Kerrang! Radio Spotlight: Bullet For My Valentine
We're focusing on the Welsh rock giants all this week
On the week they release their thunderous and spectacularly angry fourth studio album ‘Temper Temper’, we’re extremely proud to shine the Kerrang! Radio Spotlight on Welsh wonders Bullet For My Valentine! One of the lustrous beacons of British metal music, over the past decade they’ve delivered consistently blistering music, shifted over 3million records around our humble planet and progressed into one of the finest live bands on the circuit. Put simply, the music scene would be a much poorer place without them.
Bullet For My Valentine started life way back in 1998 when musically likeminded Bridgend College students Matthew Tuck, Michael Paget, Michael Thomas and Nick Crandle formed a covers band called Jeff Killed John heavily centered on Nirvana and Metallica’s back-catalogue. Throughout the ensuing years they gradually evolved and started writing their own music, even incorporating omnipresent nu-metal elements into their musical melting pot. In 2002 a day after Crandle quit Jeff Killed John, the band (now in their current incarnation) drafted Jason James on bass and hit the studio to lay down their debut EP ‘You/Play With Me’.
With a thirst for success after picking up moderate airplay with the EP, the group consciously embraced thrashier and more melodic sounds and renamed themselves Bullet For My Valentine. The rest, they say, is history. With several record labels clamouring to sign them, BFMV snubbed legendary imprint Roadrunner Records and instead penned a five-record album deal with major label Sony BMG. Their first release was a five-track, self-titled EP in November 2004, which perfectly showcase their more visceral and brawny musical direction and served as a tantalising taster of what was to come.
Met with glowing reviews, Bullet For My Valentine’s debut album ‘The Poison’ hit the shelves in October 2005. Lead single ‘4 Words (To Choke Upon)’ was a perfect statement of intent for the record; a caustic two fingers up at the band’s detractors who said they would never make it ("four words to choke upon… look at me now"). At times devastatingly screamy yet never straying too far away from a brain gnawing melody, the album’s brilliance spread by word of mouth and to date it has sold an impressive 1.2million copies.
Gradually building in stature, over the next two years BFMV honed their live performances and developed into the beast they are today. Landmark shows included Download in ’05 and ’06 (where they leaped from the Snickers Stage to the Main Stage), gargantuan US tours with Guns N’ Roses and their idols Metallica, the 2006 Vans Warped Tour plus their legendary Brixton Academy gig which became the subject of their first live DVD ‘The Poison: Live at Brixton’. The only ebb came when they were forced to pull out of ‘tallica’s Wembley Stadium in 2007 after Matt contracted a severe bout of laryngitis – an unwanted respite that propelled the band to start work on their follow-up record.
Recorded with heroic metal producer Colin Richardson in Texas, the brilliant ‘Scream Aim Fire’ landed in 2008. Featuring markedly less metalcore shrieks than their debut (partially because a tonsil-less Tuck struggled to reach the same notes), BFMV delved into more classic heavy and thrash metal territory to startling effect. Juxtaposing deliciously abrasive tracks like ‘Heart Burst Into Fire’ and ‘Waking The Demon’ with the ‘Nothing Else Matters’-esque ballad ‘Say Goodnight’, it’s a wholly cohesive work that befittingly cracked into the top five on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fresh from scoring the first of three historic Best British Band titles at the 2008 Kerrang! Awards, the next two summers saw BFMV extensively tour Europe and North America, including most notably the Mayhem Festival alongside Slayer, Killswitch Engage and Marilyn Manson. They returned to the fray in April 2010 with their epic third album ‘Fever’, which impressively emulated its predecessor both in terms of commercial success (it smashed into the Billboard chart at no.3) and musical magnificence. Combining astonishingly catchy tunes with brute metal force, the album is littered with zeniths from the singles ‘Your Betrayal’ and ‘The Last Fight’ through to arguably their greatest song, the life-affirming ‘Alone’.
Three years, two phenomenal Download Festival performances (headlining the Ronnie James Dio stage in 2010 and warming up for headliners Linkin Park in 2011) and one side project (Matt’s “metal as hell” Axewound supergroup) later and Bullet For My Valentine have just unleashed the most ferocious and essential record of their career - ‘Temper Temper’. A truly magnificent tour-de-force, it seems only right that we pay homage to Bullet For My Valentine all this week!
As well as shining the spotlight on Bullet For My Valentine, we’re also giving you the chance to win a money-can’t-buy prize - a Michael Paget LTD Signature Series MP-200 guitar, as played by the Bullet axeman himself!!
CLICK HERE* to enter the competition now! *