BRIAN HOUSTON - GOSPEL ROAD

Eleven songs from the birth canal of rock n roll. Brian Houston has written and recorded a set of songs that Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley would have loved had Houston been hanging round Sun Studios in the mid fifties. Presley and Cash came to producer Sam Phillips from their mothers’ hymn books and Gospel songs and would have loved to have got their chops around some of these. Lead Me To The Rock would have been a perfect song for Elvis, I Will Trust In My Lord sounds straight off the King’s Hymns record and it is a shame Cash isn’t still around to cover I Will Trust in My Lord.  As well as that you can hear The Temptations doing the a cappella God Don’t Worry and Sweet Jesus is a traditional hymn in the most traditional sense proving Belfast rock critic Stuart Bailie absolutely right when he has spoken of East Belfast writers like Houston, Duke Special and Van the Man having the cadences of the Wesley brothers (John and Charles) as much as they have Lennon and McCartney.

Houston speaks of writing Lead Me To The Rock by accident and surprise; it just spilled out. It didn’t fit the work he was doing in Three Feet From Gold or Sugar Queen and he had left the “worship” music behind him. There was nothing he could see himself doing with it... and then another one appeared... Glory, Glory... and then an album!  A look across Houston’s fifteen year recording career and it doesn’t seem so strange. He has always had this ability to bring Jesus and the odd snippet of hymns and large smidgen of Gospel into his pub and club gigs and on the other hand he could add a good dab of Springsteen, Earle or Emmylou to his worship. His last album Three Feet from Gold had studied early pop recordings and was thus short and hit the melodies early. It also contained his finest moment on the black spiritual influenced Sister of Mine. Gospel Road is like putting everything previous into the blender and loving the result.

But it is a fusion. There are prayers, psalms, creeds, commitments and celebration but it is rock n roll meets Gospel meet R&B For those who know Houston’s history, this record sits much easier beside Three Fields Of Gold than Rollercoaster. This is not a worship album and it would be important not to market it as such. Indeed, my fear would be that the twenty years of the Christian worship industry’s formulaic blandness has so damaged the ears, souls and minds of Christians that they will not know what to do with this artistic imaginative revivalist work. If only the Church could match Houston’s imagination, there are songs here that would change Sunday mornings into a piece of art that would more honour God that the repeated recipes of cliché shuffle.

BUT IT IS NOT A WORSHIP ALBUM. File it with Houston’s Northern Irish peers The Priests in HMV; God drenched, major label and mainstream success!  

Comments

[David]

you have me intrigued...

[Jonny]

Best track on Gold...surely Daddy don't go??

[Gary Bradley]

Stocki - Brians songs are great - retro, relevant and full of passion. But what would happen to his songwriting talent if he did get picked up by a big company? Would he have his creativity gouged out and be forced to fill up with corporate-institutional, saville-row-suit, pen-pushing, profiteering, marketing-hype, mumbo-jumbo-commercial, formulaic blandness? Given that the big companies now have a major interest in Christian music surely this is a possibilty? But perhaps that's all about the contract you negotiate??? Good mawn, Brian! G.