Bio

Valley Goats are a fascinating combination of influences and origins. French front woman Brigitte Legend's appealing voice and her sweet accent, combined with lyrics from the Dutch Lebanese upbringing of drummer Grant Tromp, thrown into the mix is new member Stephen Raynes on guitars, a kiwi raised in South Africa and on bass guitar Mike Oliver.

Brigitte is a kiwi but when she talks or sings, you know that she’s not only a kiwi lady. Born in the South of France, she discovered New Zealand in 1996 and fell in love with our beautiful country. Leaving behind her years of driving trucks and setting lights in the music industry in Europe, she set her new roots right here in the North of Auckland. Throughout her years of discovery and perpetual amazement at the beauty of her new land, she kept writing songs not even thinking of taking those songs to the next level.

When she met Grant Tromp, a creative drummer and lyricist who was writing his own songs while hand crafting Crowded House’s recording studio in Karekare for the Together Alone album she realized she could take her songs somewhere else; from a few chords, nice melody and words to a fully completed, arranged, mixed and mastered sound. Together, they formed Valley Goats and recorded their first album called Too Different Lands.

Malcolm Foster, ex-bass player with Simple Minds and The Pretenders, produced all of the tracks, wrote and played most of the bass lines, arranged and sang backing vocals. “It was wonderful” says Brigitte “to get a talented fresh pair of ears to assess our songs and add new ideas to them; because when you’re a song writer, you get to a point where you can’t deal with one particular song anymore. You need to move on to the next and it’s so nice to let someone else take over.”

People who had the chance to hear Valley Goats’ album have been taken with the quality of the songs, their subtle arrangements and the 2 videos the band produced. Some songs are immediately catchy, others are the kind of songs that you like more and more each time you play them. All involve intricate yet subtle layers of guitars, violin, keyboards and harmonic backing vocals. Valley Goats are said to be good melodic rock and they are, but they also have a few funky tracks and ballads that makes the album very interesting to listen to and appealing to varying tastes. If you don’t like one song, you can be sure to like the next.

Band Members:
Brigitte Legend (vocals, guitar)
Grant Tromp (drums)
Mike Oliver (bass)
Stephen Raynes (lead guitar)