With the amount of time you spend together as a touring band, how do you deal with tensions or arguments among yourselves? How do you work through the problems?
Tim: I think one of the great strengths about what we do is that we’re part of a team. We’ve met many people over the years that travel around as a team, and sometimes it can be a difficult and vulnerable position to be in. I think one of our strengths is that we have so many different personalities. We are rubbing against each other all the time and trying to sharpen each other. Also, we’re very different, so that means sometimes we don’t necessarily see eye to eye. It’s a bit like being married, isn’t it? Because you’re with each other so much, I guess communication and honesty is the key. We want our music to be prophetic and reflect God’s heart, but it doesn’t stack up unless the whole thing reflects God’s heart. That is so important in our relationships as a team. Because worship is not about music, it’s about a lifestyle and bringing glory to God in all that we do.
How do you, as a band, prepare spiritually before you take the stage, knowing that a lot of what you do is a vertical experience?
Martin: First, I want to make this clear—just doing a quick-fix prayer before we go on doesn’t really solve anything. The reason it works on stage is because we’re hopefully living it out twenty-four hours a day.
But we do pray and ask God to show up, because if He doesn’t, then it’s just music. So we do ask every time for that to happen. When we’re on the road and touring, we’ll often have times together at the end of the day when we’ll sit and one of us (including the crew) will do a little devotion time or something. It’s very simple, but we build it into what we do.
Since this is the “Deeper Tour,” what was the inspiration for the song “Deeper,” and do you approach all your songs as worship or are there different styles to your songs?
Martin: “Deeper” was written in about 1996-97. At the time, we just wanted to say to God, “We want this to be our lives, we want this to be forever.” So “Deeper” really summed it up for us at that time; we really wanted to go in deep. Also, during the meetings that we were leading, that was what we would talk about: “Come on, we’re going all the way, this is not just on Sundays, this is for life.” So that was the inspiration for the song.
Stewart: As far as all the other songs go, when we’re writing, it all comes from the same place. It comes from our gut feelings or whatever we’re experiencing inside. Not every song that we write is a combination of worship songs, as you’ve noticed from our records, but we feel that God has called us to be worshipers as individuals. We do write worship songs, but also a big part of what we think God’s called us to do is to take what we’ve got outside, to take our songs to the highways and byways, to get out there and do the gigs with Bon Jovi, et cetera. So there’s a different style of writing at times because you want to communicate with people that don’t know anything about the language that we use in church. If we talk about the “wondrous cross,” for instance, people might not know what it means unless we can explain it in a different way. So we’re trying to be creative and communicate things about our faith with people that haven’t stepped inside a church. That’s why we sing songs about relationships and about things we’ve observed. But it all comes from that same place: basically, life with God.
Martin: It’s been our observation (I honestly don’t mean this as a criticism), that Christian music has become sort of a machine. If you want to fit into that machine, you can only write a certain sort of song that fits a certain radio format, a certain song that fits a certain listener. Unfortunately, what it does is squeeze out stuff that may be really relevant. It does seem to be leaning now towards “We’re Christians but we can’t ever sing about the stuff that really troubles us.” It’s all about being happy, it’s all about being up, it’s all about being squeaky clean. But unfortunately, the older we get the more we realize that life’s not like that. We get dealt all sorts of blows from the left and the right. People around us, friends that have gone through marital and all sorts of difficulties—it all affects your writing. So as a writer, you want to write about those sorts of things; you want to observe those situations through the eyes of Jesus. We do get in trouble for it, but we want to fill our records with stuff that hopefully touches deeper than just “Isn’t Jesus great” all the time. Of course we know He is, but we still need to talk about the things that He’s going to help us through.
What was the band’s thinking when you went and played the arena dates with Bon Jovi throughout England?
Tim: From the very beginning with “Cutting Edge” (we started these youth events back in 1992), we were really just gathering together young people from our area for a time of worship and giving the Gospel. It was a period of time when the passion and energy in our meetings was so intense and so intimate at the same time … it was like, “What do you do with this amount of energy, excitement and passion?” Everyone was feeling they just wanted to burst out and take it outside the walls of the church. There are songs that Martin and Stu wrote at that time that reflect this, like “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?” That song talks about opening up the doors and letting the music play. “I Found Jesus” is another of those old songs. That’s where our hearts were. Our vision was to really see what we could do with the power of music … and healing, anointing, et cetera, outside the walls of the church.
So we have been singing about that from the very early days. But it’s not enough to just sing and talk about these things, we needed to get on and do it, put our money where our mouth was. So we really tried our hardest to do what we did outside of the church as well as inside.
The Bon Jovi thing is something we really pitched hard for. We felt this would be a great next step in getting in front of a lot of people who don’t know us. It’s an amazing thing, one night we got the call saying, “You’re opening up for Bon Jovi’s five stadium shows in the U.K.” Each gig was somewhere between fifty to seventy thousand people every night. We played songs like “History Maker” and “My Glorious” for thirty-five minutes; we did just what we normally do. At the end of the day, some people might just have enjoyed the music. Some might have felt the Holy Spirit, some might have not, but we really felt God had given us a great opportunity and we wanted to be faithful.
When you’re over here in the United States, it’s such a huge thing for Americans to see Delirious. When you’re at home, do you have a home church you go to, to be normal and not be so public all the time?
