The band were originally formed under the name ' Quo Vardis ' ( Latin for wither goest thou ) because they did not know which direction they were going.

Vardis Fisher, a famous and influential atheist author, is from the rural Annis area near Rigby.

Vardis quickly gained notoriety for high energy live performances, the unique approach of incorporating elements of 70's glam rock and heavy metal music and frontman Steve Zodiac's searing Fender Telecaster sound.

* Vardis heavy metal charts archive and links

Steve Zodiac ( pseudonym adopted from the lead character of Fireball XL5 ) is a rock guitarist and prolific songwriter, who gained recognition in the early 1980s as frontman of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band Vardis.

* Steve Zodiac of British rock band Vardis is thought to have taken his name from the show.

He also experimented with bagpipes on the track " Police Patrol " from the 1982 album Quo Vardis, worked with Jools Holland ( Squeeze ), Andy Bown ( Status Quo & Pink Floyd ), Ron Asprey, Terry Horbury ( Dirty Tricks ) and Judd Lander.

He prematurely quit Vardis in the mid 1980s ( which resulted in outcry amongst rock n ' roll fans across Britain ), due to mounting tensions between himself and several people within the music industry.

* 1895 – Vardis Fisher, American author ( d. 1968 )

In November 1990, a rocket attack against the armored limousine of shipowner Vardis Vardinogiannis failed.

However, both John Rees and Vardis Fisher believed it was named for the Snake River canyon which forms a natural boundary for the county with Owyhee County.

This was later abbreviated to Vardis.

Zodiac was reputable for playing Vardis concerts barefoot and bare chested, his look completed by long, naturally ice-blonde hair.

Vardis dissolved in the mid 1980s amid lengthy legal disputes with former management.

Two compilation albums, ' The Best of Vardis ' ( 1997 ) and ' The World's Gone Mad: Best of Vardis ' ( 2002 ) have been released since their premature split, but no new material.

Original Vardis records are rare and are valued in most record collector's books and guides.

* Vardis on Last. fm

Original Vardis records are rare and are valued in most record collector's books and guides.

After a decline in popularity in the late 1970s Judas Priest discarded most of the genre's blues influences, particularly on their 1980 album British Steel, which opened the door for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal including Iron Maiden, Vardis, Saxon and Def Leppard, and a return to popularity in the 1980s.

The novel Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher is a good fiction source.

His saloon was a meetin' place for influential Wyoming cattlemen, and one year durin' a severe blizzard, when his herd-owner customers were wearin' long faces, he said, `` Cheer up, boys, whatever happens, the books won't freeze ''.

Also influential in these issues were Nietzsche, Heidegger, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Derrida and Lacan.

Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners ' claims to profound powers were known from antiquity.

* Another group is the School of the Military that studied strategy and the philosophy of war ; Sunzi and Sun Bin were influential leaders.

Even more influential were such Roman thinkers as Cato, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil.

He and his cousin were both grandsons of the influential and powerful Julia Maesa, who had arranged for Elagabalus ' acclamation as emperor by the famed Third Gallic Legion.

The so-called Weil conjectures were hugely influential from around 1950 ; they were later proved by Bernard Dwork, Alexander Grothendieck, Michael Artin, and Pierre Deligne, who completed the most difficult step in 1973.

His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.

The early translators included Mashallah, who helped to elect the time for the foundation of Baghdad, and Sahl ibn Bishr, ( a. k. a. Zael ), whose texts were directly influential upon later European astrologers such as Guido Bonatti in the 13th century, and William Lilly in the 17th century.

His numerous disciples — some of whom were very influential and who, for the most part, were also disciples of Samuel — amplified and, in their capacity as instructors and by their discussions, continued the work of Rav.

Accepting his supposed hospitality, at a traditional time for settling differences, the influential Welsh leaders of the surrounding areas nearly all arrived, proffered their swords as tokens of peaceful intent to servants and, unarmed, were ushered further into the castle where de Braose's armed soldiers hacked them down in cold blood.

Here the huge Arthur Murray organisation in America, and the dance societies in England, such as the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, were highly influential.

Professional scholars were impressed by his work and in 1930 he received a grant to study the Nahuatl language in Mexico ; on his return home he presented several influential papers on the language at linguistic conferences.

BDP were hugely influential in provoking political and social consciousness in Hip-Hop however they were sometimes overshadowed by the political hip hop group Public Enemy.

His works were so influential that late in the 9th century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that " God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth ".

More recent methods of scholarship, such as textual criticism, have been influential in suggesting that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist and John of Patmos were three separate individuals.

These polls have been quite influential, as they indicate which strips the readers like best, and strips that have performed poorly in these polls were usually dropped.

" After South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond switched his allegiance to the Republican Party in 1964, BJU faculty members became increasingly influential in the new state Republican party, and BJU alumni were elected to local political and party offices.

More recently, Bacardi lawyers were influential in the drafting of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act which sought to extend the scope of the United States embargo against Cuba.

Edamaruku stated that the regular gargling and bathing activities were not sufficiently monitored, and accused Jani of having had some " influential protectors " who denied Edamaruku permission to inspect the project during its operation.

The most influential Muslim chemists were Jābir ibn Hayyān ( Geber, d. 815 ), al-Kindi ( d. 873 ), al-Razi ( d. 925 ), al-Biruni ( d. 1048 ) and Alhazen ( d. 1039 ).

They operated under a series of laws that were added from time to time, but Roman law was never reorganised into a single code until the Codex Theodosianus ( AD 438 ); later, in the Eastern Empire the Codex repetitæ prælectionis ( 534 ) was highly influential throughout Europe.