When I became a Christian at the age of fifteen in 1990, I very rapidly discovered a strange parallel cultural universe. There was a whole world of Christian books, films, t-shirts, posters, and – most of all – music. As someone keen to learn more about my faith, I ended up an enthusiastic consumer of all of these things.
Here in the UK, I think there was generally quite a balanced view in most churches about the good and bad points of secular culture, so I liked a mixture of both Christian and mainstream bands. I was encouraged in this healthy balance by a couple of my youth leaders, who were big music fans and advised us all not to get too lost in the Christian subculture. However, you couldn’t be part of a church or a youth group in the early nineties without exposure to a lot of Christian music. Some of it was good, some of it was terrible, but it was pretty influential, and I was into a lot of Christian bands in my youth. I’ve decided to start a little blog series about some of the most influential ones I’ve enjoyed over the years.
Having suffered spiritual abuse, and now being an atheist, I do find quite a lot of Christian music hard to stomach these days. The definition of a “Christian band” varies depending on how hardcore both the members and their audiences are, but a lot of Christian musicians are out to try and convert, or otherwise influence, their listeners. I saw that as a good thing at the time, but it now strikes me as quite an obnoxious concept. Sure, express your views in your art, but don’t use it as a propaganda tool. This is why I often get quite triggered when I hear the less subtle and more in-your-face Christian music I used to consume. There’s no denying it had a huge influence on me at the time, though, and so I intend this series to explore some of the bands I remember the most.
My initial introduction to Christian music was through friends in both my own church, and another in the same town which I occasionally attended (their youth group had a better social scene). It was through this other church, and my school friend Luke, that I was introduced to the first Christian band I heard. That band was Fat And Frantic, hugely popular in church youth groups and university Christian Unions the length and breadth of Britain.
I’m sure that within days of becoming a Christian, I posessed a C90 cassette with a couple of Fat And Frantic’s albums copied onto it (tut, tut), and I instantly liked them. It’s hard to describe them, really, but they were kind of a pop-skiffle band, heavy on acoustic guitars and a pretty mean trumpeter, and described some of their songs as gospel-skiffle, or “goffle”. Their humour was decidedly wacky and bizarre, with a lot of their songs being quite surreal. Highlights include “Uncle David (With His Elongated Sideburns)”, “Brian” and “Trainspotters”. In fact, the band produced a regular newsletter entitled “Trainspotter Quarterly”, and a few of my friends made it into the hallowed pages of this publication! Rather brilliantly the whole lot has been archived for your enjoyment. It was a mixture of news about record releases, live shows, and a rather odd mixture of a whole lot of other stuff. They also ran a phone hotline, which mercifully wasn’t an expensive premium rate one!
A lot of their songs were humorous takes on Bible stories, often very odd takes on them as well, the best-known of these probably being “Last Night My Wife Hoovered My Head”, which got fairly regularly played on Simon Mayo’s show on Radio 1. He was quite well-known for being a Christian back then, and presented a live Radio 1 broadcast from the 1990 Greenbelt Festival, a major showcase for Christian bands in the UK. FaF (as they were commonly known) were regulars there, although they’d split up by the time I first made it to the festival in 1994. Here’s the official “Last Night My Wife Hoovered My Head” video, produced by members of Madness, no less!
Long before making it to Greenbelt, though, a Fat And Frantic gig at London’s Marquee Club was the first-ever “proper” gig I attended. A group from the big Anglican church in New Malden, including my friend Luke, were going, and I was invited to go along. They were prolific live performers and spent a lot of time on the road, but I can’t pin down the exact date of this particular concert. It was, to the best of my memory, in the spring of 1990, and it was on a school night, which did present a few issues, given that I didn’t get home until about midnight. It was tough staying awake the following day, but I didn’t care – I had the best time!
