Bullet for My Valentine’s Michael Paget on Band Identity & New Horizons

It’s 2006, and I’m 13 years old. By some stroke of luck, I’ve managed to convince my dad to escort a group of three friends and myself to make the two-hour trek to Indianapolis to see the band whose work would supercharge my burgeoning interest in learning to play the guitar and fostering a predilection for the pointier guitar offerings from Jackson or ESP: Bullet for My Valentine. The band’s early work comprises tracks popularized by the explosive EP Hand of Blood and debut full-length album The Poison, which was released less than a month prior and was blaring in the car on that chilly November school night.

All images by Fiona Garden for Spinefarm Records, unless otherwise noted.

Origins: Theater of NoiseSonic Haymakers, Part I: The Studio at the World’s EndSonic Haymakers, Part II: Returning to the RoadIdentity, Rediscovery & RebirthConstants, Changes & Escaping to the Beginning

Origins: Theater of Noise

With its barren concrete walls, decaying façade, and imposing industrial fixtures, the Depression-era single-screen theater seemed a better fit for a Brutalist-inspired architectural showcase. To this group of sixth graders, it was the perfect canvas for capturing every sonic shade of the impending aural assault that was our first metal show. With a maximum capacity of only 400 people, the energy was palpable. We’d entered the venue during the restless state of anticipation that preceded the next act of the night: Bullet for My Valentine.

Lead guitarist Michael “Padge” Paget and lead singer / rhythm guitarist Matt Tuck took the stage, simultaneously brandishing their sharpest ESP and Jackson axes, respectively. They were silhouetted amidst the haze of smoke, fog, and diffused luminescence that would crescendo to ignition as the first notes pulverized the space. Almost instantly, mosh pits were in full momentum, with bodies moving in all three dimensions, limbs akimbo, and my friends and I testing our mettle to debatable degrees of success.

Then, it happened. “4 Words (To Choke Upon)” erupted from the same road-worn Mesa/Boogie 4×12-inch cabs that fueled the band’s Rock am Ring performance only five months prior to an audience of roughly 80,000 at Germany’s Nürburgring racetrack. Padge rips the solo from stage right, and syncopated double bass drum hits reinforced by cavernous, synchronized bass lines thunder throughout the theater while Tuck oscillates between harmonized leads and backup rhythms.

Seventeen years later, Padge and I sit face-to-digital-face. A few thousand miles away, he’s easing into his day, nonchalantly taking my call from the comfort of his South Wales home and entertaining my recollection of the show.

“Yeah, I think that was a Trustkill multiband show,” he ponders. “Pretty sure that was one of our first tours in America! So, you was [sic] there at the beginning then, yeah?” This whimsical, offhand observation of his crystallizes the true scope of what’s at stake for BFMV close to two decades on.  

Sonic Haymakers, Part I: The Studio at the World’s End

After a run of US shows and international festival spots, the band’s currently taking a well-deserved break ahead of its headlining fall North America 2023 tour to continue supporting 2021’s Bullet for My Valentine. Padge has already begun to ideate on the next release, but the band won’t officially re-enter the studio until 2024, and there are some formidable shoes to fill. After all, you only get one chance to release a self-titled record and doing so after nearly 20 years as a band is a monumental statement on identity — a proposition that dares fans and critics alike to question everything they know about the band, what it’s capable of producing, and the future of its sound.

So, what is Bullet for My Valentine? Well, there’s a short answer and a long, complex answer. The short answer is that it’s an hour-long, no-holds-barred clinic in punishing riffs, searing solos, calculated composition, and precision sound design that sees the band at its heaviest and most electric since its breakout LP The Poison. Moreover, BFMV is the nexus of multiple artistic vectors of differing temporal scopes converging into a boundless, malleable terrain that Padge, Tuck, and “the guys” — as Paget endearingly addresses bassist Jamie Mathias and drummer Jason Bowld — are forging and reinventing as they discover it. Most importantly, it’s a sonic monograph — the product of laser-focused intentionality.

It’s one thing to identify all of that following this album’s release, but what preceded it? How did it all come about? What gear made it possible? How do you know when it’s time to make the self-titled record?

This last, admittedly loaded question was the logical starting point. “The feeling was right,” Padge articulates. Through a mix of relief, bewilderment, and satisfaction that BFMV happened at all, he continues:

“It was like a new lease on life. Everything had stopped and shut down. I wouldn’t say we’ve got a new band, but two guys have been in for a few years. I remember Matt turning to me and saying, ‘Are we going to go there?’ I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go there!’ We kept getting heavier and heavier, and everything just seemed right. I was all for the self-titled approach. Matt was as well, and the guys were up for it. So, we just did it! It felt right.”

