BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE // The Venom Starts At Home

Aug 18, 2015 / WORDS The Editor / Ain't no antidote

“Bullet for My Valentine’s game is ballin’ on this record. Musically, they really are nailing their A-levels.”- Hysteria Mag

Bullet For My Valentine are on a roll – they’re the first band announced for Soundwave 2016, have just released new album Venom, and are set on delivering it as their self-proclaimed “best metal album of the year.”

We spoke to Bullet for My Valentine’s Matt Tuck and Michael “Padge” Paget about their Kanye-esque statements, where the Venom comes from, and growing up in Welsh cultural wastes. Read a preview of our feature below:

—

The ire running through Venom isn’t forced. Unless you’ve lived hard, you can’t play hard. What you hear is Matt and the Bullet boys are tapping into a seething mass of fury. Matt had to drag his Welsh ass over broken glass to get where he is.

“When we were growing up, and at school…a lot of Venom is about about the guys that used to fuck us over, and pick on us, and beat us up. We were always the kids that had the long hair, listening to Metallica and Nirvana, and all these bands. We were targeted because of that. I’m sure it goes on today in every single school in the world.”

Inside his frustrating classroom, Matt was stuck for outlets. It would’ve been so easy to throw himself on Wales’ human scrapheap.

“Unemployment’s pretty high, there’s a lot of alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide,” Matt says. “It’s a very amazing place to live, and thankfully we didn’t get affected by that too much. I mean, nothing is expected of you, really. Even schoolteachers really didn’t give a fuck about you. They never nurtured you personally, or never personally could do things with myself. Just go to school, just fuck about, and just go home. I was the only one, literally, in my year that wanted to do music. I couldn’t do it, I had to do something I didn’t want to do, and they didn’t give a shit, they didn’t try to help.”