Inadvertently, I may have stumbled upon a rather significant topic for Tuck and the band. While I’m clearly having trouble adjusting to waking life, Bullet have always held their identity at the forefront of their music. Who they are is arguably more important to them than what or how they play. It’s all about dispersing something sincere.
“There’s never been a plan B,” the frontman says in a delightful (if occasionally impenetrable) Welsh accent. “It was always music that I was going to do, and I’m just lucky that it paid off. I think I’m lucky in that I think I’ve got a good brain on my shoulders, but even that I have to really credit to the music. I didn’t want to go to uni, I didn’t want to get a good normal job. I was always getting fired from jobs anyway because I’d be off playing somewhere, rehearsing for shows. There was never a backup, but thankfully it all worked out. That commitment with everyone in the band really paid off – everyone really cared about it, the band always came first. Even when we weren’t getting anywhere, we just focused and kept on going, just working at gig after gig.”
With their fifth album Venom, due this Friday, it’s easy to prattle off platitudes of how far the band has come in the last ten years; how the hard rockers shrugged off detractors on the path to fame and fortune. And while this is all true, the road has not been without deviations and near misses. For a while there, Tuck had serious doubts about whether the band would keep moving ahead at all.
“We’ve had a few of those moments, but the biggest was around the time when our original bass player, Nick [Crandle], left the band. I had a part time job at a music store, I was in debt, but still working at the band. Then Nick left and we literally had to sit down and say, ‘Can we still have the band going at 25, still without a good job, still living with your parents?’ I think that was the moment where I thought I was probably going to throw in the towel. But we kind of restarted the band, started writing a couple of new songs, and it was almost like that was meant to be, in a way. We got pushed to the very brink of giving up, we just needed to give it that last shot. And then a year later we were signed, had an EP out, and the rest is history.”
With Venom, the band – who’re hardly known for gentle soundscapes and folky sensibilities – decided to up the ante and attempt to capture the aggressive energy of their live shows. 2013 saw the release of Temper Temper, an album that succeeded commercially, but left several critics lamenting a lack of grit and focus. While Tuck had no intention of pandering to the whim of critical responses, he was eager to move the band into heavier terrain.
“Venom sounds completely different,” he says, “[Temper] was kind of heavy, but this time around we wanted to show something that was super aggressive, something that was a bit stark. Put them next to each other, it’s still obviously the same band, but the sound now is very different. We always want each record to sound different, but still keep our identity. We don’t want to make the same record twice – that would be a total cop-out. I can’t stand the idea of having an earlier record that you’re just trying to replicate again and again. So what we might do next, well, it depends how we feel at the end of this cycle. I think at the moment we’ve kind of maxed out the heaviness. Any more and we’d start losing our identity. We’d just be heavy for the sake of being heavy, you know, not because we were actually wanting to say something. Everything that’s here now is entirely where we were already going, but just turned up a notch. I think we got the balance right, and it captures who we are.”
It took the guys almost eight months to reach that careful balance. The process of trying to forge a harsher, more violent sound was not straightforward, and there were several songs that had started to take shape only to be scrapped halfway through, as Tuck and the others realised it wasn’t representative of where the band saw themselves. Such is the band’s commitment to surging forward and preserving their identity that these fledgling songs are unlikely to see the light of day any time soon.
“We scrapped around eight to ten, I think. They all sounded pretty decent, and there were some killer riffs going on, but just didn’t quite fit the criteria of what we were looking for. They were a bit too… a bit too alternative, I guess,” Tuck laughs. “They didn’t have that identity we were going for. They were a bit closer to the Temper Temper styled stuff. You have to be very, very harsh. Once we scrap something we tend to never come back to it. If we feel like a song isn’t going anywhere – if one of us has a bit of a scowl on his face – we won’t do it. There’ll always be little bits of those songs floating around in your head, and maybe some of that might show up later on. But really, we just don’t want people to hear stuff that we don’t feel is good enough ourselves.”
To that end, Bullet have come a long and winding way from their early incarnation as Jeff Killed John. Initially, that band was focused on covering the likes of Metallica and Nirvana, before dropping their first EP of originals way back in ’99. The story of how they emerged with such an unusual name, however, remains somewhat amusing.
“Well, it’s pretty stupid, I know,” laughs Tuck. “Basically, this teacher we had at school was called Jeff. One day, Moose [Michael Thomas, drums] found a porno with a picture of John Holmes on it. He cut the head off and put our teachers head on this picture of Holmes ploughing this chick and put it in his desk as a gag. Then come the morning, the teacher opens his desk and it’s him fucking this bird, and he totally ripped it up and threw it in the bin. And Moose turned to me and chuckled, ‘Jeff Killed John’. It was so, so stupid. It’s childish, I know, but that’s how it is.”
The fiercely heavy rock band responsible for Venom seems utterly removed from the teenage pranksters of yore. Now that fans are finally going to hear their latest offering, Tuck is trying hard to kick back, relax, and let the album do the talking. But still, after all these years, he’s not quite comfortable letting go.
“The band has become such a big thing in all of our lives now, it just dominates. I mean it’s amazing, something we’ve always wanted, something that a million other bands out there would fucking kill to do. And I understand, because I would do that too. It’s an amazing privilege. It’s like winning a lottery, so I need to enjoy it now rather than just make it all work, work, work. Next tour, next album. It’s hard not to do that, because it’s so dominant you don’t always see how much control it has over you sometimes. So I need to be more conscious of moving forward, and just being happy with it.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
