Bullet For My Valentine, Kerrang!, April 24, 2010
SOMEWHERE, IN a dusty barn just outside the M25 motorway, Bullet For My Valentine’s singer, Matt Tuck, is wrestling his bass player, Jason ‘Jay’ James, into a headlock. As the rest of the band, drummer Michael ‘Moose’ Thomas and Michael ‘Padge’ Padget, egg him on – a Staffordshire bull terrier barking at their feet – Matt shapes to land a punch hard in Jay’s ribs.
Matt is newly beefed up, his once wiry body now bulging from the vest he is wearing, and Jay – not scrawny himself – is braced for something painful. They grapple, they twist and the dog strains at its leash. Were you to walk into this dark barn you’d be forgiven for thinking the two rolling around the makeshift ring were trying to cause each other some serious damage.
There is an irony here of course. For, though Bullet For My Valentine take to the task of bare-knuckle fighting for Kerrang!’s photographer with barely concealed relish, the actual mood among them currently is of deep camaraderie. When the lens is not pointed in their direction, they buzz with an energy and positivity that hasn’t always been their calling card in the past. Where once they could be taciturn and unwilling to give much away, today they all arrive with quick wit, ready jokes and smiles on their faces. This, it seems, is Bullet For My Valentine in confident mood.
The reason for such high spirits is their new album, Fever. It is, believes Matt, “the one”. He says that, if the band’s fans don’t like it, “it would really spin me out. I’d probably implode with confusion. Fuck yeah, that would confuse me.” His thoughts are echoed by his band, who variously describe it as being the record that will “take them to the next level” and as 11 songs which have made them “hungry for it” again. The excitement oozes from them.
Fever will be their third full-length release and it follows Scream Aim Fire, an album that reached No5 in the UK album chart but which all four admit did not showcase them at their best. Matt is dismissive of the vocals, the track-listing and the inadequate amount of time spent writing it. Padge believes the band were “capable of better”, while Jay points to the manic year of touring which preceded it as the reason for some of its limitations. Moose says that at least some of its content was derived from a desire to answer back to critics who believed them to not be “metal enough”. It’s telling that not a single one of them has a bad word to say about the new record.
Partly, this positivity stems from the sounds contained within Fever’s grooves. Matt hopes the album will go some way to cementing “a signature Bullet sound,” which will then manoeuvre Bullet into “a position where we could become something really special within the next five years.” He thinks this is all possible because: “No-one’s touching us at the moment.”
But there are reasons other than plain confidence to explain Bullet For My Valentine’s current good cheer. Those stem from a reconnection process that occurred as the album was written.
Bullet pieced Fever together in Wales, back in the studio in which they recorded their first EP and their debut, The Poison. At a place called The Chapel, they would tinker with ideas all day long, eventually opening a few bottles of wine in the evening and beginning to relax. Then, at 10 o’clock every night, something special would start to happen. New ideas would emerge, riffs began to crackle, rhythms and that all important chemistry spluttered, then sparked into life. “Then, for two hours, we’d write a song,” says Matt. “It was weird but it happened every night at the same time.”
And in those moments, the band rediscovered both their love for what they do and for one another. The gruelling period spent touring an album with which they weren’t entirely happy faded from memory; the months spent away from family and friends became a worthwhile sacrifice for the job they love; the questioning their metal credentials received evaporated. Slowly, they became, once again, what they had been before all this started: four friends in a room playing the music they adored. And that, they realised, was the most important thing. “We wanted,” says Matt, “to rekindle the magic. And we did.”
IF YOU ignore the dirty vests and bloodied faces that Bullet For My Valentine are currently sporting courtesy of their photo-shoot, you’ll find a happy, comfortable band. Each of them is hovering around the 30-years-old mark, Matt has just become a father, Moose and Jay already have children. They use words like “mature” and “grown-up” a lot more than they used to. They also find themselves settled – a condition at which they once might have sneered but which now they welcome. All four live in Bridgend, Matt having moved out of his gated apartment in Cardiff and back to his home town. Life is comfortable: the singer is driving his fourth – or is it his fifth? – luxury car, an Audi R8, which replaces the BMWs and other Audis he has driven before. Jay says “honestly, things are pretty much the same as they’ve always been,” with contentment. And then he concedes: “Well, our houses are a bit bigger.”
But still they say the most important thing is there: their friendship.
How important is the relationship between you four?
