Читать книгу Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer - Ben Welch - Страница 7
ОглавлениеAt sixteen, Matt had transitioned fully into what he describes as a ‘proper muso pisshead’ and headed off to Bridgend College alongside Moose to study a BTEC in music performance. The course had a particularly eccentric leader and one with plenty of experience in the music business himself: Phil Jones, who had formed the band S.E.X. in 1974. Clad in a scarlet cape and wearing a codpiece, together with a bassist who wears nothing at all save his instrument, Jones struts and preens on stage to a soundtrack of synth-inflected, tongue-in-cheek heavy metal. As he put it to WalesOnline, ‘When The Darkness came along a lot of people said they had stolen my act.’ S.E.X. had even scored two chart hits in Australia, with one – entitled ‘TV in the UK’, which incorporated advert jingles and cartoon theme songs into it – hitting the top spot in 2000. ‘I’m very well placed to teach the students about all the horrible things that might happen to them because I have fallen on my backside in every part of the world,’ he observed to WalesOnline.
It was at the college, with a course dedicated to music attracting a lot of like-minded young people and with the facilities to help new bands get started, that a real community of budding musicians began to form. There was a group of around twenty students all intermingling in various musical projects across the college and Matt and Moose had been joined by another friend, Nick Crandle, on bass. They took their band name from a saying that had emerged after a classroom prank – someone had stuck a picture of a pornstar named John (most likely John Holmes) onto the wall during a lesson and the teacher – named Jeff – had promptly torn it down. Hence: Jeff Killed John.
However, the band was still looking for another guitar player and they soon found him in a certain Michael Paget – better known as Padge. It was Moose that first introduced him to the rest of Jeff Killed John. They had met while Moose was skateboarding and Padge was walking with a girl, initially striking up a conversation on the simple basis that they shared a name.
It was Nirvana and Metallica, too, that had first made Padge pick up a guitar, with albums being passed around within his friendship group at school, so crossover with the tastes of Matt and Moose was obvious. Later, Padge had also discovered music with a harder edge. ‘I came across Pantera and Machine Head, especially the Burn My Eyes album of theirs, and those bands helped me find a new direction which was metal,’ he told Ultimate-Guitar.com website. However, Padge’s tastes extended beyond buzzsaw riffs and frantic drums; he was also a huge fan of the blues and, in particular, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan hit the heights in the 1980s, almost single-handedly bringing about a revival in the popularity of the blues, while injecting his playing with flavours of legendary guitar players from across the jazz and rock ’n’ roll spectrum: in particular that of Jimi Hendrix. The result was the grit of the blues approached with a near virtuosic level of ability, and for two years Padge practically lived and breathed the blues. Still, he found that heavy metal was his enduring love: ‘I still love rock and blues but metal has got, and always will [have], a bit more edge for me,’ he told Ultimate-Guitar.com.
In fact, it was from Padge that Moose had bought his first drum kit, upon deciding that he was not destined to be a guitar player. Matt and Moose started playing covers – mostly Nirvana and Metallica songs but also oddities from Chumba Wumba or tunes from local heroes like Stereophonics – but quickly moved on to writing their own material, and it wasn’t long before they had made a couple of original songs together. So Padge headed over to Matt’s house and learned the guitar lines. They may not have been the most sophisticated songs but it was still original material, which is what counted. In fact, one of the first songs Padge learned with the lads, entitled ‘Wrong of Me’, would later show up on Jeff Killed John’s first EP.
For Matt, it was the community of musicians that was the most useful aspect of attending Bridgend College, rather than the actual course itself. ‘It was the first year that this college had the course going, they didn’t even have a computer in the class, all we did was go there, jam and get drunk; it was just a crazy band house rather than a college,’ Matt would later comment to the BlairingOut.com YouTube channel. ‘All of us went there ’cause all we wanted to do was music… but it was nothing anyways. Apparently now it’s a really good course, but when we did it it was a bunch of guys jamming out, getting drunk, and trying to pull girls.’ Their education, ultimately, was to come from getting out into the world and experiencing it for themselves, first-hand.
