This is a transcript of an interview I did with the lovely Dyanne Davis of the now-defunct online magazine www.roadband.com, an ezine dedicated to playing bands and their influences, and she wanted to talk to me about our main influences, and settled on talking about Judas Priest.

I don't know how interesting it is, since I do most of the talking (as usual in a conversation with me by anyone) but I put in everything I can find about the band here and some random googling about something else turned this up, about which I'd nearly forgotten, so I copy/pasted it and here it is, unedited in the interest of accuracy and because I can't be bothered. Enjoy!

RoadBand interview about Judas Priest's influence on Vengeance with Dyanne Davis and Guy

I had to move the site to a new server and just finished getting some of the perl scripts working again and other matters and decided to write a few words. I never have gotten around to adding more of the promo material, international magazines and fanzines, as well as a wealth of live performances which exist only in analog audio form.

I don't know when, if ever, I'll get around to doing this. Some of the early members of Vengeance who performed on that early material have expressed an interest in seeing it added, so perhaps I'll get energetic and interested enough to slog through all that mess and add more content. As it is, there is more than I ever thought I'd get around to doing, so at least there's that.

On a more human level, Vengeance's former guitarist Curt Smith has been having some health issues, so send him your positive thoughts and vibes.

-g

• Scanned and added some photos from Mike
• Added flash player to frontpage discography pages
• Added promo material
• Working on a synched edit of the Beijing video and more footage from the shoot

-g

• Added individual band page photos
• Added live shots
• Added promo photos
• Added rehearsal & studio photos

-g

• All the new video is uploaded in flash form
• Remastered nearly all the audio on the entire site, added dozens of demo versions and rarities and wrote liner notes for all
• Updated the merchandise section (yes, people do buy stuff over the years, barely paying for the cost of bandwidth to keep the site up)
• Also plannned: a live audio page, including audio of the old Vengeance with me and Mike on lead guitar and Guy's brother Mitch on drums, plus plenty of 'classic' Vengeance live, plus a definitive live album with all the best versions of the best stuff

That's it for updates for this week, other than some minor design and navigation tweaking.

-g

Also: I went back to the 1/4 track mix-downs, and in some cases the original 16-track masters, and added some "rarities" to the discography pages. These include the songs Vengeance did for the Tribute to Phil Lynott album, a demo of a song written by Kip Kirby and some Queen songs Guy and Mike did with Chuck and Guy's brother Mitch on drums as an exercise in arranging, recording and performing stacked vocal harmonies, later used on Malicious Intent and Bad Crazy.

Next: the monumental task of sorting, choosing, re-scanning, editing, coding in and then uploading hundreds of photos to upgrade the over-all look of the site. Then checking through some of the better indy mags which profiled the band or band interviews and transcribing some of that stuff (its all in print of course and has to be typed up).

Also on the agenda: re-digitizing the audio files for the 4 albums, the rarities already mentioned, plus some lost tracks that never made it onto any album, like Fear No Man and HellRazor/Cry Havoc (the Cry Havoc half was revised and revived for the Bad Crazy album)

After that, the site is probably done for another 10 years. Please email any feedback on what has been done so far or suggestions on what you'd like to see added.

-g

We set this site up in '97 about a year after the band folded to sort of commemorate 12 years of work and touring and music that we considered to be a successful partnership.

Since then, no one has felt the need to revisit the site and update it. Its here for archive purposes only, because it seems there are, surprisingly, some people still interested in the mid-80's-mid-90's powermetal band Vengeance Inc.

However, recently a metal archivist has inquired about rereleasing our old recordings and commented about the Vengeance Inc. website design. I was appalled how outdated it had become.

Garish light-up java actuated menu buttons and framesets and image-heavy design with loud colors and poor functionality and just overall sloppy design.

I do a bit of web design professionally, even in these days when even your gramma can do some HTML, and the site just looked like an abomination, to my eyes, anyway.

It was fine and up to the standards of 1997, when it was designed and put online, but it looked pretty silly viewing it in 2008. I decided to redesign the site, streamlining it and keeping it very very simple and easy to navigate. No bells or whistles.

So, I somewhat reluctantly dove into redesigning it. As I got into it, I found what I consider real and time-consuming problems that I couldn't let stand if I intended to update the site properly. Many, if not all, of the images had been compressed to the point where they were horribly pixelated, due to some ill-considered interaction with website "optimizers" back in the evil old dial-up days when band-width was a real consideration and a few kilobytes made a difference here or there.

The original photos, which I still had (and have), would need to be rescanned. Many of the mp3s were of poor quality, having been converted from analog to digital back in '97, when conversion technology was sketchier. They would have to be reconverted from the analog tapes.

Lastly, I had converted a good deal of live VHS of the band to digital, and it seemed like a reasonable idea to add some of that to the site.

I didn't figure on hours of reviewing 30+ tapes of 2 hour+ gigs, picking the best performances, editing, converting to proper format and then coding and uploading files to the site.

So, this is still a work in progress. As I write this, none of this has been done, these are the bad photos and I plan on replacing them as soon as I can.

This is the new design, but all the pages aren't even done yet, so some of the links don't work. I hope to have the site back at least to its old functionality by August, then start working on adding enhancements.

-g