Bullet For My Valentine - 2007

So where were we? Oh yes: a new Bullet For My Valentine album. At last.

It feels like a decade since the Welsh upstarts unleashed ‘The Poison’ on the world. It has in fact been nearly two and a half years (October 2005 – Jan 2008). But don’t go getting any ideas about the Bullet boys slacking or having trouble with the creative process: the band had an album ready over a year ago – but they decided to scrap it and start again; it’s only the huge and almost instantaneous global demand for the four Bridgenders that has kept them out of the studio. The band have ticked off most of the countries in their atlases, and are finally ready to release their second album, ‘Scream, Aim, Fire’ on SonyBMG.

Sure the boys have supported Metallica and Iron Maiden, witnessed a burgeoning global following and seen their debut album sell more than 100,000 copies in the UK; but they’ve suffered a mud-slinging UK metal scene, been kicked off the Rob Zombie tour and had to endure Matt Tuck’s ever-present vocal problems and surgery.  

Today we are in a London photo studio for snaps and chats. The boys browse the digital pictures on our photographers laptop, smoke a cheeky indoor fag and point out that through a crack in the door we can see a Nuts/Zoo shoot with some clinically perfect-looking girl wearing nothing but a Santa hat and feigning surprise as if she’d just realised she had no clothes on.

With photo shoots, and interviews and tour dates announced the Bullet For My Valentine machine is grinding back into motion. Do the wheels need a little grease?

Matt Tuck rolls his eyes and throws Padge a ‘here we go again look’ as we raise the subject of his frail vocal chords. This has clearly been a hot topic of conversation in recent interviews.

Is it that they’re fucked permanently? Sometimes wounds don’t heal.

“People tell me that technically I haven’t damaged my voice permanently,” he explains. “But in myself I think ‘yeah, I could be harmed for life’. I’m still struggling with it.”

Matt runs us through the throat problems like a tour guide walking through the same stately home rooms for the millionth time. But then Padge hints at a time while recording the album when Matt’s voice – or lack of - really could have meant the end of the band.

“There was a time in Cardiff…” says Padge quietly, trailing off. “The three of us didn’t know what to think. I honestly thought I was going to have to go back to working in the factories again.”

Really? Would you have let Bullet For My Valentine die? Would you not have looked for another singer? Matt plays guitar so it’s not like he’d be out of the band.

“We talked about getting a singer in,” admits Matt, walking new halls of conversation. “But we’re determined to make it work and battle through.”

Metal Hammer asks them what a Bullet would be like with a new singer.

“I think we’d still be Bullet,” he ponders. “But it would be hard: we’ve been together so long as we are; it would be totally weird – and probably spoil what we’ve done so far.”

Matt pauses and looks at Padge.

“But I’d rather get a singer in than the band fold,” he says before adding. “It would probably make us a better band technically. I’m not a ‘singer’. I’m a guitar player who sings. Worst comes to worst I’d become a better guitarist and we’d have a singer.”

He pauses again.

“It’ll probably never happen.”

Sitting with cigarette in hand Matt admits that with a tour in January he needs get his stamina up. The band have after all been off the road for most of this year recording the album. And while Matt’s vocal recording sessions dragged on, so the other boys kicked their feet up for just a little longer.

“We need to get back into it,” Matt admits as their tour gets nearer. “It feels so fucking alien to me to sing now.”

In September 2006 Metal Hammer happened to be out on the Warped Tour in Canada, with local boys, Alexisonfire. In between interviewing and watching the show, we bumped into the Bullet boys, who invited us aboard their tour bus to enjoy the air con and hear some new music. In the back of the bus Matt Tuck proudly played some pre-production demos - without vocals – that the boys had been working on. The music was awesome: full of 80s pomp, accessible bounce and kitsch melodies, but with pace and grit and aggression. Hammer expected to see the album on shop shelves by November 2006. No such luck.

