Liturgical Manoeuvres in the Dark

Dear Readers, I've been busy trying to make some budget projections for Hnaef's proposed Beaker Academy. Personally I like the name "The Beaker Academy - Pouring Knowledge in", but Archdruid Eileen has talked me out of that and in favour of her preferred "Little Pebbles". Partly because I can see the deeper poetry in her idea, and partly because she hit me with a beaker. But today, in a moment of relaxing and recuperaption, I am glad to share with you my exciting proposal for a new genre to use in religious music. I call it Beaker Nu Electro-Punk, or "BeNuep" for short.

Let me explain. Contemporary Christian Music - or "CCM" to the hipsters - tends to divide into AOR style, Vaguely Rock 'n' Roll, Self-conscious Heavy Metal and what I call "folk-based" but Archdruid Eileen calls "hippy rubbish". She doesn't really say "rubbish", actually, but I'm trying to protect innocent ears here.

But there are a couple of styles that are missing here, as I am sure you can see. Hip-hop, for one. Although I can see why there are few CCM songs written in a hip-hop genre.  The thought of a group of seventy-year-old women rapping boggles my imagination. But it is another missing style that is bothering me. And that is the style of music that comes out of the stable of Kraftwerk, John  Foxx and Gary Numan - together with such trendy grooving dudes as British Electric Foundation / Heaven 17. I refer, of course, to electronic music.

Many are my happy memories of those days in the late 70s when, dodging the scary punks and skinheads, I would make my way home, clutching the "Underpass" EP or, as it might be, "The Pleasure Principle". Imagine the joy of that pure, unfussy music, sung in monotonous voices by a man from Hammersmith or, as it might be, Düsseldorf. Oh how we dreamt of the passionless, efficient, and above all hygienic lives we would live in the future.

I am busy programming my laptop to produce the appropriate electronic sounds, complete with authentic retro moog drone, and I am hoping that my new style of worship music will be able to debut in the special service that Eileen is organising for me, which she tells me will be the mid-day service on the next cold day in hell. While I wait with excitement, I am delighted to share with you the words to my projected first CD release. Given the genre, it is inevitably a song about isolation, loneliness and Angst. And churchgoing. The supposedly friendly acts of a glib evangelist. And despair. I'm hoping it may become a great Spring Harvest favourite. It's called "Are harmoniums electric"?

It's cold in here
And the paint's peeling off of the walls
There's a man up there
In a dark grey suit, with a King James Bible

Now the light fades out
And I wonder what I'm doing in a church like this
There's a three-hour sermon
And then I remember that you're Fundy Baptists.

So now I'm alone
Now I can think for myself
All about the theme of that sermon
And things that I just don't understand
An illustration about temptation
and the sly way sin creeps up
I don't think it meant anything to me.

So I open the door
And the minister's stood in the doorway.
'Please come again'
I pull up my anorak hood and go out in the rain.

You know I hate to ask
But are harmoniums electric?
Only yours broke down
I think your organist needs new knees.

So I found out your reasons
For the phone calls and smiles
Cos you knew I was lonely
But you should never have tried
To have brought me tonight
To your revival service
I was just another soul to you.