HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL immerge from post-industrial wasteland to pitch for pop success. James Attlee reports.

Middlesborough is chiefly famous for being an unemployment blackspot. I wondered if that environment had been an influence on Bill's songwriting.

"One of the reasons for me starting the band was however well I did at school I knew I wasn't going to get a decent job. Even if I got one it would have meant I was working for ten or 20 pounds more that I was getting on the dole, because wages were very low then, I think that's where it probably started. 'I think this may be a way out,' you know, it's always been like that with the North hasn't it? It wasn't as if I was from the rough end of town, I wasn't thick so I could have got a job, but I think when you're 15 and you're fairly intelligent but you're still not going to get a decent job I think that's what put me back when it came to career choices...I wasted a hell of a lot of time."

I wondered whether his Christian faith played a part in the whole equation.

"Oh aye - well me and Aidan are Christians - I've been a Christian three years and Aidan two. Basically it's everything my life revolves around and I write the songs. I look on peoples' songs as an insight into them, a chunk of their life put on tape or whatever. If it's honest music you're listening to their actual thoughts and expressions and moods put to music...we're not in a position and we're not gifted to be preachers so we don't preach. Obviously we're in a secular market, we're not going for the Christian market at all - though we'll do gigs for anyone, we'll play anywhere we get paid! This is our living, see! But the Christian scene is a bit insular - it has its own stars that wouldn't be stars if they were in the secular scene - it's very artificial really."

So how did Bill end up a believer? He hunches his shoulders and exhales slowly. "Phoooah, that's a long one - well I was definitely searching for God. I knew there was something else other that the boring repetitiveness of peoples' lives. I wasn't prepared to stand in the steelworks for 40 years and retire at 60.

"A lot of my sisters were into spiritualism when I was a kid and we had some weird things happening around the house which convinced me that there was an evil. I felt the presence of evil as a kid but I knew that couldn't be the spiritual reality. I grew up hoping I'd find whatever it was I was supposed to be looking for. I looked into Eastern religions and started doing martial arts and formed my own theories out of bits of this and that - it wasn't faith, trust in God, it was just a belief system. I was content with that until my family started to become Christians.

"My sisters one by one out of totally immoral lives, spiritualist pasts and many divorces, started becoming Christians.

'I thought that was alright because they were always weird, that didn't bother me...until I went up to see my sister Sue one night, she was the one I always used to go and see for my dope so I said 'can I get any stash, have you got anything to sell us, a quarter or something,' and she said 'Oh no, I don't do that anymore because Jesus gets me higher. And I said "Oh No! Not you as well, and after I'd picked myself up off the floor and dusted myself down - that really shook me.

"So I started to search a bit harder and I read some of Gandhi's life and I saw something in Gandhi I hadn't seen in Buddha or anyone like that. I saw him laying down his life for his beliefs and being willing to have the hell beaten out of him for it - and I thought that's the kind of belief I want.

"I suppose God started to stir me up really and I was put through a time when I was feeling really dark. The evil force I knew existed...I was beginning to feel I could go that way. I was beginning to be drawn by heavier drugs and desires of every kind, and I know if I didn't find out what the truth was quickly I was going to go very down.

"I went round to my sister's place one night because I was on speed and I knew I was going to be up all night and my sister was the only person I knew who would stay up all night with me. She was one of the ones who'd become a Christian.

"So I said 'you've got to stay up with me, but I don't want to talk about God," so I spent the whole night telling her about what I knew God was and how I was a religious person and all this, and by the end, at six o'clock in the morning, I realised that everything she'd said that night was based on fact and things she'd seen that were real, and mine was just based on things I'd made up and other people had made up. She had the hard facts and the truth and the reality - it was like a balance irretrievably tipped you know. I just thought I'm holding this pile of crap in my hand and I could be holding this beautiful thing. There was no other way really. I just knelt on the deck and gave my life to the Lord - then hitched to Morecambe immediately to tell my girlfriend about it.

"Miraculous things ensued. My Dad was healed after being crippled by rheumatoid arthritis for 18 years, healed completely. It just doesn't happen, medically. He wasn't even a Christian at the time - and there was miracle after miracle. I flushed my dope down the toilet, that was a miracle! And I started being uncompromising."

I get the impression that uncompromising he will remain, musically as well as personally. It doesn't appear the prospect of fame and its attendant media onslaught will faze him one bit.