The following January - with what they thought was the album in the can - Bullet For My ‘accidentally’ wrote album opener, ‘Scream, Aim, Fire’ – a moshpit stadium metal anthem – and everything changed.    

“Absolutely none of what you heard in September 2006 is on the record. None of it. Zero,” explains Matt with a strange assertiveness in his voice. “We were just so happy with the way that song came out, that it just lead us in a new direction.”

“There was nothing wrong with the older stuff,” he adds emphatically. “We just decided to include more diversity than on ‘The Poison’.”

And the new album is certainly that. From the thrashing pace of penultimate track, ‘Last To Know’, to the Dokken-esque 80s cheese-guitar of ‘Hearts Burst Into Fire’s intro, the album is broadening the band’s ‘metal’ remit into an all encompassing stadium rock outfit.

“We just wanted to have a more honest, full-on, no bullshit hard rock record,” states Tuck baldly. “That’s why the screaming is still there, but just not as much as on ‘The Poison’. We just wanted to make it a bit more classic hard rock sounding.”

And they have. Many may balk and blanche at some of the albums 80s pastiche and transparent narratives, but Bullet For My Valentine dared to and successfully created the album they wanted to make. It may have taken them longer than expected, but it’s here; and it’s as beltingly hard as it is accessible: irresistibly infectious stadium metal at its best.  

“It’s not as though we consciously thought about doing anything any different,” Matt is keen to add. “We just wanted it to be fresh. We didn’t want to make ‘The Poison Part II’ – which we could easily have done.”

There are some very self-conscious sounding efforts to include parts that will work well live, the kind of headliner claptrap that immediately gets a crowd going: gang vocals, hand-clapping and sing along wo-ohs.

“It’s totally conscious,” says Matt without pause. “Hopefully this time next year we’ll be at arena level, so we’ve got to write songs as big as the venues.”

It’s hard trying to sew seeds of doubt or even expose a tiny crack in this group’s steely confidence armour. At times it feels like the knee-jerk media savvy response of a band who know better than to divulge, disclose and display any humanity or doubt; at others it feels like the genuine self-assuredness of a band who have such unwavering faith in their music that nothing short of simultaneous solitary incarceration could ever stop or slow their upward trajectory.   

“If people like ‘The Poison’,” reasons Matt. “I just don’t see how they wouldn’t like this. It’s better. I hate the phrase, but it is a natural progression.”

For an outsider, the pressure that the success of their debut has brought on the young band must seem a heavy burden. But they boys shrug it off.

“Regardless of how many albums we’ve sold and how many fans we’ve played to around the world, I’m still writing for me and the boys. People can think what they want: love us or hate us but… whatever.”

But it must be so hard to not worry about whether your new album will be liked.

“A bit of that did creep in,” he admits finally. “But as soon as you start recording you hear it coming together, and all of that fucks right off.”

Have you ever worried that you wouldn’t be able to write good songs anymore? Or that you’d just run out?

“No,” he says flatly, shaking his head. “I’ve been writing songs for 15 years so I know what makes a good song. If you have ambition – if you want to be in a great band and go places – you won’t just put any old shit down.”

And did you worry that having not released a record for so long that your fans might have got bored, felt neglected or just dissipated?

“I don’t think anyone that really likes ‘The poison’ is going to go anywhere. And I’m sure that ‘Scream, Aim, Fire’ has the power to reel in any stragglers,” he grins. Damn self confidence is sexy.

Bullet For My Valentine may look like they’re sitting pretty: a band who blew up with their first album, adorned magazine covers around the world and supported their idols – Iron Maiden and Metallica - in front of tens of thousands of people. But the lads have also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous good fortune (well, talent and hard work). As Matt tells us, for every person who loves a band, there will be someone who doesn’t – and the haters always hate more loudly than the lovers love.

And the haters were certainly in force at last year’s Golden Gods Awards. In 2006 Bullet won Best UK Band and headlined the event to an enraptured crowd. But returning in 2007 to collect the same award for a second year running, the crowd was less welcoming – booing as the lads collected their gong.

