Cerebral Fix

Throughout their career, Cerebral Fix were one of the more consistent and critically acclaimed U.K. thrash bands, but they weren't a very groundbreaking one (no British thrash bands really were, save perhaps Sabbat), and so their legacy is now largely overlooked, if it is remembered at all. Emerging out of the industrial metropolis of Birmingham in 1986, Cerebral Fix were initially comprised of vocalist Simon Forrest, guitarists Gregg Fellows and Tony Warburton, drummer Adrian Jones, and bassist Paul Adams, but the latter quit the band (to form Reprisal, later known as Benediction) soon after their 1987 demos, We Need Therapy and Product of Disgust, attracted the interest of independent label Vinyl Solution. So the band quickly recruited a replacement in Steve Watson and set to work on its 1988 debut album, Life Sucks…and Then You Die!, before hitting the tour trail with bands like Bolt Thrower, Electro Hippies, and Hellbastard. Along the way, the LP's convincing brand of crossover thrash received largely positive reviews from the undoubtedly partisan U.K. press and even earned the approval of influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, thus helping Cerebral Fix to graduate to Roadrunner Records prior to recording their sophomore LP, Tower of Spite, in 1990. This introduced a new rhythm section of bassist Frank Healey and drummer Andy Baker (both poached from Sacrilege) and, like its 1991 successor, Bastards (featuring yet another drummer named Kevin Frost), found the band moving away from hardcore and embracing a heavier, almost deathlike thrash template. Unfortunately, by the time Cerebral Fix succeeded in spicing up their moshing ways on 1992's career-best Death Erotica LP (their first for Music for Nations), their path to commercial irrelevance had been pretty much sealed by grunge's flannel revolution (along with hundreds of their brothers in arms), and the band at least had enough good sense to break up the following year rather than fight a lost cause. Cerebral Fix would reunite as a performing unit in 2006 and have carried on sporadically with frequent bandmembers coming and going, but have yet to attempt recording any new material (a retrospective box set was assembled in 2007 by Metal Mind Productions).