Fronted by Ronan Harris, and featuring Mark Jackson on percussion, VNV Nation has emerged in the past few years to become a powerhouse performer in the Electronic Dance scene. VNV Nation, which stands for "Victory Not Vengeance", was originally formed in 1990 in London, England by Ronan. This pair of live performance artists have captured huge amounts of success and will continue to do so, as they finally start to get recognition from the more mainstream Electronic Music crowd, with their Trance Industrial sound. Hot from their successful FuturePerfect album, their US tour is currently on fire. JIVE caught up to Ronan and had a chat with the genius behind VNV Nation's music and deeply meaningful lyrics.
JIVE: A lot of your songs have more of a sad or bitter meaning, what drives that?
VNV: I wouldn't say bitter. The way I have always described the music, since Praise the Fallen, is that rather than the situation itself, it's the thoughts and feelings of a person who feels things on a deeper level or thinks about things in a much more complicated way. I wrote Praise the Fallen not as a catharsis, but as a self-affirmation in that I want to describe to me. For myself. Praise the Fallen was written purely for myself before any label was ever involved and there was no label intended for it. Kind of like an electronic diary, in a way, about where I was in my life and all the things I believed in. All the things that made me what I am. It's a way of defining to myself that which I am. It was intended for me and to be shared with friends. What I found by accident in that was a lot of people related to it. When we released it, I expected it to reach a small number of people and never really to gain any amount of success. All I was doing was writing the words and thoughts in my soul. That can sometimes be tortured and sometimes be happy. What I focused it on was the feeling of being alive, everything from the happy to the sad. There is no life that is totally and utterly happy. I would be a little bit facetious about that and say there is something fake and façadeish about it. It is the best way to have seen how the music has been affected or how its been seen or viewed by people. It's given them words for many situations. These are just the normal thoughts and feelings of a person going through various elements of life, every thought and every belief.
This is primarily for me, and sharing it with other people like myself has given me the greatest pleasure I have even known in my life. There is nothing to compare it. There are people who say "Great Beats!" or "I really like this melody!" Then there are those who say the song has provided them with words in a certain situation or become like all the words they need to say about themselves. When I write the songs, they have several different meaning for me. For example, "Beloved" could be seen in several different ways for me. It could be everything I want to feel, that I want to have, and I want to know in my life. It also means to me an element of a past, a very long time ago. It's not what the subject is about, but the passion that it expresses inside the person who expresses in that way. Feels in that way. It's looking back to the simple words in the story and seeing the type of person who would feel that, want that, and would strive towards that. That's what the song is saying. It's also saying the words, but it's saying something much bigger about the person behind it.
So the people who listen to, let's say, the song "Further". You can see everything as just being meaningless and ending when you expire your last breath. I don't believe that. I don't see things like that. Life has far too much meaning. We judge ourselves by our own little rules if we don't follow the law of the people who dictate our life. Or become the social norm: the sort of people who at 25 get married, finish college, and put all their money into saving. All they are doing is preparing for death. That's it, they are just preparing for when they are 65. Not those people. What I am saying is, in "Further", those who think and those who feel, do not see themselves in the same league as your average normal "boring" people. Many people feel trapped by those confines, the social constraints that are being imposed upon them. They know they feel different, but they've never been given any words to describe that. They've never met other people to say, "Ok, this is what you are. Maybe you've had a lot of trouble and are very unhappy accepting that. But this is what kind of person you are and you know that." They have actually woken up. With "Further", for me, it's about seeing life in a very eternal form. We can come again. Every person we live, all of or love and passions, will exist with us. We will go on until the end of time. This is not meaningless what we do. Our existence is not so transient and meaningless, as some people would want to make it out to be. There is a deeper meaning, if you want to find it. There is a magic that we've all lost in life.
JIVE: Did your culture play a role in this?