Padge sparks up a cigarette and speaks quietly through the plumes of smoke: “We got booed by 30,000 Iron Maiden fans every night when we supported them on tour. It makes you thick skinned. You have to be. I don’t think there’s much we couldn’t take now.”

“We know how the politics work,” says Matt. “When you’re new people love you, but then when you’ve had a bit of success people turn on you. The acts that get voted best band in magazine polls are nearly always voted worst band as well – look at Green Day and My Chemical Romance.”

“The people booing there that night,” he says to Padge with a justified look. “I bet 50% of them own ‘The Poison’.”

Matt admits that it’s classic metal geek politics. People only want to like you when you’re underground; as if the reason a band becomes successful is because they have ‘sold out’ by compromising their music and therefore their integrity. People are so passionate about music that they would feel belittled and mocked if the music they loved had been contrived in anyway; if it wasn’t straight from the heart.

But people often mistake selling out for ambition. Bullet For My Valentine have ambition. And the haters just make them more determined.

“I love it,” leers Matt with a sadistic glint. “I don’t care. The heckling just makes me stronger, makes me want to continue getting bigger, and continue proving we deserve to be where we are.”

 “When Metallica wrote ‘Fade To Black’ on ‘Ride The Lightening’ people said they were selling out,” says Matt. “If you’ve had a successful debut, you’ll always accused of that on your second.”

We point out that for all their concrete cocksure self-confidence, the song titles from the new album – ‘Scream Aim Fire’, ‘Waking The Demon’, ‘Deliver Us From Evil’ – seem to be self-consciously stating ‘we’re a fucking metal band’.

“I guess so,” Matt ponders. “But not intentionally. They’re just the lyrics that came, and you pick the most hooky part of the lyrics for the title. It just so happens that they’re a bit more ‘metal’ this time. It represents how far we’ve come over the last few years. People would stick us in a metalcore or even an emo category. We’re like ‘fuck it’: we don’t pay attention to what people label us as.”

So for anyone who was in any doubt about what kind of band Bullet For My Valentine are - nu-thrash, metalcore, hard rock, emo or just a an honest heavy metal band – hear Tuck’s words.

“I think we’ve proved our point with our album and our live show what kind of band we are…”

Time line

Jan 2008 - BFMV release ‘Scream, Aim, Fire’.

Jun 2007 – BFMV win Best UK Band at Golden Gods.

March 2007 – BFMV support Metallica in Austria and UK.

Nov 2006 – tour cancelled due to Matt Tuck’s throat issues.

Nov 2006 – BFMV win Yahoo’s ‘Who’s Next Competition

Oct 2006 – The Poison Live At Brixton DVD released.

Oct 2006 – BFMV support Iron Maiden on US tour

Aug 2006 – BFMV play Reading/Leeds

July 2006 – ‘The Poison’ reissued with four extra tracks and a Bonus DVD.

Aug 2006 – BFMV cancel Scandinavian tour for ‘personal reasons’

Jun 2006 – BFMV win Best UK Band at the Golden Gods and headline the awards show.

Jun 2006 – BFMV play Download

Apr 2006 – BFMV kicked off Rob Zombie US tour after Matt Tuck complained about bad treatment and labelled them ‘money-grabbing fucks’.

Dec 2005 – BFMV cancel German show due to Matt Tuck throat infection.

Nov 2005 – BFMV first US tour

Oct 2005 – ‘The Poison’ released

Aug 2005 – BFMV bumped up from mainstage openers on Friday to Radio 1 evening slot at Leeds festival.

Feb 2005 – BFMV UK headline tour.

Late 2004 – BFMV win Welsh Music Award for Best Newcomer.

Nov 2004 – BFMV get instrument endorsement.

Nov 2004 - Self-titled EP released in the UK.

2004 – Jeff Killed John becomes Bullet For My Valentine.

2002 – JKJ release two-track CD ‘You/Play With Me’.

1998 – Jeff Killed John form in Bridgend, Wales.