Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
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CONTENTS
1 TITLE PAGE
2 INTRODUCTION
3 CHAPTER ONE TO BE BORN IN WALES
4 CHAPTER TWO SCHOOL OF ROCK
5 CHAPTER THREE ‘THE NEW SEATTLE’
6 CHAPTER FOUR I HEAR YOU’RE IN A BAND
7 CHAPTER FIVE DEPARTURES
8 CHAPTER SIX LOOK AT ME NOW
9 CHAPTER SEVEN THE CHAPEL
10 CHAPTER EIGHT THE POISON
11 CHAPTER NINE ROAD DOGS
12 CHAPTER TEN THE LONE STAR STATE
13 CHAPTER ELEVEN A LUMP IN THE THROAT
14 CHAPTER TWELVE SCREAM AIM FIRE
15 CHAPTER THIRTEEN FINDING A VOICE
16 CHAPTER FOURTEEN TAKE NO PRISONERS
17 CHAPTER FIFTEEN LETTING GO OF THE REINS
18 CHAPTER SIXTEEN COMING DOWN WITH A FEVER
19 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ARENA CONQUERORS
20 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN AXEWOUND
21 CHAPTER NINETEEN MUSICAL THERAPY
22 CHAPTER TWENTY TEMPER, TEMPER
23 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE RAISING HELL
24 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO REBIRTH
25 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ARMED TO THE TEETH
26 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR INJECTING SOME VENOM
27 PLATES
28 COPYRIGHT
In garages, basements, school halls, churches and youth clubs up and down this and plenty of other countries, teenagers have gathered to play music together. Most of them won’t get beyond playing for a few friends, with practise amps drowned out beneath an out-of-tune drum kit. Some will go further, playing pubs and small clubs for a local following before fizzling out with a couple of demos to prove that they existed. But all will fantasise about the big-time; that possibly extinct or maybe always fictional place where their idols will come to consider them peers and a new legion of fans will come to idolise them in turn. A place where glory and money come easily, the guitar is never out of style and 10,000 tickets for an arena show will sell out in twenty minutes. But in the early 1990s the big-time and Bridgend in Wales were not well acquainted.
Yet, somehow, in 2006 a young man from Bridgend was sitting on stage at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds in Estonia. The grounds were the site of a traditional festival of national significance to the Estonians but they were also used as land-for-hire for large-scale concerts and tonight Metallica were playing. It was perfectly clear that day at the site, nestled in the Bay of Tallinn, with Helsinki just ninety kilometres across the Gulf of Finland – so from behind his kit, with the sun not yet set, Michael ‘Moose’ Thomas had an uninterrupted view of the 105,000 people that had come for Metallica. And the gig had a special significance for him and his band too. Metallica were the band that they had idolised as teenagers. Just a few years ago they were memorising their riffs in bedrooms, covering their songs in cramped rehearsal spaces, learning the cut and thrust of a heavy metal song as practised by the masters of the form. They had been on a band outing in 1996 to see Metallica play on the Load tour. And now not only were they supporting them at their own show but, as Moose looked to the side of the stage, he could see Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield watching their set. He forced himself to keep his eyes forward. It was all he could to keep his concentration. And yet, as the middle eight of his band’s biggest single to date crashed in, he couldn’t help but sneak a glance. Lars and James were playing air guitar. It was better than even a boyhood fantasy would dare to allow.
That night, Bullet for My Valentine would even make an onstage appearance during Metallica’s set – a stamp of approval from one of the biggest heavy metal bands that the world has ever known. But Bullet had only just begun. Their own take on the classic thrash template of the early 1980s had already brought them in front of one of the world’s largest gatherings of metalheads and it would take them even further, ultimately seeing them carve out their own place in the pantheon of the fast and the ferocious. But first, there was Bridgend.
Bridgend sits in the south of Wales, around twenty miles west of the capital Cardiff. Bisected by the River Ogmore, its history, like much of South Wales, has been shaped by the fickle fortunes of industry – in particular, coal and steel. The soil of the valleys to the north of the town were so rich with coal that, by the time the First World War broke out, the small communities that speckled the mountainous terrain had swollen inexorably, with row upon row of terraced houses built to accommodate the influx of workers. But while at one time Cardiff and Swansea were some of the most important trade routes in the world for coal and steel, after the Second World War the industry entered a steady decline. First came dwindling investment from the government, before the free-market policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s effectively saw support being withdrawn altogether. The legacy of this sudden collapse was unemployment, deprivation and drug use.
Bridgend was not the worst hit of the South Wales towns, particularly thanks to the construction of a new motorway in the 1970s that connected the town with the east and the development of new, privately-owned housing estates in the 1980s. But as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, it was still marked by the residual problems of the valleys – a lack of jobs and a shortage of investment. However, all was not as hopeless as it seemed. As a verse from Brian Harris’s famous poem In Passing goes, ‘To be born in Wales, / Not with a silver spoon in your mouth, / But, with music in your blood / And with poetry in your soul, / Is a privilege indeed.’
And so it was with music in his blood and poetry in his soul that Matthew Tuck entered the world on 20 January 1980. His father, who worked for a food company, was a huge fan of music himself, drawn in particular to the quintessential American artists who defined the image of the USA to everyone outside it: the freewheeling literariness of Bob Dylan, the heartland romance of Bob Seger and the blue-collar stargazing of Bruce Springsteen. Matt was the third child of the family, with two older twin sisters, but it was him and his dad who shared the most interests. Their first passion was sport, with Matt pursuing rugby, football, karate and basketball – anything that he could compete in (this determined streak would prove distinctly useful later on). Their second shared passion was, of course, music. His dad would play him records from his favourite singers, and their words, the way in which they would construct their songs, and the cadence of their voices as they sang, all began soaking into the young Tuck’s head.
It wasn’t a musical education completely devoid of aggression either – Matt’s dad was also a fan of Led Zeppelin and he was certainly interested in getting Matt more involved in music. At the age of five, he bought him a full six-piece Premier drum kit and Matt played his very first beats as a musician. As he later told hardDrive Radio, ‘I was always being pushed towards music.’ And while he didn’t necessarily appreciate the influence of his dad’s taste in music at the time – what child does? – and has stated that he later got into