Matt: “Very. We’re exactly the same as we’ve always been. There’s never any tension between us. There are never any fights or anything. There never have been. We’ve known each for so long, and lived with each other on the road for so long, that it’s only weird when we’re not together. We’re with each other more than we’re with our families and girlfriends.”
Was it nice to realise the relationship has remained strong?
Padge: “Yes, especially after all we’ve been through and all the living together [on the road]. The four of us are a unit. We’re a good team. That makes this the best job in the world, because we’re four friends just doing what we always wanted to do in life.”
Moose: “We went in to start writing as four friends and we locked ourselves away. We went back to where we recorded the EP and The Poison and we hung out as four friends. We’d drink wine and have fun and I think that’s where our best work comes from.”
Does the relationship feel deeper now?
Matt: “Yeah. The relationship has been going on for so long now that we knew each other inside and out. It’s definitely like a brotherhood and it’s been like that for a while. I don’t think we’ll understand how strong it is unless something happens, which – touch wood – it’s not going to.”
WHILE DISCOVERING harmony in a band who have spent so much time on the road as Bullet can be rare, there is converse problem too. A band who are happy, who drive nice cars and who are finding life very pleasant indeed often lose the drive to push themselves too hard.
That’s not something Matt believes Bullet For My Valentine will suffer from. “Yes, I have a nice house, nice car and nice things,” he says. “But they’re just a by-product of what I do and what I love. Yes we can do stuff and have stuff, but the hunger and the passion for the band has never gone away as a result. It just drives us even harder because we don’t want to lose [what we have] now. [Nothing’s] good enough for us; we’re always striving to be better and bigger.”
It’s certainly a chest-beating attitude. But then this has always been the way Matt works, fast cars and nice houses or not. He played county-level rugby and basketball as a teenager and that instilled competitiveness in him. It was a spirit further fostered growing up when, he says, he was told he would never amount to much. He believes those experiences have helped make him who he is today. Because he’s very much the band leader – he writes the songs, he makes the decisions, he’s the boss.
“It’s not a dirty little secret,” he says. “I’ve always been the songwriter, I’ve always been the one to rally the troops and get them motivated. I still do that now. I think it’s important for a band to have a leader, rather than for three people to be fighting for the alpha position. It’s hard for me to not take the lead role because I’ve had the drive in me since day one. And we’ve got to where we are because of that, so I think I’ve proved myself as a leader.”
Are the band always happy for you to make the final decision?
Matt: “I think so and I think they would tell you the same, yes. They’re intelligent dudes and they know the score. They’re not stupid. Sometimes there are disagreements.”
But if you tell them something’s happening, then it happens, right?
Matt: “It’s more of a majority decision. But if it’s a two versus two decision, then I’ll make the call. I think I’ve proved that I’m the leader of the band because, for the majority of the time, I’m right when it comes to the decision-making process.”
That’s a very confident attitude, where does that come from?
Matt: “I’m too proud a person to give in. I give in to fuck all. I won’t lose. I’ll never lose.”
Does that cause problems sometimes?
Matt: “Not for me.”
For other people?
Matt: “I’m sure it does. But that’s what’s in my blood. If someone offered to race me from one point to another, I would do it however many times it took until I fucking won. Or I’d pout all night. That’s just me. I’m ultra-competitive.”
Does that come from when you played sport?
Matt: “Yes, and also because, growing up where we grew up and going to the school I went to, you had to fight for everything. You were either competitive and fought for what you wanted to do, or you were a fucking nobody. I didn’t want to be a nobody.”
Why not?
Matt: “It wasn’t that I thought I was better than anyone else, it was that I wanted to make something of my life. The only way I thought I could do that was by committing to something and not fucking giving in until I achieved it. I think that’s why we first got signed – all four of us fought for it and sacrificed everything.”
A lot of the drive seems to stem from you wishing to prove your doubters wrong. Haven’t you already done that?
Matt: “No, there’s something in my blood where I still want to prove myself to people. I’ll be trying to convince people I’m good at what I do until the day I die. That comes from being beaten down, mentally, when I was growing up, it comes from being told we were shit. I don’t think that feeling will ever go away.”
IT’S RARE to find Matt in this mood: opinionated, bullish and determined. Or actually, more accurately, it’s rare to find him talking about these things. For the most part he’s a calm character, rarely raising his voice, often the quietest member of the band. He can be introverted, keeping his feelings to himself. It takes some prodding for him to let his guard down.
