Читать книгу Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer - Ben Welch - Страница 10

Jeff Killed John found themselves in the midst of this excitement around the thriving South Wales scene, continuing to rehearse and play gigs while working at menial day jobs to support themselves. Padge had, at one point, been working bending metal and, at another, hammering the wire frame into dartboards. One of Moose’s first jobs was in a pet store. Matt was putting in hours in a local Virgin XS, an arm of Virgin Megastore set up to sell off back-catalogue stock. It was here that he met one particular naysayer who stuck in his mind. ‘Once, a regional manager came down and he was like, “I hear you’re in a band,” and asked about it,’ he related to Metal Hammer. ‘So I told him and he was just a total dick. Like, “I’d just give it up now. What do you do? Metal? You’re never gonna get signed…” He just took the piss so much. Shit like that, for me, that’s like ammunition to prove myself even more.’

Fortunately, his parents continued to support him through his younger years, recognising that he had committed himself to achieving success. ‘They’d drive me to practice and buy me new equipment whenever I needed it; like upgrades to bigger and better things,’ he told Reverb Street Press magazine (now Reverb Online). ‘They even paid for studio time so we could do demos. They’re just amazing parents and I couldn’t have asked anything more of them. They did exactly what they needed to do because I had a dream, you know. I’ll be forever thankful for it.’

However, by 2002 they were finding other means of funding their growth. A corporate communications company had secured some £500,000 of funding from the European Union for a scheme called Promoting Youth Networks in the Cultural Industries, or PYNCI. The money was earmarked specifically to help young musicians in the area and Jeff Killed John were one of the bands selected for funding over the two years that the scheme ran. They used it to head into the studio with Greg Haver, a producer who had been heavily involved with the Manic Street Preachers since the release of their 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. He had also worked extensively with another stalwart of the Welsh scene, Skindred, a Newport-based band that fused the anger of punk and metal with the energy of dub and ragga.

The outcome of Jeff Killed John’s collaboration with Greg Haver was a two-track release and by far the strongest material that the band had laid down to date. The first song, ‘You’, shows a clear leap in ability from previous recordings. Moose has got a real handle on the double-kick pedal, with his rapid footwork matching the crunching riffs, and the chorus combines screamed vocals with harmonised singing in one undeniably effective hook. Musically, it’s still a maelstrom of relatively unsophisticated power-chord riffing and the half-rapped, half-screamed breakdown that brings the track to an end is pure nu metal, but there’s no denying that they had sharpened both their songwriting skills and their playing since the Better Off Alone EP.

It’s accompanied by ‘Phony’, a track sometimes listed as ‘Play With Me’. The riffs are tightly wound but delivered with nuance, and the screaming section that follows each chorus (‘Come play with me / ’cause I am lonely / why can’t you see / that you’re a phony’) demonstrates that the band has some real fire in its belly, with Moose once again wailing on the double kick. The band had started to let a little bit more of their classic-metal influence creep in and as a result, ‘Phony’ was their strongest song to date. On one release the two tracks were also packaged with a cover of the Phil Collins’ classic ‘In the Air Tonight’, which the band were also covering live around this time. With heavily processed drums and vocals and stabs of distorted chords that drift across the clean guitar lines like toxic ash, it has an almost industrial feel, heightened when the song kicks off at the three-quarter mark.

Just as the band had made strides in the quality of their recorded output, they were building a real name for themselves locally too. One key figure in supporting Jeff Killed John and a whole host of other acts on the South Wales scene was Glyn Mills, a man with the natural flow of a raconteur and an infectious cackle. Mills had first become involved in the scene while working for an organisation based in South Wales aimed at helping young people and had discovered that music was an extremely important outlet for a lot of the teenagers in the area. ‘We found from talking to the young people that music was the key thing, especially with disaffected kids,’ he explains. ‘Some were very disaffected, but they just needed a bit of attention.’ Mills had been working on various projects to provide facilities in the area, including raising £125,000 for a skatepark, so it made sense to provide them with a platform to play music as well. As such, he started putting on local gigs in youth centres around the area.

Mills was also reviewing for local publications at the time and had first written about Jeff Killed John at a show in 2002 at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff, where they were supporting the Newport-based band Douglas. What’s fascinating about the review is how many of the elements that would later come to define Bullet for My Valentine were already present here, years before Bullet existed. He talks of how aggressively Moose plays the drums, of how far Padge’s playing contrasts with his laid-back character. In a rare account of Nick Crandle’s contribution, he speaks of his ‘mesmerising […] menacing and sinister’ stage persona, and Matt gets lauded not just for how far his voice has developed but also for the attention he gets from the female members of the audience. The review concludes, ‘They used to play like they had something to prove, now they play like they’ve already proved it.’

Mills had already linked up with Bridgend College, who recognised that the assistance of a promoter for the local scene would be instrumental in helping students on the Music Performance course get real-world experience. ‘When [the college] heard that we were putting on gigs – obviously they had young lads, and they would say, “Can you help put this band on?”’ Mills explains (Jeff Killed John had already moved on from Bridgend College at this point). ‘It worked from there, and Jeff Killed John were building their reputation, so they got to know about us.’ Like most things, social circles were a crucial means of building new relationships too and Mills had also come to know of Moose through his brother Shiner, who was playing guitar in a local band named Then Came Bronson. (Shiner would later sign to Visible Noise with another band, Miss Conduct, featuring two other members of Then Came Bronson. There’s clearly something special in the Thomas genes.)