I sometimes wish I could say the first “proper” gig I went to was an early performance by a band that turned out to be properly cool, but alas, that wasn’t the case. This was certainly fun, though – their shows were wacky, energetic, funny, and ultimately very good entertainment – they had me hooked. I soon got to know and love their live show staples, and sang my heart out when I saw them, which I think I did about eight times before they split up in mid-1992. There’s not much video of their concerts online – this was long before smartphones, of course – but this clip is bit of a gem from their later days on the road.
The official reason for FaF disbanding was that essentially they struggled to make any money. Despite all the hard work, and the frequently packed-out gigs, they just couldn’t make a decent living out of it. I think this was partly down to their struggle to sell records. Even with frequent plugging on Radio 1, they just couldn’t get any of their singles or albums to chart, and without that exposure, they were never going to make it into the mainstream. I think it’s for two reasons – first, who is really going to get into wacky songs about Bible stories if they’re not Christians, and second, there were so many bootlegs of their albums going around. Ultimately, loads of their fans were in their mid-teens like me, and I just couldn’t afford to buy many albums. I listened to bootlegs because that’s the only way I’d hear them. Sadly it probably edged them towards their demise.
They remained very fondly remembered, though, and it wasn’t long before they played a few one-off gigs. I didn’t get to see them again until 2013 – this was the year of the 40th Greenbelt festival, and to celebrate there were several special performances from headliners of old. Despite the members of the band looking somewhat older, the performance was as energetic and slick as ever, although it was only a short one. I did leave feeling a little disappointed, though. I was still in church and still a Christian at the time, but it still felt a bit preachy in places, and also that the music hadn’t aged well. It felt like it was best left in the past. Here’s a clip from that performance.
Most of the members of the band have stayed active in the music industry, although some of what they’ve made is praise and worship music, which for obvious reasons I won’t go anywhere near these days. I always found a lot of that quite cheesy, to be honest, even at the height of my evangelical fervour (more on that in a future instalment).
That first-ever concert remains significant, though. I think it fired my passion for live music, and it also introduced me to a group of friends that, although short-lived, was to prove very significant to me. In the summer that followed, we all hung out together very often, and I celebrated my sixteenth birthday on the same day as another celebrated her fifteenth (with a FaF themed birthday cake, made by her mum). It featured FaF’s well known Dancing Man logo, that was on all their merch and album covers. It featured on various t-shirts and badges I owned. A popular thing to do after concerts was to hang around, meet the band and get them to sign T-shirts with permanent markers – one of those was a prized possession of mine until it fell apart.
These were happy days I won’t forget in a hurry. It was genuinely a sad day when we found out there wouldn’t be any more FaF gigs to go to, but I’ll remember them very fondly, even if I find them a bit cringe to listen to these days. The reason for that is hard to define, though. While I have no doubt whatsoever that these guys were Christians who really wanted to groove for the Lord, they didn’t really come across as preachy until after I’d left the church, and after they’d all started working on other much more explicitly Christian music. My perspectives had changed by then, and I began to recognise Christian culture for what it was.
They very, very rarely said anything preachy from the stage, although one or two of their earlier songs left you in very little doubt about what they believed – this is a rather over-earnest example, the words at the end being about as explicit as it’s possible to get. This was regularly performed live.
It jars a bit with the wacky image, but that seriousness was always there, and I guess they were always a band with a mission.
Everywhere I go, I know
Your eyes will follow me
They watch me as I live my life
In easy luxury
But oh, if I could love like you,
The way that you love me,
I’d start to love just like the man
Who died at Calvary
For Uganda’s children
Looking at that now, I do find it about as subtle as being walloped around the head with a large blunt object, and it feels like it was a deliberate attempt to twist the heartstrings and make people think about Jesus. I guess we always thought Fat and Frantic were one of those bands you could “invite your non-Christian friends” to – although without my belief, I very much doubt I’d have got seriously into them.
I’ll leave you with my absolute favourite track from FaF, which I still love, and again was a live staple. It’s not zany, it’s not wacky, it’s just lovely, and it keeps a special place in my heart all these years later.