Kev & Vince

Band Members

Vince Clarke – vocals, guitar, violin

Kevin Walker – vocals, drums, guitar

History

'Kev & Vince' or 'Nathan' as some other people called it, was a band active from 1976 till 1979. This was the first band that Vince Clarke joined, not long after finishing high school. Clarke was attending the Youth Fellowship meetings in Basildon which were lead by Kevin Walker. Walker, three years older than Clarke, was the leader of the Youth Fellowship, and used to play gospel songs with the kids there. Prior to forming Kev & Vince, Walker had also formed a Christian band with friend Chris Biggs, who named themselves 'Insight'. Biggs then became the manager for Kev & Vince, and another friend named Billy Slatter helped them with getting gigs.

Kevin and Vince agreed to form a "Simon & Garfunkel kind of duo", and would rehearse at Vince's flat. Kevin would initially write all the songs, combining it with a few covers, but then Vince started to write songs as well. Vince said that the songs were "happy-clappy, kind of like nursery rhymes simplistic stuff, but always melodic." Kevin described one song as being "like an Irish jig with a lot of rhythm guitar", and in which Vince laughingly played the violin. While the songs weren't necessarily Christian, "they had a message". Kevin wrote a song called 'Nathan', "about a loner drifting from place to place who didn't have any aim in life." Chris Biggs suggested them to call themselves 'Nathan', and also refers to them as such in an interview for a 2011 Depeche Mode biography by Simon Spence, but Kevin replies that he "didn't ever feel comfortable with [that name]."

Even though Kevin and Vince had jobs and college to worry about, they played 40-minute sets quite a few times at local colleges, church venues, community halls such as the Basildon Arts Centre and the Brentwood Centre, open-air festivals, as well as at venues in Staffordshire and Birmingham. Their songs were also played on Radio Basildon, where Briggs was a deputy station manager at the Religious Programmes Team. It is said that some reel-to-reel tapes are still in existence.

Dissolution

At one point in 1979, Vince Clarke told Kevin Walker that he was thinking of starting an electronic band, and invited Walker to join the band that would become either 'Composition Of Sound' and/or 'The Plan', but this was not Walker's favourite kind of musical style so he declined. The two parted on good terms.

Kevin Walker went on to become a preacher and then a carpenter, still living in Basildon. After having written two albums in 1982 and 1984, he released another album in 2013 called 'Biding My Time', with its profit going to the McMillan nurses and Cancer Research UK after losing his wife to this disease.

'Only You'

Once Vince Clarke formed 'Yazoo' together with Alison Moyet in 1982, their first single, named 'Only You', became their most successful single in their career as a band. Both Vince Clarke and Depeche Mode have stated since then that Vince Clarke had played a demo version of this song to them right after he had departed Depeche Mode, and offered them this song as a way to help them out, but they rejected it because they didn't like it. The fact that Depeche Mode's latest single 'See You' didn't do so well as 'Only You' did not help relieve the awkward tension that existed between the two bands.

Kevin Walker told Simon Spence for his 2011 Depeche Mode biography, "Just Can't Get Enough" that Vince Clarke might have borrowed this song from Kevin, if not more:

"It was quite apparent to me that when Vince formed Yazoo, some of the tunes we'd written together came out in different forms. They were recognisable to me because I'd written them, especially the song 'Only You'. When he was just starting Yazoo, he invited me round to his new flat in Pitsea – he'd just bought a new computer, a Fairlight, and we were doing a few songs together. I was hoping we would have been able to take up what we used to have but it didn't happen. Anyway, he gave me a first pressing of 'Only You', and when I heard it I said: that sounds like one of my old songs. He just sort of laughed and said: no, it's not. But I recognised it straight away."

Kevin, in turn, used some of Kev & Vince's songs for his solo album 'There's Hope' published on cassette in 1982. He recorded the song 'Only You' under the moniker 'You and Me', claiming that it has "exactly the same kind of chord structure". He also wrote a song on that same album about parting ways with Vince, naming it 'A Song For A Friend'.

Links

Kevin Walker discography

Vince Clarke Wikipedia page