“I’m not emotionless, but people can’t really tell if I’m happy, pissed off or whatever,” he says. “It drives my girlfriend nuts that I’m like this sometimes. We’ll have an argument and I won’t argue because I don’t see the point. It winds her up so much because I’m so detached from situations. That’s just me. I find it better for my health.”
At this point, we are interrupted by a phone interview that Matt must conduct. He apologises and takes the call. When he’s finished, he asks, “Where were we?” Discussing his emotions, he’s told. He rolls his eyes and sighs, which says a great deal about how much he enjoys talking about this.
Do you like to keep your feelings to yourself?
Matt: “Yes, someone’s got to really push my buttons for a reaction. I’ve only ever lost my lid a couple of time in my life. I try to keep my emotions locked in. My private life has always been kept very private.”
Do you keep emotions hidden from, say, your girlfriend too?
Matt: “Yes, she does have to drag things out of me sometimes.”
Do you find it easier to put those thoughts into a song?
Matt: “Yeah, if it’s something I’m really passionate about. Most Bullet songs start out from a real scenario in my life or something around me. But then often it’s not colourful enough for Bullet – I have to exaggerate and take it off to an extreme level. If I just wrote about normal stuff, the song would be kind of boring.”
Is that, perhaps, protection too?
Matt: “Perhaps. It’s because I don’t think those feelings are relevant. And also, my life really isn’t that entertaining. I’m quite content and happy, so it’s hard to write about stuff like that. I don’t want to be negative because that’s not me, so I have to take something that is negative, that does piss me off, then I have to take it to an extreme level so that it’s colourful to listen to.”
AND WITH that, his cards return close to his chest. For Matt, talking about his feelings is simply not something he likes to do either in public or private.
Or maybe this proves something about him and, by extension, the rest of the band’s grounding. Drama queens, they are not. Though they drive expensive cars and record albums in Los Angeles, all four still live in the Welsh town, Bridgend, in which they grew up.
Ask them if they feel they’ve matured and Moose will quip: “I’ve gone from drinking lager to drinking ale. That’s my mature step.” However, that’s not necessarily the sole truth. He also admits that, when at home, he goes to bed at 10pm in order to be up in time to take his kids to school.
Padge, meanwhile, talks about the old days of touring but does so in a what-were-we-like tone of voice. “I’d be waking up with a bottle of Jack Daniels gaffer-taped to my hand, stupid things like that” he says. “You can still do that stuff, but you tend to have grown up a bit. Now I can realise, ‘Fuck me, I was completely smashed last night and made a complete fucking arsehole of myself.’”
Bullet credit Bridgend and their friends there with helping to keep their heads level. In turn, the welcome doses of reality they receive both help them not to get too full of themselves.
“We all still live within 15 minutes of each other,” says Moose. “We’re all friends with the same people that we were friends with before. It’s nice to still have that. It’s good to see your parents and friends often. And if they think you’re being a bit of a rock star, then they tell you. My partner will say, ‘You’re not on tour now, take out the bins motherfucker.’”
Is being in Bridgend still important?
Jay: “It’s being near family and friends that I like. They remind you of where you’re from. Before the band, I used to think, ‘I can’t wait to get out of this place, it’s doing my head in’. Now it’s nice to come home and get away from the rest of the world.”
The bigger a band gets, the more they can find themselves in a bubble of airport lounges and nice hotels. Does Bridgend help burst that bubble?
Padge: “Yes, there have been times that we’ve got home to friends and family when, 24 hours earlier, we were sitting in some restaurant on the Sunset Boulevard in LA. You get back to where you live and you see all the places that are boarded up and people you are used to seeing aren’t there anymore. It can be weird.”
Jay: “It’s nice to get home and find that things are real. It’s like a different world, isn’t it? But a good one.”
Is it ever hard to move from one world to the other?
Moose: “I had to tell myself to calm down the other day when we came back from shooting a video in America. I was dying for a Chinese but there was an hour-and-a-half wait [at the takeaway]. I went crazy: ‘This fucking country’s fucking shit’. I had Super Noodles in the end. And it was a nice slap in the face. Any time you start thinking you’re a rock star, it’s good to have to eat Super Noodles.”
THE NEXT time you will see Bullet For My Valentine, it will be on a stage somewhere. They know that, in order for this album to earn the success they believe it deserves, they will need to put in some serious touring. Jay, for one, can’t wait. He says that, after their last tour ended, he would get an adrenalin surge every night at the same time they would normally be going on stage. The problem was he was at home with nothing to do. That pent up energy is now coursing through a band keen to put themselves in front of a crowd again.
