Bullet for My Valentine overcame its Vancouver setback to find glory in the pages of Kerrang!

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCT. 13, 2010

By Steve Newton

A lot of rock bands have come to Vancouver to record and gone away with hit albums, but Bullet for My Valentine isn’t one of them. The Welsh metal act spent time here in 2004 working with producer GGGarth Richardson, but didn’t come close to finding its Permanent Vacation or Slippery When Wet.

Everything the group recorded with Richardson was scrapped and rerecorded with Colin Richardson (no relation), the result being its 2006 full-length debut, The Poison, which has sold more than half a million copies in the U.S. alone.

The quartet—composed of singer-guitarist Matt Tuck, lead guitarist Michael Paget, bassist Jason James, and drummer Michael Thomas—followed The Poison with another Colin Richardson–helmed outing, 2008’s Scream Aim Fire, and is currently touring behind this year’s Fever, for which it recruited producer Don Gilmore, whose credits include Linkin Park and Good Charlotte.

“Scream Aim Fire was more a flashy sort of attempt,” explains Paget, on the line from a sound check in Montreal, “a lot of quicker tempos and different tunings and stuff, but with Fever we tried to go back to our roots. We even tried writing in the places where we wrote The Poison to sort of draw some influence back. But the main difference on Fever is the vocals. We worked very hard on the vocals and the melodies.”

When it first came together in 1998 in Bridgend, Wales, Bullet for My Valentine was a cover act known as Jeff Killed John that specialized in Metallica, Pantera, and Nirvana songs. When it started working on original material the band tended toward the nu-metal sound favoured by then-popular acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

“Obviously at the time nu-metal was unfortunately very big,” recalls Paget, whose band plays the Commodore Ballroom on Wednesday (October 20). “There was no avoiding it at that time. But I guess every band has to start somewhere, and eventually we found our feet and we created our own sort of sound, which is cool.”

That sound combines elements of metalcore with a tip of the hat to ’80s headbanger bands like Iron Maiden, whose melodic guitar style Paget was heavily influenced by. And while he cites murdered Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell as his favourite picker of all time, it’s not as though he spends hours soaking up the groove-metal strains of Vulgar Display of Power.

“I love the blues,” he points out. “I’ve turned into a bit of a blues nut over the years. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Freddie King, Albert King—anything cool, you know. Taj Mahal.”

With more than two million units sold worldwide, Bullet for My Valentine has clearly overcome its Vancouver setback and found an audience for its catchy brand of thrash. It’s also the first group to be chosen best British band three times in prestigious headbanger mag Kerrang!

“Kerrang! has been there with us from the start,” notes Paget, “but obviously winning an award like that is all to do with the fans and the readers, which blows us away. We’re very proud to receive it.”