VNV: I grew up in Ireland, which is loaded with magical stories, folk stories, and stuff like that. That's an integral part of our culture and every other European country. The rest of the European Union has thrown that all away. They've thrown away their ancient past. It's not like these things are fake and stupid stories. There is an element of the culture and the people in them. We could visit some places in Ireland that are incredibly magical and would scare the shit out of some people. They wouldn't be willing to accept that this sort of thing could have some elements of truth. Take the film "Lord of the Rings": massively popular, but for what reason? It's because we want that sort of magical imaginary faerie tale, the belief in a deeper higher meaning in things, and the battle between good and evil. It's a key element of "Manga" films or anything Anime. Always the great battle between good and evil. It's the very fact so many people went just mental about this film. The fact that they went absolutely nuts about "Lord of the Rings" in Europe showed to me that they are visiting a part of their past and subconscious that they've lost. I kind of feel that in our present day society. We have thrown away all our meaning. Like organized religion, people are astoundingly cynical towards because it doesn't provide any kind of sense of meaning or answers. It's just like reading a script. It's just here you go. That's how it is. This is how the universe works, there's this god, and this guy, and whatever you're told to believe. It doesn't stand up under scrutiny. You're expected to believe it. There is no sense of inner meaning. Which I think every person should find for themselves. Everybody needs a mechanism to understand the universe. So, I think "Further" and all songs like it expresses that deeper. There is something beyond a two-dimensional, flat, basic, boring, and non-existence. I think that reaches to a lot of people. I feel that. I have emails from people every singe day or people coming up to me after concerts and saying what the songs have meant to them. It's astounding the variety of comments that people come out with, the depth of conviction that comes out.
JIVE: Where do you consider home?
VNV: Where I live, where I am. I don't know what home is anymore. When I was growing up, I exited a room of ignorance and went into the wider world, in my mind. I never really felt at "home" anywhere. I just want to go out. Learn, see the whole world, and go traveling. I adore traveling. After tours, I found Hamburg to be a nice respite at the moment. I got peace there. I'm learning German. It's a new horizon for me. It's a very cool city to live in. The people are in love with their city. They are in love with its history, its little folk stories, and stuff like that. There mad about every aspect of it. That really impresses me about people who live in a city. That means they actually pride themselves on where they're from.
Home, for me, is a strange place. It's like people asking, 'where is the band from?' I really have no idea anymore. We were living in London, Mark and I. He's from east of London and I'm from Dublin. I moved to London when I was 21. So, we were based there for a long time. Then last June, I moved to Hamburg and Mark lives in the south of France in this nice little town. Yes, we don't know where we are from. We just say Europe, Europe is better.
J: What is a typical day for you?
VNV: I can't define typical. When I moved, I was in the process of brainstorming Futureperfect. I would come up with a lot of melodies and lots of ideas. I would store it, concepts, and lyrical ideas. A really cool thing is having a mobile phone, which has a little voice recorder on it, or PDA that has some kind of .wav recorder on it. You can at least sit there and look embarrassed and hum to yourself on a bus, or something like that, and record it. Then record it and write out a sequence. I spent all that time doing the album. Then I went on tour. Then I came back and went right back into the studio again to do the "Beloved" single. Then I was doing interviews and promotion. All I know is, what I do when I wake up in the morning, that I put on my percolator. Its one of those nice Italian things, the French have them too. You put the water in the bottom, the coffee in the middle, and just let pressure do the rest. It produces the most astoundingly large espresso.
I totally love this ritual that the Dutch have about drinking an awesome cup of coffee. I sit down, have a cigarette, and plan my day. I know exactly what my obligations are, what my responsibilities are, what I have to have finished, and just work around it like that. That's pretty much an average day for me. I work generally in a studio. If I'm in the studio for, say, if I go there at about two in the afternoon. I might finish work at about four in the morning. It depends on if I'm on a song that I really like. I won't leave. It's like that. You get a melody, you get something going, and you have it looping over and over. While trying new ideas with it, you are feeding it. It's feeding you and you're feeding it. It's a very cool system. I love that feeling. Either that or just sit there and do the emails all afternoon and do that kind of stuff. I'm doing all the graphics, all the merchandise, all the planning for the band, all the ideas and the ambition, and whatever. I've always said to myself, I reach for the stars in order to reach the clouds. I'm happy if I reach 50% of my ambitions. Then I know that I've set this huge high standard for myself, but I will have achieved enough that I will be happy. It's like, setting your standard way up there so you can reach that point. That's what I do.
