Lins Honeyman spoke at length to one of UK Christian music's pioneers, IAN WHITE

I suggest to Ian that it must be a bit of a culture shock moving from playing his own songs in bigger venues to singing other people's material in small bars to folks who may or may not be interested. "When you get to the stage of having records that have sold and people knowing your repertoire, it's actually quite a cushy number," he comments. "Playing covers and smaller gigs again has been good for my humility because, on the gospel circuit, you are the people's guest. You show up and they say they love your work, ask you where you would like to change, how long you'd like to play and it's lovely. I did 12 tours of New Zealand, six tours of Germany, I've been in America 20 times and all around the UK countless times - 200 dates in the busy years - but I never really had to play more than two hours and people were always very nice to you.

Candlemaker Row

"When you get back to playing covers in hotels and bars, you are their servant," he continues. "You have to play for far longer and they've no idea that you've done lots of records of your own. I often want to say to today's worship artists - try the challenge of holding it tight and in tune for three hours. When you look at rock climbers, you wonder why they bother going up there. They've got bleeding hands and feet but at least they can say they got to the top. It's kind of like that for me. Can I - at age 60 - still hold down a three and a half hour gig? I'm just glad I haven't lost the joy of music and I feel very blessed about the combination of music I'm involved in at the moment. I can only be incredibly thankful."

Part of that combination of music includes a foray into classical music which has resulted in two Kinnoull Symphonies - named after the part of Perth that Ian lives in - with a third in the pipeline. "My parents didn't like modern music," he explains to give some background into this particular side to his musical life. "All they had in the house until I was six or seven was classical music and that's all I was able to listen to for the first part of my life. I started hitting a piano when I was about nine but I was happier strumming a guitar. Somehow though, I've always heard classical music playing in my head and I've often wondered if that's something to do with my early years."

It seems that the roots of the Kinnoull Symphonies stretch back quite some time, as Ian confirms. "In 1988, Morningside Baptist in Edinburgh asked me to write a musical for their church so, in 10 days, I wrote what I thought was a very beautiful piece of music. It ran for about an hour or so and it was very classical-sounding. I gave it to them but for some reason they turned it down and it ended up just sitting on a shelf. All the tunes on the first Kinnoull Symphony are from the piece that I wrote all those years ago.

"I ended up partnering with a young classically-trained Perth musician called Andrew MacDonald to get the Kinnoull Symphonies off the ground. Andrew and I worked out that we could hire an orchestra in the Czech Republic for four hours and we really worked them for the time that we had them. They played non-stop for four hours and played two symphonies back to back. What we're doing now is seeing if youth orchestras in particular would be interested in playing them and one of the pieces has already been premiered by an orchestra in Atlanta. That whole classical thing - now called White MacDonald Publishing - has really grown out of something that was seeded a long time ago and was running parallel with my gospel work."

In closing, we return to the project that has perhaps captured Ian's heart the most. I ask him what the immediate plans for the Inspiration Orchestra are. "It may be an option, if the charity grows in stature, to help others elsewhere in the country to do what we're doing here," he advises. "Down the line, it may be that my role involves training up other tutors. Right now though, we want to consolidate where we are and we want to learn how to do what we're doing better. It's early days but I feel incredibly excited about it and I would encourage anyone to have a look at what we're doing."

Find out more about the Inspiration Orchestra at www.youtube.com/watch?v=II8TTTadfbw