Biff Byford

Peter Rodney "Biff" Byford (Honley, West Yorkshire, 15 January 1951) is an English singer best known as the lead singer of the heavy metal band Saxon.

Biography

Byford sang and played bass with a band called Coast from around 1973 to 1976, when he formed Saxon with guitarists Graham Oliver and Paul Quinn (who played in Coast too), bassist Steve Dawson and drummer Pete Gill. The band was originally called Son of a Bitch, but changed to Saxon in 1978. They released their self-titled debut album in 1979, and became part of what was known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which also included bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. The band had commercial success as well, charting eight UK Top 40 albums and five Top 40 singles between 1980 and 1986.

At the end of the 1980s, the band (along with the genre) declined in popularity, and Oliver and Dawson formed a new band with the same name, though they were later forced to change it to Oliver/Dawson Saxon. (Byford's) Saxon maintained a recording and touring career centred on Germany for much of the 1990s, before coming back into broader attention with 2007's The Inner Sanctum.

Byford

Byford is a village and civil parish on the River Wye in Herefordshire, England, about 11 km (7 mi) west of Hereford. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 119,increasing to 201 at the 2011 Census.

Offa's Dyke runs along Garnons Hill to the north of the village.

The 11th-century church of St John the Baptist is a grade I listed building.

References

External links

Media related to Byford at Wikimedia Commons

Coordinates: 52°04′52″N 2°52′55″W / 52.081°N 2.882°W / 52.081; -2.882

Byford (surname)

Byford is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Biff (name)

Biff is a given name, a nickname or part of a stage name.

People

Nickname

Biff (disambiguation)

Biff may refer to:

People

Computer-related terms

Film festivals

Other uses

Biff (cartoon)

Biff is a British cartoon strip, created by Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd, which debuted in 1982 and has appeared in the newspaper The Guardian from 1985 onwards (Biff Weekend ran there weekly for 20 years). The comic originated in a series of single-panel postcards before evolving into multi-panel comic strips. It has also been published in the magazine Viz and since 2001 in the magazine of the Rough Guides.

The cartoons are notable for their absurd, ironic, satirical and metafictional edge.

History

Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd met at grammar school in the 1950s and have collaborated on Biff since the mid-1970s. Chris Garratt creates the artwork (a mixture of collage, found images, tracings and original drawings) and Mick Kidd is responsible for the text. Kidd lives in London and Garratt in the Scilly Isles. They have created their strips and other artwork over the last 30 years by means of phone, post, email and occasional meetings.

In 2007 Chris Garratt introduced a retrospective of Biff work in these terms: