Tony Cummings spoke to Tim Cheshire, founder and frontman of Scottish rockers SUPERHERO

Superhero

It's only recently been released but already 'The Bicycle Thieves' by Scotland's Superhero is gaining considerable critical acclaim. With tours of the UK and the USA to come interest in the long-running band has never been higher. As aficionados of Superhero's brand of melodic rock will tell you, the axis of the group is singer/songwriter and guitarist Tim Cheshire. In fact, Tim is the only surviving member from the band who started the long climb from obscurity with the release of a humble cassette single "There's More To Life Than Surfing" in 1998. Since then the band have signed a management deal with Gary Smith of Big Ideas UK; landed a recording contract with Fierce! (who released 'Superhero' in 2003 and 'Fake Lunar Landing' in 2005); toured with Delirious?, the Newsboys, Rebecca St James and Third Day; and in 2007 and 2008 undertook lengthy tours of the USA. Superhero's latest lineup of Tim (vocals, guitar), Gavin McGrath (guitar), Mike Crawford (keyboards), Jonny McAdam (bass) and Mike Uphill (drums) is widely considered to be their best ever while their album, produced by the band themselves and mixed by Sam Gibson, demonstrates all the band's creative strengths.

I met up with Tim and began by asking him why the project was being released independently? He replied, "We did the last two albums with Fierce! but as a little experiment we're going to do this one ourselves. They've been amazing to us and fantastically supportive. We just feel we want to do this one on our own and they've been really generous and said yes, that's good, we're going to see how that goes."

Film buffs have long toted Italian movie The Bicycle Thief as one of the great post-war films. Tim, like many thousands of others, was hugely effected by the celluloid classic. He ran down the film's storyline for Cross Rhythms readers, "It's set in post-Second World War Rome where there's a real, quite deep depression and the vast majority of the men are out of work and every day they come looking for work. It focuses around one guy who turns up one day and he gets a job and it's amazing, he sees it as a turning point. He's married and he's got a little boy. He goes to find out what the job is and it's posting bills, posters, around Rome but he needs a bike and he doesn't have one. He doesn't have any money to get a bike so his wife sells her most precious possession, which is some things her mother gave her for her wedding and she sells them and buys a bike. So they're all happy, new start, new day. He goes out, first day at work and his bike gets stolen. It's a tragedy and the rest of the film centres around him and his son trailing around a very grim looking, rainy Rome looking for his bike and the thief. They know who stole it but they just can't find it. There's so much injustice involved in it, it's terrible. It's quite hard to watch, actually. But, at the end of the film he gets so desperate that he steals somebody else's bike and I suppose the message of the whole film is, you know, in the right circumstances, we'd probably all steal a bike and so let's not be too quick to judge, let's put those stones down and let's focus on love and tolerance and understand that we're all just bicycle thieves really. I just think of that picture of the woman who is about to be stoned and Jesus, the only person in the entire world who legitimately could have thrown a stone at her, said no. I love that picture and I love that about Jesus and that's why I want to live my life and that's what this album's about."

Expanding on the theme of the film, Tim has written a set of songs for the album which explore Church unity and the need to tear down walls which currently divide large parts of the worldwide Church. Tim explained, "In my experience there just seem to be a lot of Christians who spend a lot of time challenging other Christians and it just seems pointless and counter productive. We'd be better off putting our differences aside and focussing on the positive things about unity and the things that we do, that we all love Christ and ultimately want to see other people come to know him in the way we do. I'd rather focus on that. So that's definitely been a little bit of the inspiration behind this new album and the writing of it over the last year or so."

One of the most powerful lyrics on 'The Bicycle Thieves' is "All You People". Said Tim, "I just feel I don't want to be in a church which is in competition with another church; I don't want to be in a band which is in competition with other bands. I'm not interested in any of that so 'All You People' is just about Kingdom and living life like that. There's a song called 'Cool Police' addressing the slight obsession that the Church has with cultural relevance and I think that's good to a certain degree but as aliens you can only be so culturally relevant and there comes a point where I think, again, it's counter productive. We had some experiences in our band over the last year or so on our travels around the US and around part of the UK where cultural relevance and political correctness just seemed to swamp everything so much that the Gospel seemed to have been drowned in all of that. It was all about cool Christianity. I was dismayed by it and wrote a song about that as well."

Tim is very pleased with the way in which 'The Bicycle Thieves' has turned out. He enthused, "It was written over an 18 month period. For the first time in a while we've actually recorded in Scotland which has been great. We recorded it at a friend's studio in Dumfries, the recording's gone really good. We probably recorded it on and off over a six week period. Just about everyone in the band apart from me is pretty up with recording. Our guitar player is a producer and he knows Logic inside out, our keyboard player has done loads of recording with different artists - an amazing jazz keyboard player - and he also knows a lot about Logic and our drummer has done a lot of recording and our bass player has done a lot of recording in different styles so we're in pretty good shape when it comes to recording. We feel like we've got what it takes to do it ourselves."

I asked Tim how he felt 'The Bicycle Thieves' compared with 'Fake Lunar Landing'. He responded, "It's a bit more rock and roll, this one. The last one had a lot of mellow songs on it and people were comparing us to bands like Keen and Coldplay. I don't think we ever sounded like Coldplay but people hear a falsetto voice and a bit of keyboard and they automatically think Coldplay. It's very flattering I know but a little irritating as well."

Our conversation drifts back again to the theme of Church unity. I put it to him that in an age where we have ultra-liberal churchmen denying the basic biblical tenets of the faith it is hopelessly idealistic to raise a flag for Church unity. Commented Tim, "Obviously I think there are certain things where it's worth making a theological stand but there are many more things where it is pointless to be so completely dogmatic. I would rather just love them and pray for them, that God would reveal something to them than spend my life arguing with them and saying how terrible they are. I think the Devil loves that. That's doing his work for him. If we just keep arguing with each other then we're not doing anything else, we're not telling people about the wonderful, amazing, saving grace of Jesus Christ."