Bullet For My Valentine

Inadvertently, I may have stumbled upon a rather significant topic for Tuck and his band. While my own sense of self is clearly having trouble adjusting, Bullet For My Valentine have always held their identity at the forefront of their music. Who they are is arguably more important to them than what or how they play; it’s all about crafting sincerity through heavy metal.

“There’s never been a Plan B,” the Welsh frontman explains in a delightful and occasionally impenetrable accent. “It was always music that I was going to do, and I’m just lucky that it paid off. I think I’m lucky in that I think I’ve got a good brain on my shoulders, but even that I have to really credit to the music. I didn’t want to go to uni, I didn’t want to get a good, normal job. I was always getting fired from jobs anyway because I’d be off playing somewhere, rehearsing for shows. There was never a backup, but thankfully it all worked out. That commitment with everyone in the band really paid off. Everyone really cared about it. The band always came first. Even when we weren’t getting anywhere, we just focused and kept on going, just working at gig after gig.”

With their fifth album, Venom, set for release this Friday, it’s easy to prattle off platitudes of how far Bullet For My Valentine have come in the last ten years; how they shrugged off detractors and pushed hard for fame and fortune, et cetera. And while this is all true, their progression has in no way been assured. The road has not been without deviations and near misses, and for a while there, Tuck was in serious doubt if the band would keep moving ahead at all.

“We’ve had a few of those moments, but the biggest was around the time when our original bass player, Nick [Crandle], left the band. I had a part-time job at a music store; I was in debt, but still working at the band. Then Nick left and we literally had to sit down and say, ‘Can we still have the band going at 25, still without a good job, still living with your parents?’ I think that was the moment where I thought I was probably going to throw in the towel. But we kind of restarted the band, started writing a couple of new songs, and it was almost like that was meant to be, in a way. We got pushed to the very brink of giving up, we just needed to give it that last shot. And then a year later we were signed, had an EP out, and the rest is history.”

With Venom, Bullet For My Valentine – hardly known for their gentle soundscapes and folksy sensibilities – decided to up the ante and work towards an album that centred around the aggressive energy of their live shows. 2013 had seen the release of Temper Temper, an album that proved popular with fans but left several critics lamenting a lack of grit and focus. Tuck had no intention of pandering to the whim of critical responses, but moving the band towards heavier terrain was something he already had his eye on.

“Venom sounds completely different,” he agrees. “[Temper] was kind of heavy, but this time around we wanted to show something that was super aggressive, something that was a bit stark. Put them next to each other and it’s still obviously the same band, but the sound now is very different. We always want each record to sound different, but still keep our identity. We don’t want to make the same record twice; that would be a total cop-out. I can’t stand the idea of having an earlier record that you’re just trying to replicate again and again.

“So what we might do next, well, it depends how we feel at the end of this cycle. I think at the moment we’ve kind of maxed out the heaviness. Any more and we’d start losing our identity – we’d just be heavy for the sake of being heavy, you know, not because we were actually wanting to say something. Everything that’s here now is entirely where we were already going, but just turned up a notch. I think we got the balance right, and it captures who we are.”

It took the guys almost eight months to achieve that careful balance. The process of pulling together songs and trying to forge a harsher, more violent sound was not a straightforward one. There were several tracks that had started to take shape only to find themselves scrapped halfway through, as Tuck or the others realised they just weren’t responding to where the band saw itself. Such is the desire to keep surging forward to maintain an identity that these fledgling songs are unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon.

“We scrapped around eight to ten, I think. They all sounded pretty decent, and there were some killer riffs going on, but just didn’t quite fit the criteria of what we were looking for. They were a bit too… a bit too alternative, I guess,” Tuck laughs. “They didn’t have that identity we were going for. They were a bit closer to the Temper Temper styled stuff. You have to be very, very harsh. Once we scrap something we tend to never come back to it. If we feel like a song isn’t going anywhere – if one of us has a bit of a scowl on his face – we won’t do it. There’ll always be little bits of those songs floating around in your head, and maybe some of that might show up later on. But really, we just don’t want people to hear stuff that we don’t feel is good enough ourselves.”

Now that fans are finally going to experience the latest offering as it’s meant to be heard, Tuck is trying hard to kick back, relax, and let the album do the work. But still, after all these years, he’s not yet comfortable in stepping back and letting go.

“The band has become such a big thing in all of our lives now. It just dominates. I mean, it’s amazing, something we’ve always wanted, something that a million other bands out there would fucking kill to do. And I understand, because I would do that too. It’s an amazing privilege. It’s like winning a lottery, so I need to enjoy it now rather than just make it all work, work, work; next tour, next album. It’s hard not to do that, because it’s so dominant you don’t always see how much control it has over you sometimes. So I need to be more conscious of moving forward, and just being happy with it.”