Producer/songwriter Zarc Porter gives the lowdown on each track on 'The Best Of Movation' compilation.

World Wide Message Tribe

13. Frantik - World Wide Message Tribe
Once the song "Jumping In The House Of God" had become such a big live party track for the Tribe, we all really wanted to do a new track in that vein to replace it. Once again Justin came in and wrote the raps and I just built a track around them. We went for that '60s angle just to give it a different character and Tim (Owen) extended that idea into the live show complete with Austin Powers outfits which worked really well. No matter how hard we tried though, we could never quite replace "Jumping" which was partly a blessing but also a little annoying!

14. Found And Lost - thebandwithnoname
Another hip-hop meets rock track. One of the signatures of thebandwithnoname has been tracks with huge and sudden dynamic changes from a massive noise to nothing or visa versa. There's a bit in this song where Bobsta sings the middle eight and it explodes into a noise courtesy of guitarist Max where it sounds like he's had an unfortunate smelting accident!

Shine

15. Lifted - Shine
Although the girl group Shine was set up purely to do schools evangelism in Milton Keynes, they really grabbed the attention of several US labels. We ended up doing a showcase gig in Manchester where executives from various labels flew over to see them perform. The next morning, Mark and I met with the labels and found ourselves wrapped up in a bidding war for the band! It became a huge learning curve for us and in the end we all felt having so many people involved in decisions about the debut album hurt the end result somewhat. This track was one of the first we recorded and was perhaps a bit more true to their intended direction than some of the later tracks. Shine did a huge amount of schools work in the UK, ministering to tens of thousands of kids as well as appearing on things like the 700 Club in the States. They later went on to reach a bit of a milestone by playing to over 100,000 people at the Celebrate Freedom event in Dallas in the year 2000 which at the time was the biggest Christian music event ever held. Having bands like Shine or World Wide Message Tribe doing full time ministry in UK schools as well as trying to honour all the various commitments having a US record company involves inevitably caused logistical problems. It was this experience that eventually led us into starting Innervation with its split touring band/schools band approach.

16. Set My Heart On Fire - Jenna
We had started to work on a new 'ReSource' album which in the end never saw the light of day as we'd begun to get so busy with Innervation. This track was originally intended for that project and so has never been released before now. The singer Jenna, who we were planning to use for a few other things on the album, was 15 at the time and an amazing singer.

Justin Thomas

17. Thank You For The Rain - Justin Thomas
I've always had a soft spot for this track too partly because it has so much atmosphere in the lyrics. We'd already got a chorus and the basic track done but left gaps for the raps which Justin wrote and recorded extremely quickly as he always does. The chord sequence on this one is based on Bach's "Air On A G String" (or, if you like, "A Whiter Shade Of Pale") often used on TV adverts.

18. Loved - tbc
As we were preparing to do this compilation, we decided to ask people to vote for the songs they wanted to see included via the Movation web site. Something that took us totally by surprise was that this track received by far the most votes, over twice as many as the number two song. I think the lyrics especially minister to young girls; Mark and I both have young daughters and we dedicated it to them.

Disc 2

1. Tell Me Something I Don't Know Already - thebandwithnoname
This was great fun to do, we were going for that comedy thing with drum and bass meets punk and a pop chorus, a bizarre mix but it seemed to work.

2. Why Did I Let You Go? - V*enna
V*enna was made up of Lucy Britten, who we'd already worked with on various projects, and Sharnessa Shelton, a singer/dancer from the States who'd been studying in London. We wanted to do something unashamedly pure pop. It was one of those things that just worked from the word go. The girls had amazingly complementary voices and sounded brilliant together. Because of the exposure Shine had been getting in the States, we already had a label interested in V*enna even before we'd recorded anything. I have fearful memories of this particular track as the guys from the label were flying over to hear what we'd recorded except that we hadn't yet done anything as we'd been doing other things. Mark kept phoning me up saying "you've got to get going on V*enna or we're stuffed" and I just quickly worked up a rough version of this song and another one ("Do You Wanna Know") the day before they arrived. Thankfully they liked what they heard and subsequently agreed to release the album, 'Where I Wanna Be', in the US. It went on to become Movation's biggest selling album so far.

The Tribe

3. Generation Rising - The Tribe
In 2001, I'd not done much work with The Tribe for a while so I called Justin and we got together to see if we could come up with something. We did the track pretty quickly but then when the band heard it, they weren't that convinced to start with but fortunately it grew on them and subsequently became another live favourite.

4. The Best Thing - thebandwithnoname
Mark and I had written this song a while back when we'd done a stint writing for outside artists. It was originally recorded by US CCM band Avalon but we decided to have a bash at redoing it with thebandwithnoname.

5. I Believe In You (J3 Mix) - Shine
One of the Shine girls, Loretta, had been a dancer in the World Wide Message Tribe and wanted to start up a new band which is how we ended up working with them. Like The Tribe, they wanted to do schools evangelism but this time in and around their home base of Milton Keynes. Mark had helped them to get the band line up together in 1998 and this was one of the first tracks we recorded with them. Although we'd started work on a few tracks, we weren't really sure what direction they were going to go in musically and as this one was fairly dance/house, we decided to call it a remix just in case we did something totally different later. As it turned out their direction ended up more R&B and we remade this track in a much slower version for their debut EP. This version always used to go down well live especially when they did bigger gigs in mainland Europe.

6. Jumping In The House Of God - HOG vs World Wide Message Tribe
Once Justin had recorded his rap on "Holy", we just quickly threw this down at the end of the session on the same day. It was originally a HOG track (the band Justin was in with DJ Lee Jackson) but they let us feature the Tribe on it which was very gracious of them. It ended up becoming a huge live favourite for the Tribe and got a lot of exposure in the States.

thebandwithnoname

7. Drive - thebandwithnoname
As is often the case with follow up albums, we went to start work on the second thebandwithnoname album and initially got a bit stuck not quite knowing how we could step it up a level. We'd already done a couple of things which had been scrapped when we started work on "Drive". Once we got going, we started to experiment more with singing over raps and doing more unusual harmonies. Once it was finished, it really kick started the momentum for the rest of the album.