Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
at the stage and, about six months into the run, Jeff Killed John headlined a show at the Brackla. The nights would inevitably get a little rowdy and the crowds were getting bigger and bigger, with many turning up to see Jeff Killed John specifically.
Playing before Jeff Killed John on that night was a band called Nuke. They were also from Bridgend College and Glyn Mills was managing them. Their guitar player, Jamie Hanford, was studying for a sound-tech qualification and would go on to do live sound for Jeff Killed John many times in the future while working for a South Wales promotions company. ‘The “scene” was thriving back in the early 2000s,’ Hanford recalls of the period. ‘I was a sound engineer for a local promotions company and would normally work five or six nights a week right across south-east Wales. So many names from all over the world would play a fantastic mix of music; it wasn’t just rock and metal.’
And it was the second time that night that a local bass player and vocalist called Jason James, better known as Jay, had taken the stage. He had first appeared with Endurone, though he was not officially their singer and was only filling in until they found a suitable replacement (Endurone also featured Glyn Mills’s son on drums). But his main role was in Nuke. Like most, Jay had got his first taste of music through the elders in his house, with his father a devotee of classic rock ’n’ roll – Elvis Presley in particular – and his brother a big fan of Queen. But when he was twelve, he had bought a tape from his friend for a fiver that would irrevocably change his life. It was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses and it made an immediate impression on the innocent young mind. ‘When I took it home and put it on, I just could not believe what I was listening to, you know what I mean,’ Jay told Spotlight Report. ‘It was heavy and there was swearing in there, and I was like “oh my God, what the hell is this?”’
Matt Tuck had also had a part to play in Jay’s musical education. Jay, being a couple of years Tuck’s junior, was a friend of Matt’s younger cousin. One day, while Jay was visiting, Matt appeared with a stack of Metallica albums for the pair to listen to. From there, it was heavy metal all the way for Jay, with Pantera and Slayer following quickly after Metallica. Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris first inspired Jay to pick up a bass guitar and provided the basic teachings, and he joined Nuke at the age of fifteen.
Nuke and Jeff Killed John were very close from within the community – they even used the same rehearsal space – and had developed something of a friendly rivalry with one another. Speaking about the scene in general, Mills is keen to point out how bands were supportive of one another. ‘There was always a friendly rivalry. People would talk about who’s better, particular fans had particular favourites, but it was never underhanded; people used to help one another out,’ he says. ‘If you went to a party it would all be the same boys, and you’d find them supporting each other, going to one another’s gigs, etc.’
The night that Nuke and Jeff Killed John appeared after one another would turn out to be the last gig Brackla Community Centre hosted. ‘It got so, so full, there were literally hundreds of kids turned up,’ Mills recalls. ‘The audience ruined the floor, a highly polished floor, they couldn’t use it for a week… I think the cans of beer on the newly polished floor were not appreciated.’ But it would take more than a sticky floor at a community centre to stop the ever-growing pace of the South Wales scene. Mills moved on to be the in-house promoter at local venue the Toll House, previously known as Jaggers, becoming a key figure in the Bridgend scene alongside his friend Darren Dobbs. ‘They asked us if we wanted to take on the Toll House, and I was ex-marketing, and thought, “Well there can’t be that much to it.”’ he recalls. ‘I said I’d give it three months and in the end I was there for years.’
Under Mills’s guidance, both local bands and those from further afield were increasingly keen to come to Bridgend. ‘We were booking bands left, right, and centre. Bands were coming to us, it was a real good scene,’ he says. ‘There were times when we were actually turning people away because there were so many people turning up. We were disappointed if there was less than a three-figure number in; we used to wonder what we’d done wrong.’
A more difficult question to answer is exactly what factors were in play in South Wales at the time that there should have been so many notable bands coming up in such a small area, in towns with relatively small populations. For Mills, it’s impossible to ignore the economic considerations. ‘It was new music that was coming through; guys were looking for an alternative lifestyle and a way to express themselves, ’cos there was a lot of social issues going on in the valleys at the time,’ he explains. ‘You’re talking about the late nineties, early noughties when there was a tremendous amount of change. We’d lost employment, we’d lost the mines, we’d lost steelworks, everything had gone. And in place of it were jobs that were minimum wage. There was very little to offer at the time, and there still isn’t to a certain degree.’
However, it was not the promise of wealth and riches per se that got people into bands; it was merely the desire to be acknowledged for whatever ability they did have. ‘Years ago, the saying was you either went down the mines or you went into teaching. To get out of Wales you had to go teaching. Well, I guess being a musician kind of replaced that.’ As more and more people started to find their way into bands, it had a snowballing effect of pulling more and more young people into the scene. As Mills puts it, ‘people were feeding off one another.’
And while Matt felt that his time at Bridgend College was not particularly helpful, for Jamie Hanford, formerly of Nuke, the college did provide important facilities to get people started. ‘We were all students at Bridgend College at a time when the arts were funded by the government, so everyone had space and instruments to use,’ he points out. ‘So it was just natural and a part of our diplomas to jam. [It] was a really exciting, fun time.’
As things developed, Mills was putting on more and more gigs, ultimately hosting two per week in Bridgend and one a week in Cardiff, as well as the occasional show in London. ‘Suddenly, South Wales became the epicentre of everybody’s activity because there was a realisation that we had a scene going on down here that wasn’t affected by London,’ Mills explains; Jeff Killed John, too, were regularly leaving Wales and heading to London to help get their name out beyond their local area. Momentum was building and, from the outside looking in, it seemed as if Jeff Killed John couldn’t have been in a better place at a better time to get signed. But they were about to encounter a serious hurdle.
The band were only to complete one final EP as Jeff Killed John and this time the roots of the band that` they would become were absolutely undeniable. The self-titled release from 2003 features a whole range of melodies and lyrics that would later show up on Bullet for My Valentine’s debut EP and album, though in a much altered form. It opens with ‘Our Song’, a number with a crushing chorus and plenty of athletic drum fills from Moose, as well as an atmospheric breakdown with a creeping groove, though it’s not a huge step forward from the material that they recorded with Greg Haver.
The next track, however – called ‘Routine Unhappiness’ – showed that they were really getting to grips with the mechanics of writing a catchy rock song. Pivoting on an off-kilter riff, the vocals are pushed right to the front of the mix and Matt pulls out every trick in the book in his performance to sell the sordid tale of domestic abuse to the listener, with his gutsy singing line breaking into a scream at various points. The guitar work is held back to give space for the singing to properly take centre stage and the song’s middle eight lifts off with a wordless refrain of ‘whoah-ohs’. Even in this most raw format, it sounds as if it’s destined to be played in rooms larger than a community centre. It’s rough and unpolished but there’s no doubt that the boys were starting to feel and sound like a band with big ambitions.
The third track, ‘Nation2Nation’, features a guest