Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
a stage with many times over. However, the decision to leave behind Nuke was not an easy one for James. Glyn Mills, who had been managing Nuke, remembers it like this: ‘It got to the point when Nick left – I’m not sure quite what happened there – but they were looking for a new bassist. They approached Jay, and Jay was in Nuke at the time. I met Jay in town and he was beside himself not knowing what to do, ’cos they were his best mates in Nuke – they’d grown up together. But my advice to him was, look, if they’re friends, they’ll understand. You can’t turn that opportunity down. But they all stayed pretty close in the end; obviously first of all there was bother but they’re all good friends.’
As it happens, for a time, Nick Crandle actually joined Nuke, who started going by the name Emily All Over. Nick Crandle has since left but the core of the band – Jamie Hanford, Rob Norris and Sion Woodbine – are still playing today. As Hanford explains, ‘We needed to change the name of the band so we could start fresh and give us all equal ownership of our music (in terms of putting an end point to Nuke). That’s when we became As Silence Falls.’ In 2013 As Silence Falls released a self-titled five-track EP of technical, ferocious metalcore combined with emotive, melodic vocals. Recorded by none other than Martyn Ford and Jeff Rose at Not in Pill Studios and the recipient of a 4K review in Kerrang!, they have added their name to the already extensive list of great rock bands from South Wales.
With Jay in the ranks, the sense of the band being on the right track was heightened even more, as Matt would later relate in an interview with Scuzz TV. ‘As soon as Jay came in, it felt different – it felt weird, and it felt right,’ he said. ‘We weren’t aware of what was happening, and looking back at the early gigs we did, they weren’t in my opinion all that great – but there was something about us four guys doing something at that time that felt a bit different.’ It was only natural that the band sought to rebrand themselves. They didn’t like the name Jeff Killed John anyway – after all, it was a name they had picked for themselves when they were teenagers – and for a time they had been going by the name Opportunity in Chicago. Deciding that wasn’t quite right either, a brainstorming session was in order and, naturally, it happened down the pub. Armed with a pen, a sheet of paper and a pint each, the band started throwing out potentials. It was Moose who first came up with ‘Violence for My Valentine’ but it was deemed too death metal. So the band drew from some songs that they had at the time and settled on ‘Bullet for My Valentine’. It had the right juxtaposition of sweetness and savagery, which also seemed to reflect the more melodic take on metal that they were putting together.
With their aspirations up and running again, Bullet for My Valentine started rehearsing hard. And instead of plying their new sound and identity locally, they were going to head to London to get in front of people who they knew had the power to offer them contracts. They had come close before but never quite got there, as Glyn Mills recalls: ‘They were on the tips of the tongues of everyone as being the band that were gonna get signed, and there were a couple of times that they thought this was it. There were a few disappointments on the way.’ This was to be the last push.
The band had already acquired management through a demo they had sent to the Camden Barfly and, in February of 2004, Bullet for My Valentine were booked on a showcase in London in front of a number of labels. It was only their second show under the name but, after near to a decade of no success with Jeff Killed John, the response was immediate. There was not one but two labels vying for the band’s signatures.
The first was Roadrunner Records, a legendary metal imprint that had released albums from King Diamond, Machine Head, Sepultura, Type O Negative, Opeth and Slipknot, among many others. Roadrunner Records had the pedigree; it was a dedicated rock-and-metal label that had broken a number of highly influential acts and had proven itself time and time again to be ahead of the curve when it came to signing genre-defining acts. But the other label was Sony Music Entertainment, the second largest music company in the world (after Universal Music Group). They had clout, cash and literally hundreds of artists on their roster, from pretty much every genre imaginable. And they had globally renowned rock acts; everything from Foo Fighters to Ozzy Osbourne, Slayer and the mighty Iron Maiden (in the UK).
Bullet for My Valentine were in a quandary. It was a nice problem to have but, after having waited so long to get to here, there was a huge amount of pressure to get this decision right. Roadrunner Records was, by all accounts, the obvious choice because of the legacy that they had in working with new metal acts. But the band were concerned about the longevity of the bands on their roster. ‘Roadrunner is a great label, they have great artists, but we feel that after album number two, nothing much happens,’ Moose told InTheNews. ‘The bands kind of fall off the face of the Earth.’ Having worked so hard to get to this point, the boys had every intention of becoming the biggest band that they could possibly be; they wanted to surpass every expectation. The Sony deal was stronger financially and the band felt that it would offer them more longevity. As Matt put it to Metal Hammer, ‘[We thought], “let’s step out of the metal comfort zone and stand head and shoulders above everyone else that we come across.”’ And so the band finally agreed a five-album deal with Sony.
With the ink barely dry on the contract, they immediately set about the first order of business: celebrating, in the most rock ’n’ roll sense imaginable. They hit London hard, racking up a tab on Sony’s card at a plethora of bars and, later, a strip club. After the festivities they headed back to a hotel that the label had put on for them. Bullet for My Valentine were now a signed band; they were professional musicians. There was only one thing to do – trash the room. A sofa went through the wall and into the next room. The TV wouldn’t fit out the window, so they threw it on the floor and pissed on it instead.
It was the culmination of everything that the band had worked for up to this point; they had kept going, well past the point it would have been sensible to give up, until they simply could not be ignored anymore. But the truth is that Bullet for My Valentine were also, in another sense, incredibly lucky. For a start, Matt himself has acknowledged that, were the band to have been signed five years prior, when they were still very much in the midst of their nu-metal phase, they probably would have fallen out of favour and been dropped before 2004 even came along.
And secondly, in 2004 the music business was on the cusp of a huge schism. Peer-to-peer downloading had already become a major channel for the exchange of music; in 2003 iTunes started offering legal downloads and in 2007 the Internet became the biggest channel in the world for the exchange of music, though the revenue made from legal downloads nowhere near made up for the loss of revenue from traditional media. The result was that the kind of major-label, multi-album contracts that Bullet for My Valentine were offered dwindled in availability. These days, the climate for bands is considerably more inhospitable, with many having to sign away all kinds of rights to get any backing at all.
But all of that was irrelevant in 2004; all that mattered was that the chase was over. Matt put it best to The Aquarian Weekly newspaper: ‘Getting a record deal is the biggest achievement and highlight of our life,’ he said. ‘Not even of our career, but our life. We worked so hard to accomplish [this] with no guarantee of even getting anywhere near a record deal, so achieving that is the biggest highlight of our lives.’ Now they had to prove themselves worthy of it.
With the deal with Sony signed and sealed, the most pressing item on the band’s agenda was to get in the studio and prove their worth as a major-label act. Right from the start, there was only one man they wanted behind the console: Colin Richardson, a legendary British producer with a list of credits that touched all corners of the metal map. He had first earned a name for himself at the more extreme end of the spectrum, bringing the aural terror of Liverpool’s grindcore pioneers Carcass into focus, as well as producing for Napalm Death and Fear Factory. Two years previously he had even worked on Casually Dressed & Deep