25th February, 2010

JUSTIN MICHAEL

Album: Cutting Edge 1 & 2/Here I Am To Worship

Artist:  Delirious?/Tim Hughes

Year: 2010 reissue
Label: Soul Survivor

In A Word: Classic

Somewhere back in the early Nineties when people were wearing tees featuring a guy named Cobain and/or shorts past their knees like the Fresh Prince, there was a new rock and there was a new pop and somehow from the shadows leapt a new worship expression.  

The band's name alone was confronting enough for some parishoners, but before they could write to the church board about it, Delirious? were a household name and every church was harmonising to I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever. