British metal had waited years for a band like Bullet For My Valentine. Starting out as Jeff Killed John at the turn of the millennium, the line-up solidified into vocalist Matt Tuck, drummer Michael ‘Moose’ Thomas, guitarist Michael ‘Padge’ Paget and, last to arrive, bassist Jay James in 2003.
An eponymous five-track EP showed these four boys from the Valleys had something special, and by the time they signed to Visible Noise/Sony and headed to Chapel Studios with producer Colin Richardson in late 2004 to record their first album, The Poison, they knew they were heading for success.
Raised on Metallica, schooled by Machine Head and inspired by Killswitch Engage – a band they’d take out as support when celebrating the 10th anniversary of their debut in 2016 – Bullet For My Valentine bridged traditional and contemporary metal, landing support slots with the likes of Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses, and opening the floodgates for Bring Me The Horizon, Architects and more.
Frontman Matt Tuck looks back on this “bananas” era, and the tracks from the album that changed their lives forever.
1. Intro (ft. Apocalyptica)
“As a brand new band working on our debut album, we had no experience of working with other bands. The guy who signed us, Martin [Dodd] had also signed Apocalyptica too, so when we talked about having this big, movie-style dark heavy metal intro with orchestration he suggested working with them rather than just programming something.
I remember recording all the guitar parts and sending them over [to the Apocalpytica guys] and then this brilliant thing comes back. No amendments, no back and forth, they nailed it first time."
2. Her Voice Resides
“For a lot of The Poison, I was just focusing on trying to write lyrics. I was excited to be working on an album and really motivated because our dreams were coming true. A lot of these songs didn’t even exist until after we got signed, but a lot of faith was put in us and me as a frontman very early on, when we didn’t even have a lot of songs – just the six we’d already released.
This was our opportunity to get into a studio and work with a producer, so we were under pressure big time. We put our heads together and came up with a bunch of stuff, but songs like Her Voice Resides were basically stories we created that could match the soundtrack we were creating, so there’s no specific topic.”
3. Four Words (To Choke Upon)
“So we wrote this one towards the end of the Jeff Killed John era and the beginning of Bullet For My Valentine. In my head, I was at a point where I knew we’d get to show people who didn’t believe in me, didn’t believe in the boys and in our dream, they were wrong. We knew we could do something special given the opportunity, so I wrote a song for when that would happen.
That’s where the whole ‘Look at me now’ came from. The whole song was based on those four words – a real middle finger to everyone who’d told us we wouldn’t do anything. A ‘fuck you’ song that came from a place of anger and hate – all the things that make a good heavy metal record. It’s never left our sets – I don’t think we’ve ever played a headline show without that song because its important for us, and means so much to fans.”
4. Tears Don't Fall
“We did a demo of Tears Don’t Fall in Newport, about 40 minutes from where we grew up. Jeff [Rose] and Ginge [Martyn Ford] from Dub War and Skindred used to do our demos for us because they had this little studio in Newport so we’d go there to have fun, play some music and write songs. They burned us a little CD of the demo and we listened to it in Padge’s car on the way home and just went ‘Fuck!’ It felt like someone else had written the song, we just couldn’t believe it. It was like, ‘We did that?’ We figured if people got to hear that, then it was game on.
The way it was structured, how it sounded… the whole thing was a really interesting and clever piece of music. We knew we had something special – it was undeniable. There was no metal band in 2004, 2005 who had a song like Tears Don’t Fall – nobody else dared to do that kind of thing. We just jumped in headfirst and it might’ve pissed a lot of people off, but it made us stand out too.
With Part 2 on the Fever album, I just wanted to see if I could recapture some of that feeling. It was a challenge to ourselves almost, ‘If we wrote a second Tears Don’t Fall, how would it sound?’ It’s not as special as the original – nothing ever is when you have a song that big, but I just wanted to pay homage to it and write something that could capture that.”
5. Suffocating Under Words Of Sorrow (What Can I Do?)
“We wrote Suffocating Under Words Of Sorrow at Chapel Studios. We spent a lot of time there working on the songs for The Poison and Suffocating must’ve come about at like 11 O'clock on a Monday night. We’d all had a few glasses of wine and were sitting around a pool table playing guitars. The song’s riff came up and we composed it all in about an hour. Next day we tracked it and it was all done, super quick, super spontaneous and there was no overthinking.