And what do you need to go that heavy? For starters, some Diezel amps. “Those were interesting. We’d never used them for main guitar tones,” Padge notes, “and when we cranked it up, it got super loud and super aggressive. It turned out great.” For guitars, Gibson Les Pauls loaded with EMG pickups abounded, pumping out down-tuned riffs with ease.

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Writing and recording happened throughout 2020, and the state of the shutdown world gave the band a distinct opportunity to re-evaluate its creative process. It was “a reset,” Padge identifies, “that really benefitted the album. It gave us so much more time to work on it.” And work on it, they did. In fact, they refined their writing to the point that all the recording wrapped in less than four weeks; it primarily took place in the deep countryside of England’s Derbyshire county with a return to Treehouse Studio, where the band recorded 2015’s Venom and 2018’s Gravity. The studio’s owner, Carl Bown, was on triple duty as producer, mixer, and engineer. His contributions to BFMV earned him Best Production in 2022’s Heavy Music Awards. Further engineering and mixing were provided courtesy of in-house engineer Jim Pinder.

During what appeared to be an indefinite world stasis, it was unclear whether these limitations would spur artistic growth or merely stymie. For Padge and BFMV, this period was invaluable, not just to the creation of the record but to the broader relationship of their craft. Padge speaks about what the band has learned as a unique result of the pandemic and which experiences the band would like to revisit:

“Definitely the approach to writing. A lot was done in home studios, especially at my place. We wrote a lot of glorified demos, basically. We were all our own bosses, and it really shows in the songs and where we could take them. We had all the time in the world. Doing small writing sessions at home and compiling everything together before you hit the studio? The recording process was so fast. Everyone knew what they were doing.“We could all go in armed to the teeth, knowing our parts and alternatives, which was really cool for solos. I was writing two or three for tracks, so we had a choice in the studio. You could even mix and match: take the beginning bit of one solo, add it onto the middle bit of the third one, and use the end of the second one.”

Sonic Haymakers, Part II: Returning to the Road

Having seen the band at the Fillmore Detroit theater this year, I can assure you, dear reader, that the live experience does immense justice to the sonics of Bullet for My Valentine. “Shatter” is particularly a gut punch in the best possible way, with the live arrangement letting Padge’s Dimebag Darrell–styled riffs tear up the space, an influence among many that he’s proud to illuminate with the record. “There’s a lot still in our influences that shines through today,” Padge reflects. “We’re thankful to all those bands and artists who have inspired us over the years. That’s who we are.”

A less obvious source of inspiration for Padge’s craft is Stevie Ray Vaughan. “I’m a massive fan,” he gleefully declares. “I went down the blues rabbit hole years and years ago. I was completely hooked, to the point where I’d sleep with my [Stevie Signature] Fender! I’ve got books of his, all his records. I’ve got a signed poster from an Orlando memorabilia shop. I wear the hats when I’m drunk, you know? Stupid, but I love a bit of Stevie.”

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Like so many in heavy-music spheres, BFMV is all in with Kemper Profilers, and Padge speaks highly of their capabilities when discussing the live rendition of “Shatter.” In the ever-elusive “quest for tone,” as Padge puts it, Kempers have been nothing short of game changers. It’s a testament to both the Kemper Profiling technology and the band’s own sound design abilities that BFMV’s carefully concocted tones aren’t just perfectly re-created for a live setting — they also retain the punch felt on the record.

Speaking on “Shatter,” Padge continues:

“It’s just me and Matt playing our main sounds. We play everything straight: guitars left and right, bass, drums up the middle. Everything we’re playing is 100% live. It’s just us. With that song, you’ve got these big, open chords, and you can get that honky, nasally sound on them, which I love. That’s my favorite. The guitar does change for the verse from my Kemper. It filters off a bit, so there’s less low end. Jamie’s got one or two bass sounds he uses: one that’s slightly more distorted with a bit more dirt for heavier songs. Just a bit of shmozz on the solo, really, and that’s about it!”

The convenience of what the Kempers allow is unbeatable. “The sound never changes every night,” Padge notes, “and we can fly with them. We each have a spare. That’s six coming out with us every night.” Considering the heft of the record’s tracks and the range of tonal needs spread throughout the band’s discography, it’s almost impossible to imagine preferring the minutiae of dialing in each sound night after night. “Everything’s right there, straightaway. Everything’s the same in our ears. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to amps.”

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On the stage, Padge has continued his allegiance to the indelible axes of ESP, wielding black and white variants of his Custom Shop signature model. He’s been on the company’s roster for more than a decade, with both the visual and aural aesthetics of the EMG-armed, razor-sharp guitar deeply interwoven into the band’s live show style.

Padge’s Custom Shop signature guitar. Photo provided C/O ESP.

While Padge’s Signature V is still available through ESP’s Custom Shop, the production version was discontinued. If you’re hunting for a pristinely pointy, V-shaped axe from ESP, then there are plenty of fantastic offerings, including a few string-through options just like Padge’s guitar.

