Jan Willem Vink interviews the Jesus rock veteran.



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"Intensity is spiritual commitment. Intensity is not how aerobic your heart rate was when you were doing it. I can still be spiritually intense even if I'm not going to be jumping around the stage any more."

And the same speed?

"I'm supposed to take it easy and not kill myself, so to speak. Not working late hours, and not staying in the studio so much; so I guess you could say I'm slowing down my daily calendar, but very often your activity and the frequency and participation of your energies doesn't result in very much. So maybe I'm economising on my energy level but getting more results by making sure I don't sit there spinning wheels if there's no traction. Writing songs and going into the studio immediately to record them seems like it's having a different result than writing twenty-five songs then never releasing them."

Some people have said how useful it was that you came despite the risks.

"Well I didn't think I was at risk. I didn't think I was going to have another attack or I wouldn't have come. I thought I was doing better. I talked to the doctor, I took a treadmill and pushed my heart for twenty, twenty-five minutes as hard as I could; then we took video pictures of it with some kind of sonar equipment - they put this thing on your chest and they look at your heart and you watch the replay on the video. He said, 'See this part of your heart wall is dead, it's not moving, but the other side is moving, half of what you need. So I think you can go to Europe. I think you can do some concerts.' Maybe he thought I was a folk singer. So he said I was fine, so I came and did a concert but like I said maybe I had too much fun; jumped around more than I ever have before. I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't trying to jump around more. I just love this band Thesis; I have a great time with them so maybe I had too much fun."

Are Thesis different to any band you have played with before?

"Well, before the best band I ever worked with was a band called Q Stone from Finland, and I just loved their music; very precise, clean, great ideas. Thesis have a lot more education, perhaps, in music. They're not just a blues band. They can play anything, so - I just had more fun with different colours. We've done new arrangements of some songs and gone for different pastiches of colour, different textures. So maybe that's why I was more loose than usual. Some people said that these were the best concerts I ever performed. I don't know, maybe they were. I've been happier than I was for years. Maybe these were the best concerts. That's not bad; if these were the best concerts I ever did then this is an appropriate way to end my rock and roll career, instead of some little night club with 25 people smoking their heads off all night."

Do you follow what's going on in secular rock and roll?

"Yeah. I'm aware of what's going on. I don't think much is going on in the world of art. I don't think the music has any great meaning. I think that right now it's just a lot of entertainment, and different styles of artists scrambling for different demographic audiences. There's so many different tastes in music now that it's not easy to identify what kind of music you do; then it's hard for people out of all the myriad of CDs available in a store to happen upon your secular album and discover you, without the help of friends that happen to see you in clubs. So I don't think there's really any strong direction in music now. There's such a schism, and a fractured panorama of musical tastes and styles, that it's really hard for an audience to find the right artist. You know, you go to a store, buy a CD, hate it, throw it away or give it to your friend; but there's some music out there that you just love and it's hard to find it. You don't know who the artist is until you discover it by accident through a friend. So I know a lot of what is going on in secular music but I don't care very much about most of it, and I think that the Christian artists who are trying hard to imitate the avant-garde and the secularism of regular commercial music are doing probably the worst job. Instead of listening to God and listening to the Holy Spirit and trying to create something original their desire to be cool and be eccentric is very immature and a waste of time for the audience too. But there's a lot of hurt kids that like to think that they're avant-garde. They'll turn on to this kind of music, you know, and you can sell 1500 or 2000 copies of some real weird music that you call Christian. But those kids that are interested in it, it doesn't feed them very much; and maybe later, a couple of years later, they've grown so far beyond it that they can't believe they ever liked these bands. But I don't mind all the hybrids and the experimentation. If it's sincere and based in the Holy Spirit's leading then it has value, but if it's just based on being cool and effete on some level then it's just egotism."

You said earlier that a lot of music is not culturally relevant. How can your music be relevant and still incorporate deep gospel?

"Well, what was 'Step Into The Madness' about? It was about the CIA selling heroin. It's about kids carrying Uzis in big cities. It's about incest. It's about global weaponry. It's about all kinds of stuff. That's not exactly a one-note melody, that's an expanse of observations. So I think Christian music can be aware of the culture that's thrust upon us and respond to it. You know, I'm not turning Babylon upside-down on the bottom where it says are you four or six. The people in America have never heard of this until just recently, but people in France, of course, have known about it for years. I'm sure more countries in Europe are aware of it. But, you know, in a few years some of the kids that have that CD are going to go' 'Hey, look at that...I never noticed that before.' They might even think it's the catalogue number for the album."

Do you think singing about the end-times makes sense to non-Christians?

"Yeah, I think my songs make sense to non-Christians even if they don't make sense to Christians."

Why?