This is the second part in my little series about Christian bands, and how they influenced me.
After Fat And Frantic, another early discovery was The Woebegone Brothers, another skiffly gospely outfit fond of acoustic, traditional sounds – it was bit of a theme in late eighties/early nineties Christian music. They were all white British guys, but covered classic American gospel tunes – at least I think they did, it’s hard to tell whether they wrote any of their own material, and I’m not a sufficient expert on the subject. As such, Christian themes in their music were much more in-your-face, and I think their intents were to encourage people to (a) become Christians and/or (b) become much more serious about their faith. I only saw them live once, and it was at a youth mission event, so that proves my hypothesis. Apparently they first appeared at Greenbelt in 1988, but had gone by the time I started attending. Story of my life!
This is actually an indication that by the mid-nineties, there weren’t many British Christian bands sufficiently well-known to headline festivals, even Christian ones, and in my early years at Greenbelt, the bands that stand out in my memory are secular ones, like The Proclaimers, Midnight Oil, 808 State and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, generally invited because they had values that sat comfortably with the less explicitly spiritual bits of the Greenbelt programme. Midnight Oil, in particular, were very hot on human rights and social justice, something Greenbelt had strongly focussed on in their programme for years. The Woebegone Brothers were more the kind of band that appeared at Greenbelt’s fringe venues, though, which were often the most atmospheric and memorable places to hang out.
Anyway, I had that first album, and the first track on it was “Gospel Train”, which was extremely catchy indeed, and I’m still rather fond of it. It turns out they performed it at Greenbelt in 2008, and I’m sure I attended that year, but didn’t get to see this. Shame, I’d have loved to! Thanks, YouTube…
Interesting to note a reference in the comments to a second Woebegone Brothers album, which I never knew existed. Here’s the actual album version of the song, which had a little comedy scratch bit at the beginning, which I always quite liked.
I’m not sure what happened to these guys afterwards, though – I think their fame, even in Christian music circles, was short-lived, maybe as tastes moved on and people wanted something a bit less skiffly. I do remember that one live performance with some fondness, though, and I’m glad I caught it. They certainly put a lot of energy into it and Gospel Train is damn catchy, even now.
Going off on bit of a tangent here, as they weren’t a Christian band, another skiffly/acoustic group I really liked at the time was The Lost T-Shirts of Atlantis, who I’m sure supported Fat And Frantic once or twice, and played in a local pub pretty regularly. They could also be seen busking in Kingston, the town I lived in, pretty regularly. Highlight of their set was a song called “Be Happy”, prominently featuring a Stylophone! This would get passed around the audience for them to contribute to the song. Ahh, happy times indeed!
Going back to the Woebegone Brothers, I do wonder if nowadays they’d be frowned upon for performing what seems to be almost entirely black gospel music – the phrase “cultural appropriation” springs to mind a bit, and I can’t help wondering if it was a bit patronising to see a bunch of very middle-class white guys performing music that had a lot of connections with slavery and injustices we really can’t get our heads around. There’s nothing wrong with liking that music, of course, whoever you are, but I do wonder if the words lose something and sound a bit empty coming out of rather more privileged mouths. At the end of the day, though, those words did what they were intended to do – tell people about Jesus, and that’s mainly what the band’s raison d’etre was. Obviously they were a lot more in-your-face that Fat And Frantic were, and I’m not aware of any songs they did that weren’t overtly spiritual in nature. More on that selection of topics in future posts.