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Identity, Rediscovery & Rebirth

What about that long, complex answer? In the immediate, Bullet for My Valentine is a tempestuous sonic force but also a signifier — a treatise on the band’s essence. Its release garnered immense critical support, vindicating Padge’s valuation of the longer, unimpeded, and focused writing process:

“We had so much juice to put into it that we were in a good place. There were no fillers. There are 10 tracks on the album, and it was easy to choose the best. That’s the beauty of just writing and writing and writing: you get so many songs; you just trim all the fat. It’s inevitable that you come out with a great album.”

Rave reviews aside, the album embodies far more than a well-earned win among critics. It’s paradoxically both a return to form and Padge’s aforementioned “new lease on life.” To grasp the weight of this record in sonic and existential heft is to understand how Padge, Tuck, and BFMV arrived at their newly bloomed form.

In the years following 2005’s The Poison, the band has variously won and been nominated for Kerrang! Awards and Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards, released six full-length albums, and endured what some critics might consider an identity crisis, losing 50% of the “classic” lineup: Jason “Jay” James (bassist from 2003 to 2015) and Michael “Moose” Thomas (drummer and cofounder who left in 2016).

A significant change in personnel more than a decade into an act’s career doesn’t historically bode well, and detractors were opportunistic in their reviews of 2018’s divisive Gravity, the first record featuring the new lineup. The band’s preceding record, Venom, was the first without Jay on bass (with Tuck writing all the bass parts). While it was spared some of the harsher criticisms leveled at Gravity, Venom appeared to be the first step toward a much grander meditation on artistic certainty. Ironically, Gravity‘s nu metal–adjacent indulgences link the record to Padge and Tuck’s days as Jeff Killed John, the precursor band to Bullet for My Valentine.

Of course, the truth is far more nuanced. BFMV has never sought to shy away from exploration, as it’s bridged, crossed, and traversed territories throughout heavy music’s undulating topography: thrash, metalcore, hard rock, post-hardcore, and — more recently — groove metal. It’s something the band wears proudly on its sleeves. And why shouldn’t it? Rock and metal spaces are constantly plagued with the paradoxical prescription to be always already different, while newness and novelty are conflated with an ill-conceived notion of innovation. Artists are expected to stay within a comfortable orbit surrounding what first brought them success. All of this is encased in a broader cultural hegemony of what metal can and cannot “be.” It’s a constantly moving goalpost.  

Balancing growth and exploration with the increasingly turbulent landscape of musical discovery and the immediacy of streaming technology’s influences is becoming exceedingly difficult. Most artists are products of their inspirations and greater than the sum of their parts, building upon, blending, and variously channeling influences to be reconstructed and injected with an ever-changing personal flare that makes their style invariably their own. For Padge, musical identity holds the utmost importance — something for which he expresses thoughtful concern about the burgeoning generation of rockers.

Analyzing themes of danger and heaviness has regularly surfaced in Padge’s metal music discourse, but a question raised to him in a 2018 interview with Australia’s Maniacs felt oddly prescient. When asked to weigh in on a statement made by Tool mastermind Maynard James Keenan that suggested heavy music wasn’t dangerous anymore, Padge’s broad agreement cited that the genre was no longer viewed as culturally taboo, further observing a pathological aversion to modern risk-taking.

Since this 2018 interview, heavy music has undergone an unexpected renaissance. Enormous, culturally driving festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza have reintroduced metal acts with increasingly higher spots on their bills. Simultaneously, streaming has become more ubiquitous than ever, with the ease of discovering debatably costing us our personal investments in the artists whose work we admire. In this same window, BFMV would undergo its own transformation, releasing 2021’s Bullet for My Valentine — the voltaic successor to what may be the lightest entry in the band’s catalog, Gravity. Considering how much our collective relationship to music has changed in such a short five years, the Maniacs question warranted re-evaluation in 2023. Padge ruminates over this before responding:

“I think... people are afraid of danger, but I suppose ‘danger’ doesn’t have to apply to ‘heavy.’ It’s about not sticking to rules; not being afraid to be different. That’s the thing: there’s a lot of formulas out there. A lot of things sound ‘samey-samey,’ and that gets boring. If we want to go heavy, then we go there, and if we want to go even heavier, we’ll go there as well. Everyone’s starting to sound like each other, you know?“People chase as well. Say a band drops an album, and they get super successful off that album or a change in style; they pop and become super big. People jump on that and try to sound and look like those bands. There’s one particular band from the UK that springs to mind where I keep hearing their style all over the world. I’m not gonna name names, because that’s not us, we’re not in it for that. But people jump on a bandwagon and you think, ‘Ugh, another so-and-so band.'”

