Ville Valo

Ville Valo sings for HIM, a Finnish band that spent two decades making romantic gloom sound like a genre rather than a mood, and the chart is almost comically well suited to it.

He was born in Helsinki on 22 November 1976 with five of his ten planets grouped in Sagittarius: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Mars and Neptune, inside thirteen degrees. Six of the ten are in fire. A group that large in one sign makes a chart violently one directional, and Sagittarius is the sign of the larger horizon, the thing just out of reach, and the restlessness that makes long commitments feel like walls.

His Sun is on the first fourteen minutes of Sagittarius, the narrowest possible position in the sign, with Scorpio immediately behind it and the hour unrecorded, so even that is not settled. That is a fitting place for the Sun of a man whose entire subject is the border between appetite and melancholy: Scorpio holds and Sagittarius reaches, and he sits fourteen minutes on the reaching side.

The Sun is conjunct Mars within three quarters of a degree, which fuses identity and drive: no distance at all between what he is and what he goes after. Neptune sits in the same group, so romance and dissolution are inside the same arrangement as the self, which is the technical basis for a catalogue built on exactly that confusion. Mercury makes a quiet contact with Uranus eight minutes of arc from exact, the tightest thing in the chart: speech in easy contact with the unexpected, which is a lyricist getting to the odd phrase without visible effort. Two decades of songs that sound sincere and are structurally very odd is that aspect working.

A chart with six planets in fire and one in water does not describe a melancholic. It describes somebody with enormous appetite who found melancholy the most interesting thing available to want, which is a different and more durable proposition.