Stu G: Yeah, when we’re at home we’re very normal. We think we’re very normal now, actually (laughter). I think what has been really important, right from the beginning, is that we’ve had roots in a local church. We’re actually all from the same church, and we live about a mile away from each other, spread across this little town. It’s a very close-knit community, and our friends now are the friends we had ten-plus years ago. For them, it’s been a very gradual growth thing. Tim Jupp is not necessarily known as the keyboard player from Delirious, and I think for us that has been really important.
We want to encourage kids to get out there and play music, but more than that we want to encourage them to stay in a local church. Trying to get the church to understand musicians and the whole creative temperament and spirit is another important thing for us. (Musicians often tend to get pushed to one side, and they get disillusioned and feel like they don’t fit in.) At our church it’s been a very gradual process; our church has really sort of grown with us and learned what works and how to look after us. We ask ourselves how we can best serve the church, because that’s why we’re there. We go to church to serve them, not to fall into a “feed me, feed me” sort of thing.
Also, we’re all married with kids, and we want to go to church. We want our kids to be there, so we have a ten-day touring rule. That is, we travel for ten days and we’re home on the eleventh day. We want to go to church with our kids and our family, we want them to grow up with dads and husbands and wives.
In what other ways do you keep a good balance between your touring, ministry and your relationships with your families?
Tim: We all married really good girls. Stu mentioned being away for ten days. On this trip we’re actually in the States for three and a half weeks, so we broke the rule big time. The way we got around that is we brought everybody with us. That’s why all the buses are here. There are twelve children among us, and we haven’t been here in the States very long so they’re a little bit tired tonight.
Sometimes when I’m leading worship I can get caught up with the bridge coming up or something like that. How do you focus on what it’s really about?
Martin: The funny thing about worship leading is there is a paradox between being extremely practical and extremely spiritual all at the same time. If you’re leading worship in a local church setting, you can be singing a children’s song one minute, with everyone jumping up and down (like frogs), and then in the next ten minutes you can be in the throne room of God, and some old lady is falling asleep in the back. I think the great thing is that God knows what we’re like, and we need to just relax and let God be God and let us do what we can do. It may be strumming a guitar or playing a keyboard; whatever it is, we need to do it to the best of our ability and not get too stressed out about it. When we’re ourselves, that’s when we’re the most anointed, and when we’re trying to be spiritual and come up with the next big thing, it always sounds terrible. I think you should feel free to laugh at yourself and be humorous about it if things go wrong, but when you’re in that moment, go for it. When you sense God’s there, run for it with all your heart and chase it down.
Can you talk a little about your early days in England and the revival among the youth? And what do you feel about a “presence evangelism,” in which you play music that’s relevant to people who don’t know the Lord and have the presence of God enter that secular environment?
Stu G: We started ten years ago, at the time Tim’s wife and myself were leading a youth group of about thirty kids. We’re from a small town and a small church; there were about three hundred people then. We talked to the kids and they said, “Hey, we just want to do worship.” We had no money, no practical bits apart from our instruments. We had an overhead projector and we rented out a small room. We turned all the lights off, apart from the overhead; it was totally low budget. We basically said that for two hours we wanted to be as creative as we could and try and find God. We didn’t care what it took, we didn’t care what we did, we wanted to find God for ourselves. We had people painting, we had dances, jazz, poetry, you name it, and we gave everything a go because we were just desperate. We thought, “Let’s throw it all up in the air and see what works and what doesn’t work.” The only parameter was that we’d have five minutes of the Gospel, because basically people wanted to bring their friends along that were not in church. It was a bit of a stepping stone. It was the most exciting time of our lives. We had seventy people turn up on the first night, and bear in mind we only had thirty kids. That was the result. Within a year we had over a thousand kids showing up, both from within the church and from outside the church. God was doing something in all of our lives. It wasn’t run by us; we were the band and we were putting a lot of it together, but everyone felt like they were running the whole thing. There were people beating down the doors to get there two hours early to set things up. And for us, it was just an incredible time. We’ll never forget that. Also it put a passion in our hearts to keep going, to ask “What’s next?” We’ve always come up with these different catch phrases, and one of them is “Taking it wherever it goes.” Even now we say we’re not going to stop where people’s perception is that we’ve made it. What is there around the corner? Where is the cloud? Where is the fire? That’s what has really kept us going.
In terms of getting the music out there, we totally believe that if you play music that God’s anointed, it doesn’t matter who you are playing to, it doesn’t matter what arena it’s in, whether it’s secular mainstream or a Christian thing. If God has anointed it, then He’ll speak to people. We’ve experienced that, and it’s probably the most evangelistic thing you can ever do. To play music that God’s breathed on and allow people to sense this. They might not get what it is, but they know there is something going on in the room. That’s why in the U.K. we do mainstream venues. We very rarely play churches. The other reason is there are never churches near as big as the ones you have here in the States. But we get out and we want to play rock-and-roll venues where people can bring their friends, where there is not an “I’ve got to step inside a church” syndrome. So many of the people that follow us have friends that they would like to bring. They want to invite their friends because they want to tear down the walls too. So when we get out there before forty thousand to seventy thousand people at a Bon Jovi concert, we’re expecting God to anoint something, and people start to raise their hands to “History Maker.” They don’t quite know what’s going on, but something in their hearts is changing.
Martin: Scripturally as well, it makes total sense. God uses music for everything. One minute you’ve got Miriam dancing with a tambourine as they come out of the Red Sea, and in another minute you’ve got the Israelites sending out the musicians first into the front lines of the battle. We totally believe that music is God’s secret weapon. It can cut to the heart of a man more than words can. I think God loves music and He’s created it for us to use in every situation.
Featured in Christian Musician, October 2002 www.ChristianMusician.com
