Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
previous project, Dub War, had languished on Earache Records, forcing him to reconfigure the line-up and start a new project. Their debut album, Babylon, was released in 2002 to a positive reception, with critics praising the release for its fresh and unfiltered take on metal – in addition to the blazing riffs and pneumatic drums you’d expect from a solid heavy album, Babylon incorporated a bold streak of reggae and dancehall, with Webbe’s highly versatile and distinctive vocal the focus of their hybrid approach. Webbe had first fallen in love with both punk rock and reggae at school (when his friends were all announcing their allegiance to this tribe or that with their dress sense, he just wanted dreadlocks with a mohawk in the middle, he told online fansite Metal as Fuck). It’s a testament to his support for the scene that, despite being an RCA-signed artist at this time, he was still helping out unsigned acts in the area and his work with up-and-coming Welsh acts continues to this date, in addition to regularly touring with Skindred.
‘Nation2Nation’ opens with the sound of a siren, a sample heavily used in dancehall, before a cyclical riff kicks in. The verse sees Matt incorporating another nu-metal rap, as on ‘You’ – it’s a product of the era that the EP was produced in but it’s pulled off with gusto nonetheless. The chorus is pure vitriol, with traded screams pinging back and forth over the driving riff, and Webbe appears in the second verse, stealing the show somewhat with an elastic vocal line combining death-metal growls with the rhythms and inflections of Jamaica. It’s a fascinating experiment in playing with the Jeff Killed John style that, despite not having a lot in common with JKJ’s future approach, does show that the band were more than prepared to explore unfamiliar territory with their music – a trait that would last throughout their career.
The track is important in the Bullet for My Valentine story for another, less apparent reason. Skindred signed to RCA Records and released Babylon in July 2002 but in November of that year two of its founding members had left – the drummer, Martyn Ford (better known as ‘Ginge’) and guitarist Jeff Rose (also known as Jeff ‘Death’ Rose). In detailed joint statements, Ford in particular cited mistreatment at the hands of RCA, writing, ‘After recording our stunning album Babylon and doing some amazing shows seeing the reaction from people to our music I knew we deserved to be treated much better than the way we had been by RCA, the label total [sic] didn’t push the band or the album in the way a major label can when they believe in it.’ Both members instead decided to pursue a career in recording. Ford had set up a makeshift studio beneath a boxing gym in Newport to track the demos for Skindred’s debut and, experiencing Pro Tools (a digital audio workstation) for the first time after recording Babylon in Hollywood, he saw his future. Upon leaving Skindred, he decided to found his own recording studio. The result was Not In Pill, in Newport, and the first band to record there were Jeff Killed John. It was the start of a longstanding creative collaboration that would last throughout Bullet for My Valentine’s career (Ford would also go on to work with Slipknot, Trivium, As I Lay Dying and many more).
Around this time Jeff Killed John had also recorded a track that will be familiar to all and it is another example of how far they had developed in the craft of writing songs. Opening with a simple acoustic-guitar part accompanied by a vocal, ‘All These Things I Hate (Revolve Around Me)’ shows a band that know how to structure a composition, with each vocal line carefully designed to stick in the listener’s head and with the lyrics clearly audible. While the drumming and guitar work is still prominent, it’s in service to the emotional tone of the song. Matt was developing as a lyricist too and had the smarts to write songs around highly relatable themes, such as the collapse of a relationship.
But if Jeff Killed John were experimenting with a more accessible and approachable take on their sound at this time, they weren’t about to go full pop, as the next track on the EP demonstrates. Entitled ‘Misery’, it opens with an extended instrumental section, a pensive guitar line underpinned by a spartan drum part from Moose, which also forms the basis for the melancholic verse. But all hell breaks loose in the chorus, which also shows just how strong a scream Matt could pull out at this time.
While the Jeff Killed John EP shows that the band were, if not ready to blow, at least making significant strides, the truth was that all was not well around the period that this EP was recorded. Although South Wales was well and truly under scrutiny from the industry, all the increased pressure was causing some discontent in the Jeff Killed John ranks. They were broke and in debt. Outside of the nurturing scene within Wales, they were regularly getting involved in pay-to-play shows, whereby bands have to pay some sort of fee upfront to the promoter to get on the bill, usually with the promise of compensation if enough punters come through the door. Their commitment to the band had seen all of them, at one time or another, lose a job.
Plus, seeing other local bands get snapped up by majors was causing something of a crisis of confidence. ‘We just kept thinking “what are we doing wrong?”’ Padge revealed to Ultimate Guitar. ‘All these bands were getting signed up and we’d been going just as long, if not longer than some of those bands and we couldn’t figure it out.’ Things were about to get worse. The band was gearing up to enter the studio but bassist Nick Crandle decided he had had enough. ‘We were due to go in the studio on Saturday, and he quit on the Friday,’ Matt told The Gauntlet website. ‘Everything went completely tits up.’
The band entered a period of soul-searching. They had already dedicated years to Jeff Killed John and, despite coming close on a number of occasions, they had watched other bands in the area break out of the local scene while they remained in relative obscurity. Now they were down a member too.
With nothing left to lose, the band took stock of everything that they had built up so far and decided to change the direction they had been heading in. Moose explained it to the Voice of Rock Radio like this: ‘We’d had eight years of jumping on bandwagons, and being kids, we didn’t know our identity as musicians, and we were jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon. It wasn’t working, so we thought, let’s analyse why it’s not working, and we tried to make music that sums up all our influences on one song.’
That song came along while the band were practising in the dilapidated old church where they used to rehearse. Where they had previously followed the nu-metal template of dense, power-chord based riffs, usually a bar in length and repeated over and over, they started to look more to the bands that they had been most influenced by when they were growing up; the classic thrash and heavy metal that had first made them want to pick up an instrument and play. One thing that stood out as notably different to what they were doing was the guitar work. It could be thick and blunt but it could also be intricate, almost baroque, with twin guitar lines playing contrapuntal melodies or reflecting one another in harmonised lines. Once the decision had been made to call time on the nu-metal style that the band had been pursuing – and weren’t really interested in as fans anymore anyway – the harmonised twin-guitar approach naturally started to express itself in their songwriting. The result was ‘4 Words to Choke Upon’, a song that not only absorbed and modernised a whole host of classic-metal influences but also managed to stick the middle finger up lyrically to everyone who said Jeff Killed John would never make it.
The song felt like a catalyst for something. They had hit on a rich vein of material and there was no telling how deep the mine went. They began writing furiously but, rather than trying to force themselves into a certain mould, they just allowed the songs to come out organically. ‘There was no specific decision made,’ Matt told RoomThirteen. ‘We just started to write and whatever happened, happened. Luckily it totally worked […] The harmony guitars and big angelic choruses seemed to have just progressed from there.’
At this time the band were also looking for a replacement for Nick and, fortunately, they were in the midst of a scene teeming with musicians. One candidate was even from Ogmore Vale, the same