![]() Afterwards he went to get a picture with Matt, boldly telling the fellow Welshman abroad that he’d be doing what he’s doing one day. The first gig he saw Bullet play, however, was in Orlando, when the teenage Jamie was on a family holiday and happened upon the city’s House Of Blues venue where the band featured on the bill with Eighteen Visions. Jamie is similarly cemented within the ranks, having been in them since 2015, his first gig with the band an intimate engagement at the Electric Ballroom as part of Camden Rocks. “Well not inside out, but you know what I mean.” We’ve lived together and seen each other go through amazing times and terrible times. “We’re adults now,” Padge says of his relationship with Matt, who he describes as “a weird wizard” because of his mysterious way with a tune. None of his bandmates, though, thankfully. But I still want to kill motherfuckers, I do.” Even when we went into the studio I was wondering if it was all in vain, but gradually realised that things were happening. “I thought last year this was all over – the band, the music industry, everything – which terrified me and sent me to a really dark and horrible place. Everyone is really pissed off and has an energy they want to release.” “Not just because I prefer it, but because it’s the right time for an album like this. “I can’t wait to put out this record,” says Padge of the difference between their forthcoming seventh album and its divisive predecessor. “Padge was very anti-Gravity,” Matt admits. The source of some of that friction, Matt suggests, was 2018 album Gravity, with its departure from their more traditional sound into nu-metal revivalry, much like Machine Head did with 1999’s The Burning Red. ![]() But having our world taken away from us, like everyone else did, really brought us back together, without sounding all weird. “It’s a complicated journey when you’re on it with someone else for so long. “It’s a force of nature being in a band with someone for so long, as I have with Padge, because it pushes and pulls and rips and tears,” says Matt of a dynamic that’s needed some restoration in recent years. A smoking shaman who’ll regale you with talk of his Himalayan Salt Pipe and its restorative effects on his airways while buying three packs of fags he’ll blaze through like a prisoner just out of solitary confinement. A man who’ll boast his band “ripped the c**t” out of their new album when the interview isn’t being recorded, but shyly deem it “gorgeous” once the tape is running the next day. The guitarist isn’t just the resident maniac, but a figure of fascinating contradictions. Opening track Parasite is a relentless assault of hatred and hooks Bastards is a scrappy, boisterous chant-along Shatter is a slower, Parkway Drive-esque colossus featuring the addictive refrain, ‘ I don’t exist, I was never alive / But now I know I’m ready to die.’ And while this new album explores different styles – a trademark of BFMV’s career for good and for ill, depending on who you ask – it’s governed by a sense of wild abandon.īack in the practice room, so too is Jason, who’s thundering through a three-minute drum solo, which Padge takes as an excuse for a cigarette break. Knives, the first taste of this new opus, released the day before this rehearsal, is a molten outpouring of maliciousness which the band runs through to bruising effect. Twenty-three years later and the line-up is now completed by bassist Jamie Mathias and drummer Jason Bowld, a unit of four markedly different men whose undeniable musical chemistry has resulted in a self-titled seventh album that will startle anyone who thought they had BFMV pegged or written off. Despite warming up for an appearance on an expansive main stage in a little over 24 hours’ time, singer/guitarist Matt Tuck and guitarist Michael 'Padge' Paget practically stand shoulder to shoulder, the kind of proximity the duo will be accustomed to from playing together in their teens, the band having initially formed as Jeff Killed John in 1998, while studying music at Bridgend College, some 20 miles away. The most striking thing to note – aside from the blistering form the four men are on – is what close confines they’re in.
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