BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE

When frontman Matt Tucks’ voice hit the skids during the recording of the band’s new Scream Aim Fire, they thought the band might be a thing of the past. Now, with the album’s release, the future is about to change.

By Mikael Wood
Photo by Travis Shinn

It’s almost dusk on a typically gorgeous Saturday afternoon near the California coastline, but the four members of Bullet for My Valentine aren’t lounging around on the sand. They’re standing atop a makeshift stage inside a hulking industrial warehouse tucked into the Long Beach shipyards, pretending to bash away at their instruments as they film the video for “Scream Aim Fire,” the title track from the Welsh metalcore band’s sophomore album.

Quickly fading sunlight streams through the warehouse’s windows (or at least the spaces where windows used to be), but it’s about as cold in here as Southern California gets. The crew is bundled up in coats and scarves, while the Bullet boys—singer-guitarist Matt Tuck, guitarist Michael “Padge” Paget, bassist Jason James, and drummer Michael “Moose” Thomas—find what warmth they can in their T-shirts. The shoot’s been going on for about eight hours, and there’s very little chance they’ll get out of here before another eight have passed. In short, these guys have flown more than 5,000 miles to hang out in the one spot in L.A. that’s as dreary as their native U.K.

Not that they’re complaining. The day before, at Revolver’s photo shoot downtown, Moose could be heard announcing his ambition that Bullet for My Valentine become nothing less than “the biggest band in the world in five years’ time,” and he and the rest of the group seem to have a pretty good understanding of the hard work and long hours it’ll require to accomplish that—or even to get close.


“It’s been fucking insane,” Tuck says a few weeks after the L.A. visit. He’s on the phone from his home in South Wales during a break from recording vocals for Scream Aim Fire B-sides. “I’ve been getting my knickers in a twist the past week with the sheer amount of work that’s come in. It’s been a real shock to the system this time around, to be honest.”

As it happens, “shock to the system” isn’t a bad way to describe Scream Aim Fire, which is coming out on Jive. A more intense blast than the group’s 2005 debut, The Poison, the album finds Tuck and his bandmates beefing up their sound with heavier guitars and more robust rhythms; at the same time, it’s got some of the catchiest melodies they’ve come up with yet. According to Moose, the motivating idea was simply to top The Poison, which has sold nearly 350,000 copies in the United States and earned the band high-profile gigs opening for Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Guns N’ Roses.

“We wanted to change up the dynamics but keep our identity and the song-structure thing we have going on,” Tuck adds. “We wanted to make it a lot fresher and reflect the here-and-now of what we’re about and what we’re feeling musically.”

Bullet recorded Scream Aim Fire in El Paso, Texas, with producer Colin Richardson, who also helmed The Poison. The process went smoothly, says Richardson, until Tuck suffered a series of throat infections that eventually led to an emergency tonsillectomy. “There was a time in the last six months when I thought that Matt’s voice would never come back and that we were gonna be a one-album band,” Moose admits. “We even thought about getting another singer. It was not a very nice time.”

“I almost think they had to get to that lowest point in order to rise above it,” Richardson says. Once they did, the band knuckled down. “Definitely with Bullet, the guys realize it’s a career thing,” continues Richardson. “They all held boring jobs working in factories and stores before the band blew up, so they’re conscious that they wanna savor this moment and make it go as long as possible.”

REVOLVER You guys toured The Poison pretty solidly for most of 2006 and 2007. Did you get tired of those songs by the end?
MATT TUCK We were actually totally happy with it and excited just to be doing it as a job. We never really got sick of it until we started throwing “Scream Aim Fire” into the set just to see how it would go down. And as soon as we played that song, it became the most entertaining, exciting part of the night for us.

Did you know what you wanted to write about when you started putting together lyrics for the songs on the new album?
I wanted to dabble in a couple different things that I hadn’t done before. A lot of it had to do with all the crap I went through with my voice—that played a huge part in the lyrics. And then some of it was just about our experiences, the highs and lows of being in a rock band that’s blowing up everywhere.

Is that something you think your fans can relate to?
The way I’ve structured the lyrics is obviously from my point of view, but anyone can relate to them if they work away from home or they go to university or college for a while. It’s just about being away, really.

Did the success of The Poison lead you to feel more confident in the studio this time?
The studio is always a relaxed place to us. It’s where we’re at our most creative and where we shine as songwriters, really. All the bits and pieces come along on the road, but it’s in the studio where all these creative ingredients just pour out of us. We had the luxury this time as well of not having any kind of deadline or anything. We could really take our time and get into it, and if we weren’t happy we’d just start again. That’s where Colin came in, because we trust him implicitly.

Was working with Colin again a no-brainer?
Totally. He just gets what we’re doing and what we want to achieve and the way we want to sound. Even when things were bad with my voice and we were in the studio for three weeks without one word being put down on ProTools, there was no negativity. He never got frustrated. He was just like, “No worries—we’ll take a break for a few weeks and come back.” He pretty much kept it together when times were getting really ugly.

