History

If you're very lucky there may be occasions in your life when you find a band and you realise you've discovered something a bit special. Sure we've all heard 'great' bands who release 'great' albums, but I'm talking about band that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and give you that nervous excitement as you listen to the songs on an album for the first time. For me Vega are one of those bands.

From the opening swathes of the keyboard on Into The Wild through to the closing refrain of SOS, Vega set their stall out from the off with their striking debut album, Kiss of Life. But then what the hell happened.. sorry let me rephrase that - then What The Hell! happened - and it completely blew away everything that had gone before.

To understand the pedigree of this very special band you'd have to go back to the late 90s when twins James and Tom Martin formed their very first band, Sugartown. This is the start of an impressive music history which is worthy of and could take up a whole website all on its own. Suffice to say they formed bands including Kryah, Albion (with Alistair Griffin, who they've worked with both before and after his stint in Fame Academy) and The Station Club and written songs for an impressive line up of bands and artists including Khymera, Danny Vaugn, Joe Lynn Turner, House of Lords, Ted Poley and Tommy Funderburk. 

It was during their spells in Kryah (2004 - 2006) and The Station Club (2006 -2009) that they first teamed up with Dan Chantrey, who played drums for both bands. Meanwhile Nick Workman was busy establishing a name for himself in Kick (1999 - 2004) and then Eden (2006 - 2009) and crossed paths with Tom & James when Kick supported Thunder on their 1999 farewell tour. It was some 10 years later in 2009 when a meeting between all four of them at the Z Rock Festival at JBs in Dudley where they decided to work together and Vega was born.

"Normally when we write songs we have the control over the lyrics/melodies but this time with Vega we left Nick to this part because we really rate him as a songwriter and he did a fantastic job with this on Kick's albums, so we knew he could make our sound more unique and make it a bit different from the AOR songs we write"

Over the next few months the guys busied themselves writing songs for their debut album and with John Greatwood and Dennis Ward handling production and mastering respectively, Kiss of Life emerged through Frontier Records on the 6th Dec 2010. The album received universal critical acclaim, unsurprising really as it's a damned fine slice of rock pie - not that you'd really want a pie made out of rocks, lucky you haven't tried some of my cooking.

After a brief foray onto the live circuit work soon began on the follow up and in fact the record was essentially completed well before the band managed to secure a deal for its release. Eventually a deal was made with Spinefarm Records/Ninetone (distributed through Universal Music Group) in 2011 but it took until the 18th March 2013 before What the Hell! finally hit the streets, although we had an early taste of what was to come with the release of the single White Knuckle Ride in October 2012.

"We wear our love of 80's rock music on our sleeve, but we also have injected our love of modern rock music to it. We aren't trying to rehash anything: the sound we have achieved is 100% VEGA. We didn't want to try and guess what people expect and get it wrong"

If the debut impressed, the follow up snatched the rock pie and smashed it through the back of Kiss Of Life's skull and while it lay there semiconscious drowned it in a euphony of guitar riffs and keyboard layers whilst the onlooking crowd sang along as one - Ok I might be getting a bit carried away with the visual imagery here, but if Kiss of Life is George Lucas (accomplished, if a little safe), then What the Hell! is Quentin Tarantino.

There then followed a successful UK tour support slot with the magnificent FM and then a few extra dates as headliners later in the year. This is possibly.. ok make that definitely.. when I became ever so slightly obsessed with the band. With a gap of just 5 days since the release of the album, I watched them live for the first time as they stormed the stage at Shepherds Bush Empire and they blew me away for the second time within the space of a week.

Having a great record is one thing, but being able to translate that into a live performance (and being entertaining), especially when you don't have elaborate staging and lighting to carry you, is another thing altogether - even some 'big' bands fail to achieve this, but Vega accomplish it with ease. In Nick they have a frontman who's a natural and oozes personality on the stage. Augmented by a couple of guitarists drafted in for live shows, every band member plays their part. Seeing them that night I knew I'd found the Holy Grail, a band that in modern parlance you'd say managed to tick every single box.

"We wanted to write an album where every song could have been a single, so we have been spending a lot of time fine tuning the songs"

You'd expect an article about a band on their own website to be pretty positive but as they're not writing it I'm afraid we're going to have to end on a bit of a negative. Well actually it's not a bit of a negative, it's a pretty damned major one - and that's why thy hell aren't this band absolutely massive yet??

With the guys working on songs for the next album hopefully it won't be too long before we're writing the next chapter of the phenomenally awesome band that is Vega and see them achieve the success they so richly deserve.

The Stalker

 

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