But, as their bus takes them across Europe, America, the Far East and who knows where else, they know that the core is still there among them. They know that, for now anyway, they can rely on each other. And when they’re a long way from Bridgend, they can once again remember what it feels like to be four friends, in a room, playing heavy metal.
© Tom Bryant 2010
Matt is newly beefed up, his once wiry body now bulging from the vest he is wearing, and Jay – not scrawny himself – is braced for something painful. They grapple, they twist and the dog strains at its leash. Were you to walk into this dark barn you’d be forgiven for thinking the two rolling around the makeshift ring were trying to cause each other some serious damage.
There is an irony here of course. For, though Bullet For My Valentine take to the task of bare-knuckle fighting for Kerrang!’s photographer with barely concealed relish, the actual mood among them currently is of deep camaraderie. When the lens is not pointed in their direction, they buzz with an energy and positivity that hasn’t always been their calling card in the past. Where once they could be taciturn and unwilling to give much away, today they all arrive with quick wit, ready jokes and smiles on their faces. This, it seems, is Bullet For My Valentine in confident mood.
The reason for such high spirits is their new album, Fever. It is, believes Matt, “the one”. He says that, if the band’s fans don’t like it, “it would really spin me out. I’d probably implode with confusion. Fuck yeah, that would confuse me.” His thoughts are echoed by his band, who variously describe it as being the record that will “take them to the next level” and as 11 songs which have made them “hungry for it” again. The excitement oozes from them.
Fever will be their third full-length release and it follows Scream Aim Fire, an album that reached No5 in the UK album chart but which all four admit did not showcase them at their best. Matt is dismissive of the vocals, the track-listing and the inadequate amount of time spent writing it. Padge believes the band were “capable of better”, while Jay points to the manic year of touring which preceded it as the reason for some of its limitations. Moose says that at least some of its content was derived from a desire to answer back to critics who believed them to not be “metal enough”. It’s telling that not a single one of them has a bad word to say about the new record.
Partly, this positivity stems from the sounds contained within Fever’s grooves. Matt hopes the album will go some way to cementing “a signature Bullet sound,” which will then manoeuvre Bullet into “a position where we could become something really special within the next five years.” He thinks this is all possible because: “No-one’s touching us at the moment.”
But there are reasons other than plain confidence to explain Bullet For My Valentine’s current good cheer. Those stem from a reconnection process that occurred as the album was written.
Bullet pieced Fever together in Wales, back in the studio in which they recorded their first EP and their debut, The Poison. At a place called The Chapel, they would tinker with ideas all day long, eventually opening a few bottles of wine in the evening and beginning to relax. Then, at 10 o’clock every night, something special would start to happen. New ideas would emerge, riffs began to crackle, rhythms and that all important chemistry spluttered, then sparked into life. “Then, for two hours, we’d write a song,” says Matt. “It was weird but it happened every night at the same time.”
And in those moments, the band rediscovered both their love for what they do and for one another. The gruelling period spent touring an album with which they weren’t entirely happy faded from memory; the months spent away from family and friends became a worthwhile sacrifice for the job they love; the questioning their metal credentials received evaporated. Slowly, they became, once again, what they had been before all this started: four friends in a room playing the music they adored. And that, they realised, was the most important thing. “We wanted,” says Matt, “to rekindle the magic. And we did.”
IF YOU ignore the dirty vests and bloodied faces that Bullet For My Valentine are currently sporting courtesy of their photo-shoot, you’ll find a happy, comfortable band. Each of them is hovering around the 30-years-old mark, Matt has just become a father, Moose and Jay already have children. They use words like “mature” and “grown-up” a lot more than they used to. They also find themselves settled – a condition at which they once might have sneered but which now they welcome. All four live in Bridgend, Matt having moved out of his gated apartment in Cardiff and back to his home town. Life is comfortable: the singer is driving his fourth – or is it his fifth? – luxury car, an Audi R8, which replaces the BMWs and other Audis he has driven before. Jay says “honestly, things are pretty much the same as they’ve always been,” with contentment. And then he concedes: “Well, our houses are a bit bigger.”
But still they say the most important thing is there: their friendship.
How important is the relationship between you four?
Matt: “Very. We’re exactly the same as we’ve always been. There’s never any tension between us. There are never any fights or anything. There never have been. We’ve known each for so long, and lived with each other on the road for so long, that it’s only weird when we’re not together. We’re with each other more than we’re with our families and girlfriends.”
Was it nice to realise the relationship has remained strong?