Speaking of the ugly times, did it ever get to the point where you thought the band might be done?
Yeah. When I first started getting the problem toward the end of 2006, we just thought it was kind of a temporary thing. But unfortunately it turned into this huge, chronic problem. We thought the main thing was my tonsils, because they were just so huge, like two golf balls in the back of my throat. And as anyone who’s had tonsillitis knows, it’s not really your throat it affects—it’s your entire fucking body. You’re vomiting, you’re sweating, you’re shaking, you can’t move, you’ve got fever, ache, migraine. It just totally disables the human body.

And you were trying to sing during this?
Yeah. I went into the studio to try to record my vocals, but nothing was happening. I was really husky and had a really crappy range. We were like, “Fuck this—something’s gotta be done.” So we phoned this throat-specialist hospital and they literally got me in the next day and ripped my tonsils out. And I just went into the recovery process; we thought that was gonna be the end of it. Then I got back into rehearsals about nine weeks later, after it had fully healed and I’d gotten the go-ahead from the doctor that it was safe to sing again. I got in front of a microphone and started singing and it was the same fucking issues. It hadn’t helped. At that moment, it was like, “Fuck, that’s it.”

So it wasn’t just your tonsils?
The problem was a lot deeper. Since then I’ve been working with vocal coaches and stuff, trying to get it back together. There’d be breakthroughs and then the next day it would be bad again—there was just no continuity or stability in my voice. It was a totally heartbreaking experience for me, the lowest point of my life. It felt like my dream was coming to an end. I was like, “It’s still not right. I’ve done something to my voice that’s probably going to be a permanent thing, and now I’ve just got to find a way around it.”

The lowest point of your life—that’s heavy. How have you dealt with the psychological aspects of the problem?
I haven’t seen any kind of shrink or anything to try to talk to me out of being a singer or to get me to be positive about it. I just want to deal with it on my own. I’m the type of person who doesn’t think that shit will help. It’s more of a physical thing to me. I’m taking vocal lessons and doing the coaching and all the exercises, and they’re fine. The hard part is applying it to a fucking song with actual words and trying to put feeling into it and stuff. It’s a total head-fuck, which I’m still kind of dealing with. But I’m not gonna give up on this—there’s no way.

Did the voice problems ever cause any tension between you and the rest of the guys in the band?
No, the boys were great. I was the reason everything was getting fucked up, and I was taking the full brunt of it and dealing with it in my own way, which is just to lock it up inside myself. But there were never arguments or fights or them saying, “For fuck’s sake, Matt!” They were like, “Do your thing, and if there’s anything we can do, just let us know.” I know deep down that the boys were just as worried as me.

Did having them by your side make dealing with it any easier?
In a way, yeah. I mean, we’ve been together for too long to just give up over a voice problem, even though it’s been as severe as it has and lots of things have gone wrong because of it. There’s nothing else we want to do in our lives, and if it takes another 12 months to work at it and get it better, that’s what we’ll do. But having them there in my corner, not getting pissed off or wanting to jump ship, was totally cool. That’s just the way me and the rest of the guys are with each other. It’s more of a brother thing than anything else.

Now that you’ve completed the record, it’s time to start up another touring cycle. Is that intimidating?
For me, getting back on the road is a really scary thought, because I’ve just got this seed planted in my head of what’s happened over the last year. But as soon as I get a couple of shows under my belt and there are no problems I’m going to be a lot more confident than I am.

A good deal of your touring in support of The Poison included dates with older, more established metal bands. Was that exciting?
Yeah, it means a lot. It’s something you never think of when you join a band as a teenager and you look up to these people as complete fucking gods. To even know that they know who we are is fucking amazing. It still hasn’t sunk in that we’ve done something like that. They know us personally and are calling us by our names.

Has that changed your ideas about who or what rock stars are?
We’ve kind of seen what to do and what not to do if you get to that level. When we were on tour with Guns N’ Roses, that was a prime example of how not to fucking act on tour. Then with Maiden and Metallica it was the complete opposite. They made us feel so welcome, and anything we wanted, they were more than happy to give us. It was nice to see that though they’ve established these godlike myths about them, when you actually get them one-on-one in a room, they’re just Mr. Average. It was inspiring to see that our heroes weren’t dicks.

One thing that unites acts like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses is that they play to incredibly varied audiences. It’s not just kids who know everything there is to know about the history of metal. Does establishing that kind of following appeal to you?
That’d be cool, yeah. We’ve had our fair share of something similar, which is playing in front of people who really don’t understand what’s going on in modern metal. The Maiden experience was an example—they were 40- and 50-year-old men with mullets and denim jackets, you know? It was mad to see how out of touch some people are with modern rock music.

How important is it to you that you expand your fan base in America with this record?
America for us is priority No. 1. It’s definitely where we want to be. We’ve made a really big crack there, and as long as we keep producing the goods, album-wise, and keep putting on a great live show, I’m sure we’ll have no problem making a further dent this time around. People are gonna be sick of us over there by the end of 2008.