Canter Bridge

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In 1995 I sat at a dinner table in Oxford and chatted with the young American at my side. He was the manager of a new band called ‘Delirious?’, he explained. They were going to be the next big thing, perhaps the next U2. He earnestly implored me to watch for them, I would not be disappointed.

The band’s name did not seem promising and the guy clearly had an interest in promoting his project. I didn’t take him too seriously.

A decade later and with many Delirious cds on my shelf, I smile to recall this memory.

Cutting Edge was in fact the first name of the band. To appreciate this CD, you’ve got to enter the narrative of the insert and appreciate the band as a spiritual and musical phenomenon that seemed in the mid-90s as much a surprise to the musicians, managers, and hangers-on as anyone else. The United Kingdom is often referred to these days as ‘post-Christian’, a dismissive adjective that is overstated but, sadly, contains much more truth than one could wish.

The Delirious? phenomenon is, perhaps as much as anything else, audible testimony to the fact that the Lord does not easily abandon a nation. Dry bones are unpromising material, the prophet Ezekiel would concede, but when breathed upon by the Lord’s spirit are capable of becoming a mighty army.

Indeed.

Such rhetoric, with its palpable biblical allusiveness, is part and parcel of the Delirious? package.

Before anything else, these tracks give us worship songs. Those looking for highly-produced, densely-packed, expertly-scored music like that of, say, Steven Curtis Chapman, are likely to walk away from this double-cd package disappointed and a bit glazed over.

Delirious? was and is a work in progress. Classic, simple rock progressions (‘Singer’s Song’) give way to acoustic reflectiveness (‘Lord, You Have My Heart’). Yet one never loses the sense that Delirious? is in some essential sense a band up on a stage. Leading worship. The recording studio came later and, one might sense, only half welcomed.

This reviewer lived for many years in Costa Rica, where in our church we often sang Delirious? songs in Spanish. Presumably, few of us knew the source.

Although much of Delirous?’ output has not weathered as well as I had hoped, I am still deeply moved–as I was upon first hearings some years back–by the band’s tempered, chastened side, a tonality that seems to move them consistently towards the Cross of Christ as their ground zero. This part of their artistic bandwidth is best appreciated via ‘The Prophet Song’ and others that I’ll excerpt below:

I hear the words of the prophets
I love to sing with the angels
I love to hear children praying
I love to see weak made strong
But most of all I love to hear the voice of God.

With these lyrics, Martin’s voice reminds us of what is central to our shared live of faith and what is, if not peripheral, then at least not indispensable.

Then one wonders about the biography behind a song that I have sung alone in tears:

Find me in the river
Find me on my knees
I’ve walked against the water
Now I’m waiting, if you please

We’ve longed to see the roses
But never felt the thorns
And brought our pretty crowns
But never paid me the price …

We didn’t count on suffering
We didn’t count on pain
But if the blessing’s in the valley
Then in the river I will wait

This pensive, profoundly grown-up offering seems to co-exist effortlessly beside the raucous and grin-making ‘I Found Jesus!’. Indeed, it is the very fact that the men of Delirious? have chosen to grow up in front of us and out loud that accounts for a large portion of the reservoir of affection that one feels for them as human beings and appreciation for the music they have so generously handed over to all who choose to listen.