Padge: “Yes, especially after all we’ve been through and all the living together [on the road]. The four of us are a unit. We’re a good team. That makes this the best job in the world, because we’re four friends just doing what we always wanted to do in life.”
Moose: “We went in to start writing as four friends and we locked ourselves away. We went back to where we recorded the EP and The Poison and we hung out as four friends. We’d drink wine and have fun and I think that’s where our best work comes from.”
Does the relationship feel deeper now?
Matt: “Yeah. The relationship has been going on for so long now that we knew each other inside and out. It’s definitely like a brotherhood and it’s been like that for a while. I don’t think we’ll understand how strong it is unless something happens, which – touch wood – it’s not going to.”
WHILE DISCOVERING harmony in a band who have spent so much time on the road as Bullet can be rare, there is converse problem too. A band who are happy, who drive nice cars and who are finding life very pleasant indeed often lose the drive to push themselves too hard.
That’s not something Matt believes Bullet For My Valentine will suffer from. “Yes, I have a nice house, nice car and nice things,” he says. “But they’re just a by-product of what I do and what I love. Yes we can do stuff and have stuff, but the hunger and the passion for the band has never gone away as a result. It just drives us even harder because we don’t want to lose [what we have] now. [Nothing’s] good enough for us; we’re always striving to be better and bigger.”
It’s certainly a chest-beating attitude. But then this has always been the way Matt works, fast cars and nice houses or not. He played county-level rugby and basketball as a teenager and that instilled competitiveness in him. It was a spirit further fostered growing up when, he says, he was told he would never amount to much. He believes those experiences have helped make him who he is today. Because he’s very much the band leader – he writes the songs, he makes the decisions, he’s the boss.
“It’s not a dirty little secret,” he says. “I’ve always been the songwriter, I’ve always been the one to rally the troops and get them motivated. I still do that now. I think it’s important for a band to have a leader, rather than for three people to be fighting for the alpha position. It’s hard for me to not take the lead role because I’ve had the drive in me since day one. And we’ve got to where we are because of that, so I think I’ve proved myself as a leader.”
Are the band always happy for you to make the final decision?
Matt: “I think so and I think they would tell you the same, yes. They’re intelligent dudes and they know the score. They’re not stupid. Sometimes there are disagreements.”
But if you tell them something’s happening, then it happens, right?
Matt: “It’s more of a majority decision. But if it’s a two versus two decision, then I’ll make the call. I think I’ve proved that I’m the leader of the band because, for the majority of the time, I’m right when it comes to the decision-making process.”
That’s a very confident attitude, where does that come from?
Matt: “I’m too proud a person to give in. I give in to fuck all. I won’t lose. I’ll never lose.”
Does that cause problems sometimes?
Matt: “Not for me.”
For other people?
Matt: “I’m sure it does. But that’s what’s in my blood. If someone offered to race me from one point to another, I would do it however many times it took until I fucking won. Or I’d pout all night. That’s just me. I’m ultra-competitive.”
Does that come from when you played sport?
Matt: “Yes, and also because, growing up where we grew up and going to the school I went to, you had to fight for everything. You were either competitive and fought for what you wanted to do, or you were a fucking nobody. I didn’t want to be a nobody.”
Why not?
Matt: “It wasn’t that I thought I was better than anyone else, it was that I wanted to make something of my life. The only way I thought I could do that was by committing to something and not fucking giving in until I achieved it. I think that’s why we first got signed – all four of us fought for it and sacrificed everything.”
A lot of the drive seems to stem from you wishing to prove your doubters wrong. Haven’t you already done that?
Matt: “No, there’s something in my blood where I still want to prove myself to people. I’ll be trying to convince people I’m good at what I do until the day I die. That comes from being beaten down, mentally, when I was growing up, it comes from being told we were shit. I don’t think that feeling will ever go away.”
IT’S RARE to find Matt in this mood: opinionated, bullish and determined. Or actually, more accurately, it’s rare to find him talking about these things. For the most part he’s a calm character, rarely raising his voice, often the quietest member of the band. He can be introverted, keeping his feelings to himself. It takes some prodding for him to let his guard down.
“I’m not emotionless, but people can’t really tell if I’m happy, pissed off or whatever,” he says. “It drives my girlfriend nuts that I’m like this sometimes. We’ll have an argument and I won’t argue because I don’t see the point. It winds her up so much because I’m so detached from situations. That’s just me. I find it better for my health.”
