Renowned as one of R&B gospel's premier divas, HELEN BAYLOR has seen God put her marriage back together. The veteran spoke at length to Mike Rimmer.

Helen Baylor

10 years ago she was a fresh face on the Christian music block, a studio veteran newly delivered from a drugs habit and setting out on a journey to make music that honoured the Saviour who delivered her. Her latest live album closes with the determined declaration of "Still Here". Helen Baylor's testimony continues.

It's been a long time since she started doing studio sessions as a very young teenager and a long time since she was a West Coast R&B recording act Little Helen. (Admiral Cummings confesses to having interviewed her way back when he was an R&B head!) Helen reflects on the journey so far, "I guess you would call me a veteran. It doesn't seem like it's been 10 years but it has been. I'm really grateful because it could be that I started 10 years ago and I was the new kid on the block and then 10 years later everybody's going Helen who? So at least I'm still here!"

Helen cut her teeth in the studio, becoming a seasoned session singer with a reputation for quick high quality work, and today she still enjoys the process of making studio albums. "I think it's because you get to walk in with nothing and then you layer upon layer create something from nothing. There are so many memories, and so many people that come in and out of the studios, and then there's the tiresome hours, sometimes there's 12 and 14 hours where you're just camped out in that studio, all day. I think I like the trench work of an album being created in the studios, whereas a live album you basically have two to three weeks to rehearse and you go up and you do it and then you're done! I like the two to three month process of bonding with the musicians and the engineers on a studio album, and the hot chocolate at night and staying up late and listening. When you do a live album I miss that!"

I insist that she must have some memories of the live performance for this album. She agrees but says, "But it happened so fast. And being the executive producer for the first time on this live album, you have to make a lot of decisions on how the money is going to be spent. And then the lighting for the video and the song selection and the rehearsals and getting everybody in and out, it happens so quickly! From the first rehearsal to the time you do the concert, it's about three weeks so it goes by like a blur. What you end up remembering, for me, are the times when you fussed at the musicians and you fussed at the singers when something didn't go right."

Some would say that after the fairly recent The Live Experience' and in the light of the fact that Helen prefers studio recording, why would she choose to record another live album? She explains, "Well, we had just signed with my new record label Verity, and they thought that we should probably do a live album for my first project because The Live Experience' was such a huge success for me. So we wanted to try to do something that was close to that. So we said, "Well, let's not do a studio record for the first one, let's go and do the live album and then let's do the studio album for the second project,' and so that's how we came up with the idea. I personally like the studio records but I think this one came out really well."

With The Live Experience' Helen could draw on her back catalogue and present her crowd pleasing best songs whereas with her new one it's all untried material. I suggest that must have been a problem. "Yeah and that makes it difficult," she agrees, "because you're not sure what's gonna go over well, and what the people are gonna receive, and so you just pray and you believe God to help you pick the best songs. Then you just go and give it to them, and we're thankful that it was very well received that night and every song went over really well."

With the cream of the crop of session players in her live band, she didn't have the opportunity to road test the songs first. Helen explains, "We don't do a whole lot with our band because of the cost that it incurs, you know, with flying 10 people around! We had worked together maybe 10 or 12 times over the preceding six or seven months, not with those songs, but there was a synergy happening amongst us. So when we went into the two-week rehearsal period, to put together the songs for the live album, it was real easy for everybody to play together and work together because we had played together recently. The band in Cluderaham Laboriel and ka Khan back in the 70s and Tony Maiden was the guitar player for Rufus so it was like having a good friend with me.

"Still Here" would have been a great title for the new album considering the turn of Helen's life over the past couple of years. Helen's half-sung, half-spoken testimony of salvation was captured on her previous live recording The Live Experience' and on the new album she continues to tell her audience of some of the pain and victory she's known in recent times. She thinks back over the night of the recording and says, "I will never forget looking out into the crowd and seeing this audience of all different ages and races and ethnic backgrounds, it was like looking into the face of Heaven. I'll never forget that, and how the people responded, jumping around on 'Still Here'. I'll never forget that."

On the recording, Helen chose to be extremely vulnerable about her marriage to James Baylor. It wasn't easy for her to confess that her marriage had hit the rocks, that they'd separated, but somehow they had pulled away from the brink of divorce and let God heal their rifts.

She says ''From way back, when I got delivered from drugs and alcohol I had such an experience with God and I knew hat he was real there was nothing anybody could tell me to make me believe that God wasn't for real. But I went through this experience where I was separated from my husband for several months and I wasn't sure what was going to happen in the future and I was still having to travel and sing and minister. This experience gave me an opportunity to get to know God as a healer, as someone who is always there with me in the good times in the bad times, I went through a whole lot, you can probably imagine it was very difficult to have people talk about you and say negative things and yu know you hadn't done anything wrong. But. God was always there and I think coming out of this situation, I realise now, more than ever that God is all-powerful.

Helen continues to remember those dark days, "There were many times when I didn't realise what was going on. I didn't know what was happening to me, and then God would let me know that this is just the enemy trying to steal my marriage, my children's lives, my ministry. And he told me, 'Don't give up, I'm with you, it's gonna be OK in the end.' So I got to know God very intimately and personally in a way that I didn't know him before."

