Singer/songwriter BRIAN HOUSTON is a star in his Belfast hometown. Mike Rimmer met the musical maestro.

BRIAN HOUSTON

It's my first day in Belfast and it's raining rather heavily. I later discover this isn't unusual! I'm sitting in Brian Houston's car and we have to make it across the road to the famous Ruby Tuesday cafe. With our wives, we make a dash for it, dodging between the traffic, heading for pancakes and a lengthy lunchtime chat.

Like the title of his latest album, Brian Houston has spent 35 summers in Belfast and wherever I wander in his city, everyone I talk to raves about him. His audacity and sheer electricity on stage is credited as snatching back live venues from the clutches of covers bands, so that once more original songs will blast out of PA systems, and singer/songwriters are able to ply their wares. Brian has released five albums, and three have made number one in the charts here. The other two made number two. "It's still pretty much a cult thing here right now," he confesses modestly. "It's like maybe one in 20 has heard of my music."

Unfortunately, as his newly released "Radio Song" explains, the girl at the local garage is clearly one of the 19 who haven't! Brian remembers the inspiration for the song, "I was in a garage in Belfast, and this woman started giving me hassle because my signature on my cheque card didn't match my cheque or something. I had this thought, because they were playing the local radio station and my songs were on the station at the time, and I was thinking, 'Do you not know who I am?' He chuckles, "It's kind of schizophrenic; she started doubting my signature while I'm on the radio, and I'm thinking, 'Hey! I'm a radio star.' So it's just having a laugh at the irony of it."

Brian's album prior to '35 Summers' was another corker, the worship-orientated In The Words Of Dr Luke' and worked well in establishing Brian in the Christian market when Kingsway released it in the UK. However, in his home town, Brian almost seems to live a double life - playing the pubs and clubs on a Saturday night ,and leading worship on a Sunday morning. Some people are clearly confused though he admits the 'Dr Luke' project "established me more within the Christian mindset. People then said, 'Oh! The guy actually is a Christian.' I think prior to that I've had stuff that's verged on religious themes but people weren't sure where I stood." He shrugs, "People feel the need to know where you stand."

His previous albums have seen him establish a reputation as a fine singer/songwriter, and his collaborations with producer Adrian Lee (of Mike & The Mechanics fame) have been so good that many critics, myself included, have wondered why the guy isn't a worldwide success. But such are the mysteries of the rock'n'roll business! But would Brian describe his mainstream releases as Christian albums? "All the albums are out and out Christian albums," he responds. "Some of them reflect less acceptable faces of belief struggles. There's a pressure to sound like you're totally together, totally healed and all your problems are in the past. Releasing stuff into the secular market allows me to write stuff about feeling something right now. This is how I feel, these are my doubts, these are my fears and it's possible to release it in an honest format without feeling under pressure to sound healed all the time. It's just another facet of my belief, and in fact the worship record that I released is as much about who I am as anything."

His new project '35 Summers' was recorded DIY in a studio Brian has built in his attic. He laughs, "It's the longest album I've worked on. I used some of the proceeds from 'Dr Luke' and bought some gear. Then I sat, literally from September last year through to March, learning how to work it! Then I wrote and recorded, just generally building things from scratch and then doing all the backing vocals and doing all the instruments, then coming back and re-doing it. It became, I think, drawn out because when you're not under a deadline and someone's not saying, 'You have to finish today', then you just keep coming back and working a wee bit more and a wee bit more."

I joke that it must have been a laborious task that impressed his family! He laughs, "When we recorded the drum tracks, there is a note in the record thanking Pauline and the kids, because they were downstairs trying to watch TV when my brother was blasting away upstairs!" One domestic incident involved Brain's aged auntie Dot! The memory makes him exclaim, "Auntie Dot! God love auntie Dot. Auntie Dot is in her 70s. She was hassling me to get my son who was out playing and I was trying to record guitar tracks and I had my little 1962 Fender on, sitting in the hallway with a mike cable and a guitar lead running out to it. So I just left everything the way it was, but my son decided to hide and it took me 20 minutes to find him. By the time I got back I walked in the door and my 1962 amp was lying flat on its back and I thought, 'What's going on, who broke my amp?' and looked up and there was auntie Dorothy, bleeding all over the place. She tripped over the amp and banged her head on the chair and had to have 15 stitches." Brian pauses before deadpanning the punch line, "It was okay because the amp was unscathed."

The song which seems to have attracted the most attention, perhaps because Brian has plugged into the collective Belfast unconscious, is "We Don't Need Religion". A hit on local radio and also on Cross Rhythms, Brian comments, "It's a five-minute song so getting it on the radio was quite an achievement. When we first released the record, the people in the local TV station came over to my house and filmed my house, interviewed me and came and filmed my gigs because politically it was a hot potato. I was actually surprised the reaction wasn't greater because we thought we would get a lot worse reaction, but in typical Northern Ireland terms it was greeted with an almighty shrug. People just either like it or they don't. One of my friends told me that his friends are offended by it, they take it as meaning their particular brand of religion, and yet other people love it because they like the whole idea of dumping religiosity and taking on spirituality. It's one of those songs which divide people. It's about all the stuff that makes people ignore someone lying by the roadside, on the basis of bigotry or prejudice, and carry on their religious track. It's about just throwing away all the hard-heartedness, and all the garbage that makes people so unbearable and unloving, and trying to bring back the love of God."
The song has a live feel but Brian admits that it's a cheat! The idea came from a gig he played in Dublin opening up for Delirious?. He remembers, "At the Temple Bar, 600 people crammed in the venue and when I got to 'We Don't Need Religion', there was an audible gasp. They take it very serious down there. You don't need religion; it's like wow! And when I got to the line 'You could use the love of God' the whole place erupted." The song had been recorded by that stage, but Brian went back and recreated the vibe of the Dublin audience with an "audience" of Brian's singing along! "Every time I recorded I stood in a different position rather than up to the mike. Whether that makes any difference is doubtful, but it gave me the feeling that I was a different person in each part of the little room. After I'd done it 12 times, believe you me, it sounded like there are a lot of people in there."

Halfway through our conversation my mobile phone goes off, interrupting the proceedings. It's a friend telling me that there are no cheap cars available for hire to get me round Belfast during my stay. Brian, though he's just met me, lends me his for the week! Diamond geezer, eh? Driving through the suburbs Brian points out the local rock'n'roll sites, Cyprus Avenue (immortalised in a Van Morrison song) and then Van's old house resplendent with commemorative plaque. "Big deal!" he declares before pointing to a teenage girlfriend's old house. "Big deal!" he repeats, though the latter address clearly has more meaning as so many summers ago the formative Brian Houston walked these streets.