At this point, we are interrupted by a phone interview that Matt must conduct. He apologises and takes the call. When he’s finished, he asks, “Where were we?” Discussing his emotions, he’s told. He rolls his eyes and sighs, which says a great deal about how much he enjoys talking about this.
Do you like to keep your feelings to yourself?
Matt: “Yes, someone’s got to really push my buttons for a reaction. I’ve only ever lost my lid a couple of time in my life. I try to keep my emotions locked in. My private life has always been kept very private.”
Do you keep emotions hidden from, say, your girlfriend too?
Matt: “Yes, she does have to drag things out of me sometimes.”
Do you find it easier to put those thoughts into a song?
Matt: “Yeah, if it’s something I’m really passionate about. Most Bullet songs start out from a real scenario in my life or something around me. But then often it’s not colourful enough for Bullet – I have to exaggerate and take it off to an extreme level. If I just wrote about normal stuff, the song would be kind of boring.”
Is that, perhaps, protection too?
Matt: “Perhaps. It’s because I don’t think those feelings are relevant. And also, my life really isn’t that entertaining. I’m quite content and happy, so it’s hard to write about stuff like that. I don’t want to be negative because that’s not me, so I have to take something that is negative, that does piss me off, then I have to take it to an extreme level so that it’s colourful to listen to.”
AND WITH that, his cards return close to his chest. For Matt, talking about his feelings is simply not something he likes to do either in public or private.
Or maybe this proves something about him and, by extension, the rest of the band’s grounding. Drama queens, they are not. Though they drive expensive cars and record albums in Los Angeles, all four still live in the Welsh town, Bridgend, in which they grew up.
Ask them if they feel they’ve matured and Moose will quip: “I’ve gone from drinking lager to drinking ale. That’s my mature step.” However, that’s not necessarily the sole truth. He also admits that, when at home, he goes to bed at 10pm in order to be up in time to take his kids to school.
Padge, meanwhile, talks about the old days of touring but does so in a what-were-we-like tone of voice. “I’d be waking up with a bottle of Jack Daniels gaffer-taped to my hand, stupid things like that” he says. “You can still do that stuff, but you tend to have grown up a bit. Now I can realise, ‘Fuck me, I was completely smashed last night and made a complete fucking arsehole of myself.’”
Bullet credit Bridgend and their friends there with helping to keep their heads level. In turn, the welcome doses of reality they receive both help them not to get too full of themselves.
“We all still live within 15 minutes of each other,” says Moose. “We’re all friends with the same people that we were friends with before. It’s nice to still have that. It’s good to see your parents and friends often. And if they think you’re being a bit of a rock star, then they tell you. My partner will say, ‘You’re not on tour now, take out the bins motherfucker.’”
Is being in Bridgend still important?
Jay: “It’s being near family and friends that I like. They remind you of where you’re from. Before the band, I used to think, ‘I can’t wait to get out of this place, it’s doing my head in’. Now it’s nice to come home and get away from the rest of the world.”
The bigger a band gets, the more they can find themselves in a bubble of airport lounges and nice hotels. Does Bridgend help burst that bubble?
Padge: “Yes, there have been times that we’ve got home to friends and family when, 24 hours earlier, we were sitting in some restaurant on the Sunset Boulevard in LA. You get back to where you live and you see all the places that are boarded up and people you are used to seeing aren’t there anymore. It can be weird.”
Jay: “It’s nice to get home and find that things are real. It’s like a different world, isn’t it? But a good one.”
Is it ever hard to move from one world to the other?
Moose: “I had to tell myself to calm down the other day when we came back from shooting a video in America. I was dying for a Chinese but there was an hour-and-a-half wait [at the takeaway]. I went crazy: ‘This fucking country’s fucking shit’. I had Super Noodles in the end. And it was a nice slap in the face. Any time you start thinking you’re a rock star, it’s good to have to eat Super Noodles.”
THE NEXT time you will see Bullet For My Valentine, it will be on a stage somewhere. They know that, in order for this album to earn the success they believe it deserves, they will need to put in some serious touring. Jay, for one, can’t wait. He says that, after their last tour ended, he would get an adrenalin surge every night at the same time they would normally be going on stage. The problem was he was at home with nothing to do. That pent up energy is now coursing through a band keen to put themselves in front of a crowd again.
But, as their bus takes them across Europe, America, the Far East and who knows where else, they know that the core is still there among them. They know that, for now anyway, they can rely on each other. And when they’re a long way from Bridgend, they can once again remember what it feels like to be four friends, in a room, playing heavy metal.
© Tom Bryant 2010
