Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
that descended on South Wales following the success of Lostprophets and Funeral for a Friend, for Matthew Davies-Kreye, the tag was not justified. In an illuminating article for online music mag Noisey.Vice.com called SOUTH WALES WAS THE NEW SEATTLE? TOTAL BOLLOCKS, he writes, ‘They were nothing alike other than the fact that we’re by the coast, it’s depressing, and it rains for 290 of the days of the year.’
However, he does give an incredible account of the South Wales music scene in the early 2000s before it came to the nation’s attention. He states his view that the venues were incredibly important, particularly because they would often host pop-up record stores: ‘Even if I wasn’t too familiar with the band playing,’ he writes, ‘I’d go to shows knowing my friends were going to be there… It was a very honest, pure environment to be in.’ Davies-Kreye also pays tribute to the diversity of the scene, which would often see bands from completely different genres hosted on the same bill, with an atmosphere of mutual support throughout. ‘You’d have hardcore kids, punk kids, nu-metal kids, hip-hop kids; nobody really knew what they were and it didn’t matter,’ he explains in the piece. ‘It was a mash-up of people and influences, which made being a part of it quite beautiful. There were no boundaries, most people were just really passionate about the fact that local bands were writing their own songs that were actually good.’
Jeff Killed John found themselves in the midst of this excitement around the thriving South Wales scene, continuing to rehearse and play gigs while working at menial day jobs to support themselves. Padge had, at one point, been working bending metal and, at another, hammering the wire frame into dartboards. One of Moose’s first jobs was in a pet store. Matt was putting in hours in a local Virgin XS, an arm of Virgin Megastore set up to sell off back-catalogue stock. It was here that he met one particular naysayer who stuck in his mind. ‘Once, a regional manager came down and he was like, “I hear you’re in a band,” and asked about it,’ he related to Metal Hammer. ‘So I told him and he was just a total dick. Like, “I’d just give it up now. What do you do? Metal? You’re never gonna get signed…” He just took the piss so much. Shit like that, for me, that’s like ammunition to prove myself even more.’
Fortunately, his parents continued to support him through his younger years, recognising that he had committed himself to achieving success. ‘They’d drive me to practice and buy me new equipment whenever I needed it; like upgrades to bigger and better things,’ he told Reverb Street Press magazine (now Reverb Online). ‘They even paid for studio time so we could do demos. They’re just amazing parents and I couldn’t have asked anything more of them. They did exactly what they needed to do because I had a dream, you know. I’ll be forever thankful for it.’
However, by 2002 they were finding other means of funding their growth. A corporate communications company had secured some £500,000 of funding from the European Union for a scheme called Promoting Youth Networks in the Cultural Industries, or PYNCI. The money was earmarked specifically to help young musicians in the area and Jeff Killed John were one of the bands selected for funding over the two years that the scheme ran. They used it to head into the studio with Greg Haver, a producer who had been heavily involved with the Manic Street Preachers since the release of their 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. He had also worked extensively with another stalwart of the Welsh scene, Skindred, a Newport-based band that fused the anger of punk and metal with the energy of dub and ragga.
The outcome of Jeff Killed John’s collaboration with Greg Haver was a two-track release and by far the strongest material that the band had laid down to date. The first song, ‘You’, shows a clear leap in ability from previous recordings. Moose has got a real handle on the double-kick pedal, with his rapid footwork matching the crunching riffs, and the chorus combines screamed vocals with harmonised singing in one undeniably effective hook. Musically, it’s still a maelstrom of relatively unsophisticated power-chord riffing and the half-rapped, half-screamed breakdown that brings the track to an end is pure nu metal, but there’s no denying that they had sharpened both their songwriting skills and their playing since the Better Off Alone EP.
It’s accompanied by ‘Phony’, a track sometimes listed as ‘Play With Me’. The riffs are tightly wound but delivered with nuance, and the screaming section that follows each chorus (‘Come play with me / ’cause I am lonely / why can’t you see / that you’re a phony’) demonstrates that the band has some real fire in its belly, with Moose once again wailing on the double kick. The band had started to let a little bit more of their classic-metal influence creep in and as a result, ‘Phony’ was their strongest song to date. On one release the two tracks were also packaged with a cover of the Phil Collins’ classic ‘In the Air Tonight’, which the band were also covering live around this time. With heavily processed drums and vocals and stabs of distorted chords that drift across the clean guitar lines like toxic ash, it has an almost industrial feel, heightened when the song kicks off at the three-quarter mark.
Just as the band had made strides in the quality of their recorded output, they were building a real name for themselves locally too. One key figure in supporting Jeff Killed John and a whole host of other acts on the South Wales scene was Glyn Mills, a man with the natural flow of a raconteur and an infectious cackle. Mills had first become involved in the scene while working for an organisation based in South Wales aimed at helping young people and had discovered that music was an extremely important outlet for a lot of the teenagers in the area. ‘We found from talking to the young people that music was the key thing, especially with disaffected kids,’ he explains. ‘Some were very disaffected, but they just needed a bit of attention.’ Mills had been working on various projects to provide facilities in the area, including raising £125,000 for a skatepark, so it made sense to provide them with a platform to play music as well. As such, he started putting on local gigs in youth centres around the area.
Mills was also reviewing for local publications at the time and had first written about Jeff Killed John at a show in 2002 at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff, where they were supporting the Newport-based band Douglas. What’s fascinating about the review is how many of the elements that would later come to define Bullet for My Valentine were already present here, years before Bullet existed. He talks of how aggressively Moose plays the drums, of how far Padge’s playing contrasts with his laid-back character. In a rare account of Nick Crandle’s contribution, he speaks of his ‘mesmerising […] menacing and sinister’ stage persona, and Matt gets lauded not just for how far his voice has developed but also for the attention he gets from the female members of the audience. The review concludes, ‘They used to play like they had something to prove, now they play like they’ve already proved it.’
Mills had already linked up with Bridgend College, who recognised that the assistance of a promoter for the local scene would be instrumental in helping students on the Music Performance course get real-world experience. ‘When [the college] heard that we were putting on gigs – obviously they had young lads, and they would say, “Can you help put this band on?”’ Mills explains (Jeff Killed John had already moved on from Bridgend College at this point). ‘It worked from there, and Jeff Killed John were building their reputation, so they got to know about us.’ Like most things, social circles were a crucial means of building new relationships too and Mills had also come to know of Moose through his brother Shiner, who was playing guitar in a local band named Then Came Bronson. (Shiner would later sign to Visible Noise with another band, Miss Conduct, featuring two other members of Then Came Bronson. There’s clearly something special in the Thomas genes.)
One of the early venues Mills used to host gigs was the Brackla Community Centre, in the east of the town. During wartime, Brackla had been home to the largest factory in western Europe and, as fighting ended, the land was sold to developers. They used the site to construct one of Europe’s largest privately owned housing estates