Divorce is a subject that can provoke judgemental attitudes amongst believers and not always the support that a person needs. I wonder how people responded to Helen's situation when she was separated. She admits, "Yes, people can be very judgemental and I think there's a fear involved, I mean, everybody is vulnerable to some degree. I think in the Church, everybody was taught to smile and look as though nothing was wrong, look as though they had a perfect marriage, perfect family, perfect relationship with God and that they had no challenges. So, when someone else was going through something as difficult as separation and possibly divorce it made people afraid that wow, if it could happen to them, then this thing could happen to me and so people are very judgemental.

The consequence of being upfront and honest may have caused some people to judge Helen and James, but they also had many people who offered support. She remembers, "We had many, many hundreds of people who were supportive and prayerful, and who called us and prayed with us and cried with us and laughed with us, and helped us talk our way out of it. They helped James and I communicate with one another. We had many, many more believers who were on our side than we had the 'nay sayers' and the judgemental folks. I believe that this problem is really prevalent in the body of Christ, there are a lot of marriages that all of a sudden you look up and they are divorced. I believe that God allowed me to talk about it, we never hid it and we never put it under the rug, so to speak, and smile our way through. When we realised there was a problem, we began to talk about it and seek help, and I think that that was in many ways our salvation, that we were able to talk about it.

She admits that the gutsy "Still Here" is a significant song and says,"' was really angry with the Devil when I wrote that song. I was just so angry with him for getting in. I was also a little angry with James, that we didn't see this coming until it was right up on us. And I wrote it out of retaliation, just saying to the enemy, 'OK you shot your best shot, you tried to take my marriage, you tried to destroy our family but we fought back and we praise God through this difficulty and I'm still here.' So it's kind of like one of those schoolyard type songs where you tell the bully, 'OK, you beat me up and you sent me home yesterday, but I'm back and I'm still here and let's rumble!' I like to close my concerts now with that song and everybody really seems to relate to it because everybody starts singing!" Helen breaks into a quick rendition of the chorus, and continues, "It's a very feisty type of song because I'm a feisty kind of person anyway!"

Helen and James went very close to the edge in terms of their marriage ending. I wonder whether the painful emotional experience had changed Helen's perspective? "It definitely has." She continues honestly, "I always felt for other people, and I always thought that I had compassion for what other people were going through and having to live through. I think that this experience has changed me, and that I'm a much more laid-back person in that I know that this battle is not mine. It belongs to the Lord, and I think what's been most interesting is not just the experience of the separation and the heartache of that, but learning how to let God heal you after you put a marriage back together. Its one thing to go through the experience of separation and then believe God that he's gonna restore the marriage and then God puts it back together. Then you have to live through the restoration and the healing. You find out if you really want this marriage, you find out if you really can walk in forgiveness and so that's what I've learned, I've learnt how to just kind of rest in God, I've learnt how to walk in his forgiveness. There's still some areas that sometimes a situation will come up, and I find myself reliving some of the pain that I went through when we were separated, and then God has to re-talk me through it and say, 'OK, forgiveness is what I'm teaching you today. So I've learnt that through this situation, even though it was very personal. I've learnt how to be forgiving with other people, relationships, business relationships, professional relationships. I've learnt how to be sensitive to the people who come to the concerts, and to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, to let him use me in whichever way he chooses to in a concert."

She continues to share, "I realise that what God has allowed me to go through and bring me out of is to help other people, and sometimes that includes helping myself and helping James or helping my children. Many times it means helping the people I sing in front of, or the people I might meet on an aeroplane. I'm just a lot better person for having gone through such a horrible thing and I know that sounds funny, but I'm a better person now."

There is a pressure that comes to many Christians that we have to hold our lives together and appear to be perfect. That pressure exists in the Church and it is intensified when you're in the spotlight as a Christian music artist. I wonder whether Helen recognises that pressure. She agrees, "That's definitely been it, and it's hard to be vulnerable and to be transparent in front of others. I remember when this separation first happened how devastated I was because I was in shock. I didn't know what was going on, and my first inclination was to try to conceal it because of people looking at us and everybody looking at us to be perfect, I didn't want to fail anybody."

The turning point came in a conversation with a pastor friend in New York. She remembers his advice, "He said 'Helen, you and James don't need to worry about your reputation, all you need to be concerned about is your integrity.' She continues, "He also said, If I were you, I would just be open and transparent and tell it and let it out, because if you don't, the Devil will.' And so I remember wanting to hide it, but the power came when I began to be upfront and open about it."

Helen learnt to be honest with promoters when they booked her to sing. She would explain her situation and check to see whether they still wanted to book her. She remembers, "Nearly every time they would say, 'We want you to come and we'll be praying for you and James.' I felt like I was becoming empowered by talking about it, where initially I thought I should keep it a secret. It has shown me that God can use us in our failures and in our frailties when we allow him to be God."

In the midst of this vulnerability, Helen has received a happy ending to a painful chapter of her life. A fresh start with a new album, a new record company and God has put Helen's marriage back together super-naturally. Where there had been communication breakdown, Helen and James learnt once more to really hear each other. She explains, "And ifs a much better marriage than it was before, and I don't know how God works, but he does work like that. Now James and I, we're much more mature and we talk and talk about things, and we laugh about things ,and if I'm upset about something I can tell him I'm upset without him being upset with me for being upset. So we've matured quite a bit, and I think a really nice part of the concert, when we recorded the live album, came from just being able to be transparent and not put it under a bushel. I don't think we'd be together today if we had hidden our failures from the world and from the body of Christ. I think we're better off for having shared about it."