Some songs can take like a month to write, but others can just burst out onto the page and that’s exactly what we needed at that time. There was such a fearless vibe to us at that point. Songs were just coming out of us every day. We felt unstoppable.
Later we got all these offers to get those songs on videogames, movies and whatever. It was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ That whole era of the band is bananas – from our touring schedule, who we toured with, getting songs on John Madden [NFL 06], Need For Speed, Saw 3 soundtracks… it was a mind-blowing time for the band. Something we’ve never really beaten, so far as it all felt. Nothing compares to 2004 – 2006, it was such a wild time for us.”
6. All These Things I Hate (Revolve Around Me)
“Another big one. I remember writing it on a beat-up 3/4 Spanish guitar in my bedroom. I was strumming the chords and thought it sounded pretty cool, so wrote it on the spot and added some classical guitar parts in. We wanted something big and dynamic, with a bit of shock factor from when that first chorus hits.
Lyrically, I was dating a girl for a long time and she’d gone off to university, so we got separated. That’s kind of what the song is about; being separated from someone you love, and the reason for it being these decisions we’d made that were for our own lives and future, but also hating that fact.”
7. Room 409
“We wanted something up-tempo and heavy, more of a riff fest. I wasn’t speaking from experience lyrically on this one, thankfully! I wanted something about betrayal, deception and cheating, something that felt like a band called Bullet For My Valentine should write about.
It wasn’t a single or anything, but it stayed in the set for a very long time because of the energy. It was uncompromising and was fun to write, the kind of track where you hope kids are going to want to learn it on guitar.”
8. The Poison
“Another fictional song. I loved the words ‘the poison’ and figured on another piece of fictional storytelling lyrically, while we had a bunch of riffs set aside for this song.
It was our first venture into tapping – we were finding our feet, really and experimenting with different styles of guitar playing. We wanted something anthemic and uplifting, but also had a bit of schnozz in it. It was a bit more experimental for us, but also its one of the songs I love and am most excited about bringing back. There’s a little break before the last chorus hits and the crowd always do their thing, which is great.”
9. 10 Years Today
“When I was 14, a guy in our year at school and one of our close friends took his own life. We had a big group of lads aged from like 13 to 16 all into Nirvana and heavy metal, so we’d all hang out. It was a hideous experience to deal with the fallout of that, trying to compartmentalise it emotionally, asking why and how. We were barely into our teens and dealing with this traumatic event with one of our closest friends. Today, we still don’t really know why it happened, so it was really rough.
Thankfully we were resilient and eventually bounced back, but it was the most chaotic and awful event that I’ve ever had in my life, it was in all the papers and people from the tabloids were going to his house and stealing pictures of him, all the bullshit. So on the album, I wanted to talk about it, about him and how I felt. It’s a great song, but does bring back some painful memories.”
10. Cries In Vain
“Cries In Vain was another Chapel special – a song that didn’t exist until we went in to actually write the album. More late nights with glasses of wine and guitar playing. One of my fondest memories of making The Poison is listening back to that after we’d tracked it; it was so fresh and new with no demo format, so our first experience of it was after Colin had done some mixing.
It felt like a well structured, composed piece of music and really gave us all the feels. It also has one of my favourite pieces of music we’ve composed, which is the dual lead in the middle section. Really cool shit!”
11. Spit You Out
“We wanted something fierce and a title that was nasty, basically! We were writing continuously and decided we needed an intro where the China cymbal would be riding. There were a lot of bands at the time who’d use that big, epic swish sound, so we wanted to carry that. We wanted heavy riffs, big choruses. Anthemic and heavy – that’s how we liked it!
There’s a section towards the end where the bass comes through and it goes to a live section, which was actually from Download 2004. We ripped the audio from a live DVD they’d given us of our performance. That had been our first Download and was really special for us, so we wanted to commemorate it on the album.”
12. The End
“There were a lot of ideas we’d got before we’d even written the album, and one of them was to have a big, long song called The End to close it. We wanted to tap into that dark Metallica/Machine Head moment where there’s just clean guitars that really make it feel like you’ve been on a journey.
They’re really hard songs to write! Once we’d committed to it though it all came together pretty quickly, and I remember thinking I wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Machine Head were one of our favourite bands at the time – still are – so we wanted that kind of thing and I think it puts a full stop on the album perfrectly.”
Bullet For My Valentine tour North America from March 30 and play Download Festival in June. For the full list of upcoming dates, visit their official website.