J: What is the weirdest thing that's happened to you on tour?
VNV: We always seem to survive the weirdness on tour. There isn't anything that really stands out that is astoundingly weird, that I can think of. There are many amusing things that happened. We stopped off at a Waffle House on tour one time. It was in the middle of Georgia, on our way between Tampa and Atlanta. We stopped off at a Waffle House just across the border of Georgia. The people who working there looked like they have never left the county. Like, they would go home to feed the chickens, kind of thing. To me, coming from my background and my culture, this was a movie for us. The sort of setting you would find in a move and the characters you would find in a film. They were so real and yet they were so astounded and amazed that we were going to New York at the end of this. They were totally amazed and were telling us about their lives. We were just fascinated. I felt very sorry for them because we were seeing them in that kind of, through a piece of glass, kind of way. One of them was so proud to tell us that she had been on Ricki Lake. We couldn't believe this, because I always thought that these people on Ricki Lake were fake and predominately actors. That might be a shock for some people. Yeah, she was on Ricki Lake. Then what happened was, we asked her why and she introduced us to the word "hoochie mama". She said, in the thickest Georgian drawl, and I will not even attempt to do an impression of it, "Cause my sister, she dresses like a hoochie mama". Everyone stopped silent, she expected a reaction and I just went, "what…what's a hoochie mama?" She said, "you know what a hoe is?" and I said yes, "Well that's a hoochie mama". Then we went back to Norway and were sitting there watching TV one afternoon and Ricki Lake is on and there she was in all her glory. This woman has got to be one of the most amazing people I've ever met. Just her whole attitude, her whole spirit, and she had so much gusto. She was just so real. It was honestly like a character on a film.
We have got a lot of weird accidents and a lot of strange things happening. Like, shows where every single thing that could go wrong has gone wrong. Everything broke down. Chaos decided to pay us a visit that night and show us probability. The DVD would break down, then every synth would break down, the Mark's drum module would break down, one of his pads stopped working, and everything that could stop working, stopped working. The end of it you just think, what is fate telling us tonight? I think they are telling us to cancel the show. We've never done that. Anytime we've had an accident live, anything breaks down we always make up for it. I'm the front man, so I just go out and handle it. I end up doing this comedy routine. Last night I was doing this Henry Rollins-type of speech and I was saying if anyone was a director I would really love to do a cameo of a police officer in a film. I think Rollins is the man with his spoken word shows. Yeah we always do that, we always survive every show. There was one time where our DVD was dodgy because of the heat and humidity in the venue causes it to malfunction. It cut halfway through "Genesis" just before we reached the second chorus. I just kept singing. We did this in Ft. Lauderdale. The power cut out because they wired us up to a 20amp circuit or something like that. Then the end of it I just said, 'I'm singing all of it unplugged'. Then the whole audience just sang along. Things like that you never forget. That's what we are about. We are there to entertain. We are not there for any other purpose. We are trying to inspire the feeling of what VNV nation is and it is a feeling.
JIVE 5:
Favorite song?
I don't have one. I have a song for every mood, just a collection of CDs that I listen to.
Dogs or cats?
I despise cats. I find cats too incredibly independent. They only let you give them attention when they want it. They are just there to frustrate you.
Favorite food?
It's got to be a coin flip between Sushi and Mexican food.
Favorite movie?
Wings of Desire
If you were not doing the whole VNV Nation thing, what would you be doing?
Probably back at my old job, I was a programmer and then I became a project manager installing Internet systems for a very large petroleum corporation.
