Pop-cum-progressive-cum-worship rock is the intriguing sound of Ireland's SOULED OUT. Trevor Kirk spoke to them.

Souled out

Northern Irish CCM has brought us many great bands in the past. Now there's a new one, Souled Out, whose 'Brand My Spirit' was recently released. I began by asking lead guitarist, singer and songwriter John McSwiggan about the church background of the members of the band, and how they'd got together. "All the band members bar one have been in church all their teenage lives," said John. "But it wasn't until 1994, when I was about 17, that an English youth leader named Mark Case came into our church and taught me how to play the guitar. I'd always known I was musical, my mum had tried to teach me guitar, but I was never interested. Then my friend Tim Stewart started to play bass guitar and our original drummer was Gary Stewart, so that's how we started. When Gary went to London at the end of 1997, Ryan, my younger brother, who's 15, and who's been playing drums since he was 10, took over. Also in 1996, our keyboard player Lisa joined us, she came from a Presbyterian church background. We all play together every Sunday as a worship team at The Magherafelt Christian Centre, which is a Pentecostal fellowship associated with the Christian Centre in Coleraine."

Being an independent fellowship as opposed to being part of the established church set-up, how did they get on with their neighbour churches? "We do have relationships with the other churches in the town", said John. "We've done gigs for them, mainly because we're one of the few alternative Christian rock bands around here. There's lots of traditional Celtic bands, they're 10 a penny, and then there's your middle-of-the road Irish bands -they're Christian, and they play rock, but they don't really have a very hard-hitting message."

The band's first tape was strictly a demo thing, a six track cassette recorded in a 12-hour studio session one Saturday. "We'd got about 30 songs that we were using in worship services, and we'd be playing them every week, and we thought, 'why don't we lay some of these down?' Then Mark Case came along again, he knew Barry Bynum, and he introduced us. We love Barry, he's a great feller, so we got together and did the session pretty much live, no overdubs except perhaps for one guitar solo. Barry's a great one for advice, 'cos he's done it all, and he loves talking about the Liberation Suite days of the 70s."

So what prompted the decision to do another album? "It was just a natural progression - I'd written so many more songs, my songwriting style had developed, and so I thought it was just natural to do another one, this time more professional. The costs for the cassette were sponsored by the church, which was a great blessing; it showed they had faith in us, but this one was so much more expensive, so the CD is funded by my dad and me, it's a self-funded project. It was a big step of faith."