BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE Frontman: Getting Kicked Off ROB ZOMBIE Tour Boosted Our Record Sales

Revolver magazine reports in its February 2007 issue that BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE's latest album, "The Poison", catapulted the band into the U.K. limelight. Within no time, they found themselves being mentioned in the same breath as AVENGED SEVENFOLD and TRIVIUM, two other young bands that wear their love for old-school metal on their tattooed sleeves.

"The three biggest bands of the moment, that have got the biggest buzz and are making the biggest impact, are us, TRIVIUM and AVENGED," BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE frontman Matt Tuck told Revolver. "We've known them for, like, two years now, but we really got close with them this summer, when we all opened for METALLICA in Europe and played a lot of the same festivals. We're all very ambitious young men — we all have the same goals. And there's no rivalry. We all hang out, get drunk, and it's just cool. There's no bullshit.

"It seems like it's kind of meant to be, like it's part of a cycle," he continued. "You've got GUNS N' ROSES, METALLICA and IRON MAIDEN, and now there's us, TRIVIUM, and AVENGED. AVENGED have the GUNS N' ROSES thing, TRIVIUM have the METALLICA thing, and we've got the MAIDEN thing. It just seems right, in a spooky way."

In addition to the aforementioned METALLICA gigs, BULLET scored what Tuck describes as "dream-come-true" opening slots with GUNS N' ROSES and IRON MAIDEN in 2006. They also opened a U.S. tour for ROB ZOMBIE and LACUNA COIL, though their participation in that particular endeavor came to a premature close after Tuck posted a rant on BULLET's official message board calling the ZOMBIE camp "money-grubbing fucks" for forcing the other bands on the tour to sell their T-shirts at inflated prices.

"A fan was bitching on our web site about the T-shirt prices and how short our set was," guitarist Michael "Padge" Paget explained. "They were doing price-matching on the shirts, and it was all totally out of our hands, so Matt just kind of told him the truth of how it was. And that was then put up on Blabbermouth [See previous BLABBERMOUTH.NET stories: Story#1, Story#2, Story#3, Story#4], and someone e-mailed it to Rob Zombie himself. It was a misunderstanding, but Zombie wanted us off the tour, so we left."

"I'm not proud of it, but it didn't hinder us in any way at all," Tuck said of the Zombie incident. "If anything, it helped us — the album sales shot up the week afterward! And then, the three weeks we had back home because of that, we wrote a whole bunch of new songs that are going to be on our next album."