Bullet For My Valentine’s Matt Tuck Speaks Out About Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan

In the Kerrang! 1302 issue with Bullet For My Valentine on the cover frontman Matt Tuck speaks out about Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan and how his death put things into perspective for him. You can read the excerpt below:

Last June, taking time out from the recording of his band’s forthcoming third album, Matt and his bandmates – Michael “Padge” Paget, Jason “Jay” James and Michael “Moose” Thomas – hired a car and drove south down the gorgeously scenic Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu to Huntington Beach, California to visit their buddies in Avenged Sevenfold. Since the two bands shared stages across America on the 2008 Taste Of Chaos tour they’d become close friends, and the Bullet lads were looking forward to blowing off some steam with their pals following a month of intense recording at Document Room Studios. They found Avenged in good spirits too, buzzing with excitement about their own forthcoming album and well up for a party. Upon seeing his Transatlntic brethren, Avenged’s drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan threw himself upon the quartet, wrestling each one to the ground and attempting, in a splendidly primal display of excitement, to bite them. The drummer was, says Matt with a fond smile, “off his tits.”
Seven months later, in January this year, Matt found himself back in Huntington Beach, in markedly more combre circumstances. It was the day of Jimmy Sullivan’s funeral, and matt was standing in the kitchen of Avenged vocalist M Shadows aka Matt Sanders’ house, the pair surrounded by floral tributes to their late friend. Shadows was playing the Bullet frontman a demo of a new A7X song, a beautiful piano ballad written and sung by Jimmy. And in the moment, the music business, and all their respective bands’ successes, all the gold discs, all the sold-out shows, all the glowing reviews, didn’t seem to mater very much at all to the two friends.
“Something like The Rev passing away puts into perspective what’s super important,” says Matt. “I think I’ve grown up a lot over the past few years. I mean, I appreciate and am hugely grateful for my life; I have a girl that adores me, I have a beautiful house, I have an amazing bunch of friends, I dont want for anything, whereas before the band I had fuck all. I loved at home, was in debt to my parents, I had nothing. But I also know there are bigger priorities than just myself.”

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