Despite superficial similarities, the subtext of the self-titled record imbues this current contemplation with an entirely different gravitas. Bullet for My Valentine isn’t just a heavy album — it’s a declaration of agency, a testament to the band’s rebirth and rediscovery of itself. Contrasting Padge’s infectiously easy-going demeanor, it’s clear the slippery subject of identity is integral to the band, especially now. Why? Let’s take stock.

Constants, Changes & Escaping to the Beginning

Between 2015 and 2017, BFMV’s original lineup recorded its final album after more than a decade together. Before Venom‘s release, Jay left, and Mathias replaced him on bass and backing vocals. Moose departed in 2016. That year, Bowld filled in on tour before joining the band as a full-fledged member in 2017. In the same period, this lineup embarked on a tour for The Poison’s 10th anniversary, releasing a live album recorded at South West London’s legendary O2 Academy Brixton, including a performance of the widely acclaimed debut full-length album in its entirety.

While a bad-faith critique of the band’s discography would suggest it lost the proverbial plot, it’s reckless to suggest the band’s pension for exploration didn’t generate friction in staking out its sound, especially by the release of Gravity. But is it so audacious to believe that Gravity would stray so far from expectations? Padge doesn’t think so, though the complexity of navigating the identity-expectation apparatus isn’t lost on him:

“Gravity was a slight step away from traditional Bullet. There are some great songs on it, but I prefer this new album [Bullet for My Valentine]. I think we all do. It’s a great record, but we do dip a big toe in, every now and again, with experimenting. You’ve got to scratch that itch! You can’t write the same album every time. You want to keep things interesting, not just for the fans but for yourselves as well. It’s important to stretch and test yourself.”

As Bullet for My Valentine sets the stage for a promising new era, the band has found modern music’s predilection for collaboration to be an inspiring avenue for both testing boundaries and re-establishing its sound.

“Experimentation’s all good,” Padge says and pauses. “You can always do the collabs, if you want to do something different. Matt’s all for that — working with other artists and bands.” Laughing, he continues. “It keeps him busy as well.” In fact, Tuck recently lent his vocals to drum-and-bass band Pendulum — “friends from just after the early days,” as Padge addresses them.

Though Pendulum’s “Halo” shares a common denominator with the electronic ambience BFMV has peppered throughout recent releases, Padge assures me that while this doesn’t represent a new direction, he’s genuinely happy it happened, both for the mutual exposure and the artistic presence it articulates for BFMV. As unusual as it may seem for a bona fide heavy metal powerhouse to collaborate with a legacy drum-and-bass act, Tuck’s not the only one with a pension for subverting expectations.

After years of yearning to play a saxophone, Padge cops to acquiring one in 2022. “It was a drunken purchase,” he confides, lamenting with a mild form of comedic self-deprecation how difficult they are to play. While there likely won’t be any sax solos on the next record, Padge’s non-BFMV work mirrors the demi-cyclicality of the band’s odyssey. He has taken UK rock outfit Florence Black under his wing. Helping with demos and management, Padge has become something of a mentor.

“The scene in South Wales is absolutely flourishing — it always has been. There’s so much talent, and I just like to be involved and to help in any way I can to develop any talent,” he says. Padge confirms that it’s his way of giving back to the scene that kick-started his career.

So, with roots in mind, where’s the band now? On the new lineup, maturation, and future of BFMV’s sound, Padge explains:

“After everything the band’s been through, the transition, we’ve come out the other side, all guns blazing. We’re on fire now. It feels really good, man. With Jayce [Bowld] and Jamie [Mathias], we really do have that band. Jayce will out-drum any drummer around the world. Jamie holds it down on bass, and his vocals are absolutely amazing. Matt’s the front man and handling rhythm guitar. We’ve got the band now, man; we can do whatever we want. There’s nothing in the back of your mind; you know everyone can hold their own. I think that’s why we went there, on this record — we knew we could. I don’t think the last band would’ve been able to do that.”

“To be able to draw the line on the other side of things, it’s just... ” he trails off before a serene smile slowly takes form. “Coming out and being able to finally smell the roses is great.”

BFMV on Tour & Honing Your Craft

You can catch Bullet for My Valentine on its falltime North America 2023 headlining tour with special guests Of Mice & Men and Vended. Until then, if you’re feeling inspired by the raucous riffs, electrifying leads, and brutal breakdowns of Bullet for My Valentine, then you’re in the right place. Sweetwater’s a menagerie of metal machines, from picks and cables to essential sonic-sculpting tools like amps, recording interfaces, all-new axes, and pedals — including Dunlop Cry Baby wahs, a personal favorite of Padge’s! Our Sweetwater Sales Engineers will aid you in your own “quest for tone” with gear tips, shipping concerns, financing, and more. Give them a call at (800) 222-4700!

Photo provided C/O Atom Splitter PR.
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