Once I had worked out how to plug the bloody thing in, the first duty of me on "da net" was to find a search engine and type in "dexys midnight runners".If you did that nowadays, you would find several sites dedicated to dexys,back then it produced one.

"The TQ Orange dexys web page" was the original and first dexys page on the net.It featured pictures, albums and singles and was encouraged mainly by "Come on Eileen", but it was a web site dedicated to dexys!

I managed to contact TQ, and we shared files and pics, he found himself not having the time or resources to manage his site.I said I would try and put something up of my own.

I found a web server at the globe.com, and created the first incarnation of "The unnofficial dexys midnight runners homepage" and just put up a few pictures and some lyrics.It was mostly dominated by my thoughts of the band(something which hasn't really changed much over the years!)

Around this time another dexys site was created, the dexys page at spiritonline.com.

This can still be found at www.spiritonline.com/dexys

Moving on now to around the later part of the 90's.

I had found a dexys music bulletin board at www.imusic.com and had daily conversations with loads of people there.I became friendly with these two mad women, they thought the same as me and loved the band.Imusic was becoming very boring but we were getting news that Kev was getting the band back together and then his record label Creation created another forum.This was magic but there was some right bollocks posted on it!

Shortly before it's demise, myself and these two mad women(Gina and Lynda) went off searching to create another dexys forum.I stumbled across www.delphi.com and created the dexys midnight runners forum.

So Creation had by now died a death, but now delphi was becoming a popular haunt for many fans of the band.Looking at my lists now for 1999, we had 1632 members by the end of the year(and we only started it in April) Old faces started to appear, hey! this was magic! we could post pictures,sound files,reminisce about days gone by, talk about anything we liked! This was AND STILL IS a proper community.It's not just about the music, it's about friendship and finding people who think just like me.The membership as of today October 25th 2003 is now a mighty 4931.That total is an actual amount of users logged in to the website.

Still the dexysweb was now weaving, my unofficial site had to be moved to a new server(which it still resides here) at tripod.com and with thanks to Gina and Lynda was updated with all the lyrics to the three dexys albums(*note, I shall be adding "The Wanderer" this weekend)

Neil(from keep on Running) created a small little site devoted to Keep on Running on the net and Clive Grey produced his still magnificent website of the dexys rarities resource, eventually changing his web address to www.dexys.co.uk .Media publications were now finding our sites, my place was featured in the NME and Clive's on the Don't Stand me Down re-issue.Still things progressed.

Old lady at tripod created a wonderful discology of dexys work, A truely wonderful site.

Now some dark clouds were gathering over at delphi, some ,members felt they needed to abandon their friendship with others on delphi over an incident that started out as a misunderstanding but as do so many things in life blew up into something much more sinister.They decided to create the msn dexys webgroup and I will not comment any further on that at this stage.Scott and Ellen had shortly before this, created the yahoo groups dexys page and are now in the process of creating another great webpage at www.dexysmidnightrunners.com (note* the bbc described this as the official dexys webpage, it is that good).I was then involved in some "unpleasentness" with a man who i still hold as a genius in regards to dexys.I made my point and left it there.I think that has still not been forgotten by him but you know what? it don't matter much lately.

So that's about the size of it, I have obviously made some glaring ommisions from this little story and I apologise to those who I have missed out.I will talk with a few people this weekend to see if I can add any more to this.

Thankyou to everyone who has been involved with dexys on the net, I may have called myself SR1, but we all have this great band in common.

I am just a fan.

Tim