BFMV: Fatherhood And Fame

With 'Fever' tearing up the charts, we talk to Bullet For My Valentine about what drives them higher and higher.

Posted Wednesday, 2 June 2010 in

Bullet For My Valentine are - whether you love or hate them - probably one of the biggest UK bands today. But, as Rock Sound found out in our current cover story, that's simply not enough for Matt Tuck and co.

Click here to see Bullet For My Valentine's December arena tour dates

In a revealing interview, the band talk about the pressures of touring while trying to maintain a new family, how close they came to junking their new album 'Fever' and how, despite their huge success so far, they won't be satisfied until every head on the planet bangs to their rhythm.

“There are definitely two Matt Tucks. There’s the one that’s doing what we are now – the band – and there’s my private life, but I don’t really like to delve into that at all,” the frontman reveals, with a look that says, ‘Fuck right off, journalist’. “I like to have the segregation. I like to go home and shut the door and no one gives a shit about me, and I have new responsibilities now as a new father… but our objectives and responsibilities towards the band have never changed. I just have another chapter in my life. I’m still very ambitious – all of us are – for success.”

Collectively, the band talk about the imminent touring, the festival headline slots and whatever other promotional activities they’ll have to do off the back of ‘Fever’ with the air of supermarket shelf-stackers about to start a 12-hour night shift. That’s not because they’re not excited – they just hate talking about going on tour and shredding across five continents and much prefer actually going on tour and shredding across five continents. Tuck talks of his creative process in much the same way.

“There’s still stuff I want to write about even though I’m not going to because we’re not, like, a political band. There are still taboos,” he says. “We follow a formula on songwriting. Musically and lyrically it has to be a package, I think. We cant stray off into other things. We tried it on ‘Scream Aim Fire’ and it didn’t really work: we went into the more epic thing, the homesickness / being on tour thing, and they’re cool and good stories and whatever, but we’re Bullet For My Valentine. The name says it all – we write fucked-up relationship love songs, that’s what we do, that’s what I write best and that’s why I think the people loved the band in the first place, for those lyrics on ‘The Poison’, you know?”

It might sound strange hearing a frontman of a band playing a style of music traditionally associated with nailing a bottle of Jack, a willing stripper and a line of coke and then jotting down some lyrics on the back of a pizza box talking formulas, but Tuck’s simply being honest. Bands set down boundaries all the time – it’s why Paramore will never release an album called ‘Pummelling The Skull Of A Tormented Goat Orphan’, and why Bring Me The Horizon will never go ska – but rarely do bands of Bullet’s magnitude talk about it so candidly.

They’re after consistency, so whenever you hear a Bullet song either online, from an album or at a show, it has the same constituent elements running through. And from consistency, they believe, will come vastness.

This is an excerpt from Rock Sound 136, onsale now in WHSmith and all good newsagents. Or click here to buy the new issue and have it sent direct.