![]() I seem to recall attendances at gigs dwindling. Then real life took over. ![]() Thrash and glam metal claimed the mid and late 80s and, by then, Vigilante didn’t quite fit the mould. We all kept our fingers crossed and hoped that the band would continue to grow.īut alas, it was not to be. I even fixed them up a place on the bill at a Southampton University anti-racism gig – though unfortunately they had to withdraw. My friends and I joined the fan club under the group pseudonym ‘Brett Peters’. The new songs, which took the band in a softer, more melodic direction, had the virtue of being more immediate in a live setting, and the band further extended their reach with a session for the BBC on Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show. (Frankie says: “Relax, the Vig will gig!”) And damn, they were still good. After an enforced hiatus, Vigilante re-emerged with a new sound and a completely revamped set list. In this case Pelele moved on. After much discussion, the rest of the band decided to keep the name, recruiting a female vocalist (Sandra) and keyboard player (Ian). Of course, times change and people move on. Pelele, Jones, Brace and Hinton – classic stuff! It shows the quality of both their songwriting and playing, and it shows, perhaps, that for every band that makes it, there’s probably a hundred others who could have. I still have a 3-track demo from that period: the catchy ‘Heartache’, the Budgie-inspired ‘Long Term Suicide’, and the classic ‘Victim of Circumstance’. (I bought 4!) Gary, it transpired, was good mates with Budgie drummer Steve Williams, and played the drum kit that Williams had used on Budgie’s ‘Power Supply’ album. ‘If Swallowed Do Not Induce Vomiting’ that seemed to be in circulation – on sale at the back of the hall for just 20p a pop. That particular gig was notable for the large quantities of the Budgie E.P. They even did a charity gig in our school hall that drew quite a crowd. Indeed, their version of Lizzy’s ‘Still In Love With You’ was so good that you could almost have believed, just for a few seconds, that bushy-haired bass player and vocalist Andy Hinton was Phil Lynott. They played mostly original material, but they also slipped a couple of Skynyrd and Lizzy tracks into the set. Brace’s drum solos were endlessly entertaining, as he frequently left his drum stool to give anything he could find a good whack. The twin guitars of Pelele and Jones were top notch. Bogey’s Rock Club, The Great Western, The Lion’s Den, Cardiff University Students Union. They saw a thousand faces (well, a few hundred anyway) and they rocked them all. The band: Vigilante (formerly Judah), one of the best established heavy rock bands on the Cardiff/South Wales rock scene, circa ’79 – ’83. And it’s particularly cool if said band are genuine purveyors of bona fide “no nonsense rock ‘n’ roll. It’s pretty cool to have a history teacher who drums in a heavy rock band.
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