One of the early venues Mills used to host gigs was the Brackla Community Centre, in the east of the town. During wartime, Brackla had been home to the largest factory in western Europe and, as fighting ended, the land was sold to developers. They used the site to construct one of Europe’s largest privately owned housing estates and some five decades later it was not the din of munitions manufacture ringing through the air but the noise of young rock and metal bands. Then Came Bronson had been regular performers at the stage and, about six months into the run, Jeff Killed John headlined a show at the Brackla. The nights would inevitably get a little rowdy and the crowds were getting bigger and bigger, with many turning up to see Jeff Killed John specifically.

Playing before Jeff Killed John on that night was a band called Nuke. They were also from Bridgend College and Glyn Mills was managing them. Their guitar player, Jamie Hanford, was studying for a sound-tech qualification and would go on to do live sound for Jeff Killed John many times in the future while working for a South Wales promotions company. ‘The “scene” was thriving back in the early 2000s,’ Hanford recalls of the period. ‘I was a sound engineer for a local promotions company and would normally work five or six nights a week right across south-east Wales. So many names from all over the world would play a fantastic mix of music; it wasn’t just rock and metal.’

And it was the second time that night that a local bass player and vocalist called Jason James, better known as Jay, had taken the stage. He had first appeared with Endurone, though he was not officially their singer and was only filling in until they found a suitable replacement (Endurone also featured Glyn Mills’s son on drums). But his main role was in Nuke. Like most, Jay had got his first taste of music through the elders in his house, with his father a devotee of classic rock ’n’ roll – Elvis Presley in particular – and his brother a big fan of Queen. But when he was twelve, he had bought a tape from his friend for a fiver that would irrevocably change his life. It was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses and it made an immediate impression on the innocent young mind. ‘When I took it home and put it on, I just could not believe what I was listening to, you know what I mean,’ Jay told Spotlight Report. ‘It was heavy and there was swearing in there, and I was like “oh my God, what the hell is this?”’

Matt Tuck had also had a part to play in Jay’s musical education. Jay, being a couple of years Tuck’s junior, was a friend of Matt’s younger cousin. One day, while Jay was visiting, Matt appeared with a stack of Metallica albums for the pair to listen to. From there, it was heavy metal all the way for Jay, with Pantera and Slayer following quickly after Metallica. Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris first inspired Jay to pick up a bass guitar and provided the basic teachings, and he joined Nuke at the age of fifteen.

Nuke and Jeff Killed John were very close from within the community – they even used the same rehearsal space – and had developed something of a friendly rivalry with one another. Speaking about the scene in general, Mills is keen to point out how bands were supportive of one another. ‘There was always a friendly rivalry. People would talk about who’s better, particular fans had particular favourites, but it was never underhanded; people used to help one another out,’ he says. ‘If you went to a party it would all be the same boys, and you’d find them supporting each other, going to one another’s gigs, etc.’

The night that Nuke and Jeff Killed John appeared after one another would turn out to be the last gig Brackla Community Centre hosted. ‘It got so, so full, there were literally hundreds of kids turned up,’ Mills recalls. ‘The audience ruined the floor, a highly polished floor, they couldn’t use it for a week… I think the cans of beer on the newly polished floor were not appreciated.’ But it would take more than a sticky floor at a community centre to stop the ever-growing pace of the South Wales scene. Mills moved on to be the in-house promoter at local venue the Toll House, previously known as Jaggers, becoming a key figure in the Bridgend scene alongside his friend Darren Dobbs. ‘They asked us if we wanted to take on the Toll House, and I was ex-marketing, and thought, “Well there can’t be that much to it.”’ he recalls. ‘I said I’d give it three months and in the end I was there for years.’

Under Mills’s guidance, both local bands and those from further afield were increasingly keen to come to Bridgend. ‘We were booking bands left, right, and centre. Bands were coming to us, it was a real good scene,’ he says. ‘There were times when we were actually turning people away because there were so many people turning up. We were disappointed if there was less than a three-figure number in; we used to wonder what we’d done wrong.’

A more difficult question to answer is exactly what factors were in play in South Wales at the time that there should have been so many notable bands coming up in such a small area, in towns with relatively small populations. For Mills, it’s impossible to ignore the economic considerations. ‘It was new music that was coming through; guys were looking for an alternative lifestyle and a way to express themselves, ’cos there was a lot of social issues going on in the valleys at the time,’ he explains. ‘You’re talking about the late nineties, early noughties when there was a tremendous amount of change. We’d lost employment, we’d lost the mines, we’d lost steelworks, everything had gone. And in place of it were jobs that were minimum wage. There was very little to offer at the time, and there still isn’t to a certain degree.’

However, it was not the promise of wealth and riches per se that got people into bands; it was merely the desire to be acknowledged for whatever ability they did have. ‘Years ago, the saying was you either went down the mines or you went into teaching. To get out of Wales you had to go teaching. Well, I guess being a musician kind of replaced that.’ As more and more people started to find their way into bands, it had a snowballing effect of pulling more and more young people into the scene. As Mills puts it, ‘people were feeding off one another.’

And while Matt felt that his time at Bridgend College was not particularly helpful, for Jamie Hanford, formerly of Nuke, the college did provide important facilities to get people started. ‘We were all students at Bridgend College at a time when the arts were funded by the government, so everyone had space and instruments to use,’ he points out. ‘So it was just natural and a part of our diplomas to jam. [It] was a really exciting, fun time.’

As things developed, Mills was putting on more and more gigs, ultimately hosting two per week in Bridgend and one a week in Cardiff, as well as the occasional show in London. ‘Suddenly, South Wales became the epicentre of everybody’s activity because there was a realisation that we had a scene going on down here that wasn’t affected by London,’ Mills explains; Jeff Killed John, too, were regularly leaving Wales and heading to London to help get their name out beyond their local area. Momentum was building and, from the outside looking in, it seemed as if Jeff Killed John couldn’t have been in a better place at a better time to get signed. But they were about to encounter a serious hurdle.