Jeff Killed John first appeared on record on a compilation entitled Allsorts! The first track contributed is called ‘Bouncy Stuff’, which skips along on a suitably spongy riff and has Matt channelling Zack de la Rocha at one point with an exclamation of ‘bring that shit!’ The second offering, ‘Hostile’, is a more punk-rock affair with largely unintelligible lyrics and a rudimentary riff. There’s little on display to hint at the band that they would later become.
Not long after Padge joined Jeff Killed John, the band headed to the studio to record their first EP, which was released in 1999 after the band had left Bridgend College. Entitled Better Off Alone, it shows a band clearly possessed of songwriting nous and proficient on their instruments but, stylistically, it is very much a product of its era. Despite almost all of Bullet’s key influences coming from either the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (N.W.O.B.H.M.) – such as Iron Maiden and Judas Priest – or the American thrash-metal movement, which included Metallica, Slayer and, later, Pantera, the late 1990s was very much the reign of ‘nu metal’, with bands such as Korn, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach making big waves on the live circuit and appealing to a new, younger audience with their fusion of styles. In 1998 Korn’s third album Follow the Leader had made it to the top of American album chart the Billboard 200, signalling that this new iteration of heavy metal was now big business. It was shortly followed by the likes of Deftones’ Around the Fur, Slipknot’s self-titled debut and Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other (which also peaked at number one on the Billboard 200).
In truth, the nu-metal tag was a broad descriptor used to lump together a whole new wave of American bands that, in many cases, had only passing similarities with one another. Sure, Slipknot’s debut featured scratching and a brief burst of pseudo-rapping but its thick, quasi-industrial and menacingly heavy sound had little else to do with hip-hop. Limp Bizkit, on the other hand, used live instrumentation to mimic hip-hop beats and fused these with big rock choruses. Deftones had the atmosphere and romanticism of a British new-wave band, in complete contrast to the violence and nihilism of other bands in the so-called movement. But nonetheless, the genre had its defining elements – most notably simple, repetitive, detuned riffs, a world away from the fiddly guitar heroics of classic heavy metal. And Jeff Killed John’s Better Off Alone EP has these in spades.
The title track, which also opens the EP, for example, begins with a one-bar syncopated bass riff that is soon mirrored by the guitars, and the warbling tremolo guitar effect in the verse could be heard on any number of Korn songs. But even at this early stage, Matt possesses a commanding vocal style and Moose’s drumming displays plenty of the controlled power he would later be known for. ‘Bottom of the Line’ uses the same trick: a pummelling guitar riff to kick things off, a variation of the riff to carry the verse and a return of the riff for the chorus. Structurally, it’s incredibly simple but the song is not without character. The verse has the playful bounce of System of a Down, an influence that can also be heard in the frantic bass playing but the vocal effect saturating Matt’s voice in the chorus showcases just how good the band already were at knowing how to create a memorable hook in an unrelentingly heavy song.
They were also experimenting with different tempos and formats at this time, as demonstrated by ‘Wrong of Me’, one of the first two songs that Matt taught Padge when he joined Jeff Killed John. And as a very early composition, it’s interesting to hear that this has a more generic indie-rock chorus, with little in common with the harder material on offer elsewhere on Better Off Alone. It was the first time that any of the boys had heard Padge play a solo and the song is peppered with melodramatic leads that show plenty of awareness of how to write a melodic guitar line, while not displaying any of the highly technical sweeps and speed runs that he would later be known for. Padge’s analysis of his fretwork, however, is less forgiving; speaking to Dutch online magazine FaceCulture many years later, he would simply refer to this first recorded solo as ‘fucking terrible’.
The four-track release closes with ‘Don’t Walk Away’, which takes us back into nu-metal territory and the detuned, repeated power-chord riff. The vocal line in the verse of ‘Don’t Walk Away’ has, perhaps, more in common with punk, and the call-and-response of the chorus is pure masculine angst, but it can’t be denied that there’s a pop sensibility at work here. It’s also the first time that we hear the band utilise vocal harmonies effectively, which would later become a key weapon in Tuck’s arsenal. The song closes with a rip-roaring solo, very much out of vogue among the nu-metal crowd and showing that the boys weren’t quite ready to write off their classic-metal influences. The seeds of Bullet for My Valentine were undoubtedly there; they were just very much buried.
