Nexus VI

FOR THE PEOPLE WHO STILL REMEMBER...
NEXUS VI, 1991 - 2000: A BAND WHO SOUNDED LIKE NO OTHER IN THEIR PARTICULAR BOROUGH.
TJ was a drummer in various Newport bands and Lee just happened to have a keyboard and was looking for a good reason to get out of a moral obligation to help someone record some terrible disco music. They were apprentices at a Ministry Of Defence base when they met. TJ was training to do something useful with binoculars, and Lee was foolishly trusted to tinker with bomb disposal robots.
Nexus VI was originally formed in 1991 as Trip, and TJ was asked to play drums. TJ wasn’t going to be in a shoe-gazing, baggy indie band, so after a line-up reshuffle and a name change, TJ, Lee and Mez remained. Quite the trio of misfits (a punk, a goth and a bloke in a permanent lumberjack shirt), we spent time listening to a lot of music by Pop Will Eat Itself, Carter U.S.M. and other 80's alternative bands, rather than the diluted post-rave acid shite vomiting out of the UK's radio speakers at the time. And it reflected in our music.
TJ swapped his drumsticks for a guitar, Lee grew an extra pair of arms and took on bass as well as keyboards and the standard band line-up was replaced with a second hand drum machine and a portastudio. We played a few gigs and recorded a couple of demo tapes, ‘Kwodd’ and ‘Nexus 6’. The first Nexus VI gig was at The Victoria Hotel in Newport in front of a couple of hundred teenagers. I don’t think they got it but they enjoyed it all the same. To this day, there are still a few people who swear blind they were never there...
Eventually the band split in 1993 in order to amicably remove Mez (for his own good of course; a large and mostly unhygienic biker threatened to kill him if he ever sang again). Nexus VI was quickly reborn the following week under various guises (Penguin, Lambrusco Tabasco, T.S. Inc) as a duo, playing various stupid songs to audiences who were mostly under the influence of Class B narcotics (well it was the early ‘90’s).
We even made the effort to pull off a spectacluar musical scam involving Cascades, Telford's grottiest (and at the time, only) nightclub.
Irritated at the truly horrible emergence of 2 Unlimited and that bloody 'No limits' song, we'd quickly knocked up a couple of 'rave' tunes and convinced the manager of the club using a shitty quality tape cassette, to allow us to 'perform' them onstage. Amazingly, we had the 1500 strong audience of ravers eating out of our hand as we wreaked revenge upon them with a terrible miming performance and a gyrating cross-eyed dancer whose name escapes me (Lisa, I think). Clearly the moral of this story is that drugs do damage your brain...
It was soon clear that the logical progression would be to write stupid songs all the time, seeing as we turned out to be quite good at it. In spite of our combined effort to do little in the way of rehearsal, we managed to hone an individual sound consisting of punk guitars and sample-heavy music using a couple of Atari ST’s.
After a while it was evident that we needed to get another guitarist in to fill out the sound (and stage), so in time-honoured fashion, we stole one. His name was Kevin Turner, a glam rocker from Newport. He was playing guitar in a band called Chocolate Forest who thankfully, because they wanted to be The Cure, didn’t put up much of a fight when we stole him. The rest was easy; we got him drunk and taught him our songs. His maiden flight on the Nexus VI jumbo jet of hilarity was Kids International 1994, a vast annual festival of events held in Telford’s Town Park. This is still immortalised on video somewhere in the depths of TJ's collection.
We played lots of gigs between 1993 and 1995, got involved with many local music events and achieved a sizeable fan base for our efforts. We arranged our own gigs and support acts and through the medium of comic timing, quick-fire gags and lightshows, raised our profile as one of the most watchable acts on the local area. We also took time out to record the ‘Killin’ Everything’ and ‘Nexus Chainsaw Massacre’ EP tapes. A few people still have them, probably.
Then in 1995, Nexus VI poured an entire evening of energy into ‘…Humph!’, an album recorded and mixed at Lee’s house on a couple of portastudios, occasionally wearing small black moustaches made of insulation tape. We still have no idea why we did that.
‘…Humph’ was a tapestry of lost love, political statement, hangovers and child psychologists set against a backdrop of noisy guitars, drum machines and inappropriate samples from obscure TV programs & cult films. It was the unrecognisable electronic pop-bastard offspring of punk, glam rock and goth, and we loved it.
We continued to write songs about James Bond, members of the Star Trek cast and getting drunk in the years that followed.
The band eventually wrapped up due to academic/geographic constraints but got together sporadically for one-off gigs in Sheffield, Wolverhampton & Telford between 1998-2000, where we were joined by Del Jones on live drums and for our last gig at Telford's Fusion Festival in 2000, Julian Kilgallon on guitar.
Currently, Kevin works as a wine-chugging copy writer in London and has written a book about his month-long road trip around Europe. TJ plays in Sheffield-based rock band Whitewash, once again combining comedy with music. Lee is resident DJ to the Hex In The City Goth night in Wolverhampton and a very busy producer/remixer.
We’ve all come away from those nine interesting years with actual jobs and lives. It was a blast 95% of the time; the other 5% was spent sleeping it off... We wouldn’t have kept on doing it if it weren’t for the fans, people who helped us and of course the concept of 'not exerting too much effort'.
Acknowledgements for their efforts, support and association with Nexus VI are as follows in no particular order:
Dave J (always there from start to finish), our respective families, Bob, Mike, John Clarke, Chris Davies/Aston, Suzi Never Barks, Madeley Music Project, Rabid Lemmings, Chocolate Forest, Florence, One Hour Birthday Party, British Groovement, Korova Dremcom, Millennia/In Like Fynn, Johnny Alpha, Sonic State, P.I.M.P., Whitewash and last but not least,the Disaster Groupies.
We should also really nod knowingly towards the likes of Kerosene, Thomas Vacuum, Psychic Circus and Tomorrow's Joy for creating any sort of interest in the Telford music scene at all at the time!