivates people, but I’m more fascinated by what the beliefs are and the traditions, and how it becomes a social tool. I’ve met people who want to believe that VNV Nation is somehow this die-hard Christian band. I think there were some people, who at the very beginning, heard Praise the Fallen and thought, “Oh, they’re singing about war, and they’ve got these strong logos. It must be something militaristic.” But the fact was that it was actually the opposite of that. It was just a way to express it, and it just fell on deaf ears.

Now, I think the message is pretty strong and clear. There was an argument when “Savior” came out, in the vocal part, what was I really saying? And I look at these debates, I look at these arguments, and I love to get involved in them, and I love people to ask me what I meant. A lot of songs I want people to interpret for their own lives, as tools for their own lives, as they were for me, because that’s exactly what they were for me. It’s me sharing my emotions with other people, and if it works for you, and it helps you, that’s great. If people see us as just a band singing catchy songs, that is more of a symptom, or a side-effect of what we do. It hasn’t really been that bad, so it hasn’t really happened.

What role does mythology play in VNV Nation?

Huge. Mythology is a part of our hidden language in society. Mythology is reinterpreted through every culture. They inherit it from an older culture and they reinterpret it. Mythology is an archetypal language, if you want to study Carl Jung. It’s a language of archetypes. We all need certain symbols and certain rituals and certain heroes and heroines, who are with us in this sort of legendary history. I think there’s a great deal of knowledge held in mythology. The Irish have a serious amount of mythology. One day, someone pointed out that Irish mythology and Indian mythology are incredibly alike, including the name structures. So there must have been a connection of some kind in the past. So it did serve a purpose, because it showed that the Celts brought their religion over from Northern India at one point.

What are the roots of your interest in warfare?

I grew up in Ireland! [laughter] Warfare is a small subset of what I’m interested in. I like history in general, and I love reading books about history. To me, it’s like reading a fictional book about things that actually happened, really the greatest stories ever.

You refer to “Solitary” as the “VNV Nation anthem.”  What is it about the song that makes it representative of the band?

It’s about the time it was written, and it’s about what that song means. “Solitary” is kind of like my anthem for victory, if I were to put it that way. It’s the moment where you look back on your past, and the very first second when you see yourself in the future. Someone asked me at that time, “Where do you see yourself?” And I said, “Sitting on a chair.” And he looked at me like, “What the hell does he mean by that?” It’s all about where I am. How do I feel while sitting on that chair? Am I content? Am I happy? It’s like you’re going to picture yourself married in twenty years with kids, and that could be a nightmare scenario, or that could be a very happy scenario. It’s up to you.

You picture yourself sitting on a chair, and all you want is that you’re happy. That song is about me going forward with what I know I see. And had it not been for that song, and that “I have never wanted more” line, and what it meant in my own life, and what inspired it, has become what VNV Nation is. That’s why, in retrospect, that song is the anthem. And people like singing it. Of course “Beloved” is the one that everyone sings now but for totally different reasons.

On the DVD, you said that you always sing “Dark Angel” for the sound check. I take it that it’s one of your favourite songs?

I love it. I absolutely adore it. I don’t know why. Every time I hear that song, I just go mental. I can’t explain it. Especially singing the end bit, all that song is about is summed up in those three lines. It said everything. It’s an autobiographical song, at the time that Empires was written, when I was saying things that I needed to say. It just means a great deal to me because it’s full of vibe that makes me feel free, absolutely free and happy. I live vicariously through my own songs sometimes. I mean, I wrote “Archlight” and people were coming up to me saying that they put the lyrics up on their fridge. One girl said it stopped her from killing herself. I get people telling me stuff like that all the time.

At the beginning I was very humble, and shared tears with people who told me their stories because it’s an honour and a flattery that someone would tell me how something I did impacted them. I wrote “Archlight” and the lyrics … I so badly wanted to believe myself. Have you ever tried listening to your own advice? You don’t. But you can follow someone else’s. It’s just something that happens in humans. That’s exactly what “Archlight” was. I so badly needed to change my situation. I knew I would eventually, but the song comforted me at the time that I knew things would get better.

Do you think that the band’s success might be partially attributed to the fact that your world view is a tad more optimistic than the average industrial act? Or, that it’s more fun to dance to an empowering song like “Fearless” than to one about how shitty things are?

I don’t know in general. I know there are people who need what we do. I don’t know on a general level if that’s the reason. It’s strange; I always thought we were just presenting an alternative. We’re not trying to, but I never liked the whole negative theme of the music I’ve heard in this genre, singing about chemical spills, and kind of dark futuristic crap. I think it was at the time, what we were doing was suddenly emotional. “Honor” was the one in Germany they were all pumping their fists for, but when they heard “Solitary” or they heard “Forsaken,” they couldn’t figure us out.“ Are they goths? Are they electro? What are they?” And I’m not a goth. I never was. I mean, what the hell does the word “goth” mean? I like bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins in the ‘80s, and I like a lot of different stuff, and it wasn’t called “goth.” It was just that I was into alternative music and I was into this post-punk, post-modern kind of music and it meant something to me. It didn’t have a genre name.

What are the passions that drive you to create?

It’s not so much a passion that drives me to create. It’s in me. And if I didn’t do it, I’d go insane. If I didn’t sing, in the bath [laughter] … walking around my apartment on my own, I’m singing, and I don’t know what I’m singing. Music has always meant an incredible amount to me. If I’m not creating and playing a song, and playing it back to me … Imagine feelings at certain moments in your life where something happened. And you want to relive that feeling. That’s what I do with the keyboard. I go back and rewrite those, and they play back to me, like a feeling diary. I’m not joking.

My girlfriend understands exactly what I’m talking about, because I play certain chords that trigger the same response in both of us. I say, “My language may be different than yours, but that’s what it does to me.” The passion inside me to sing, to express myself, I kind of opened the door once, and I let a lot of repressed feeling… I’d gone to sleep and woke up angry, which is why Praise the Fallen was a bit angry. Empires was more about sobering up afterwards, and FuturePerfect was all about disillusionment, and the next one’s all about … has anyone mentioned where the titles of these albums come from?

Actually, no.

Then I’m going to leave you with this thought. In regards to Matter and Form, go read Aristotle. Matter and form is a philosophical point at the beginning of Greek philosophy, in that what defines a table? A table is just a bunch of parts formed into something, and that becomes its form. This was picked up by German philosophers in the 1500s and 1600s to mean more metaphysical things, which is what I like. It’s the application of that philosophical principle to mean you as a person, all the things you’ve experienced. How you think and how you feel will guide you to wanting to learn certain things. And that becomes your potential. How you realize that into something, whatever form that may take, and it can take a million of forms. It’s all about the spirit or the soul, whatever you want to call it, the potential of human beings, and what they can realize, and what they can become.

Related Links:

www.vnvnation.com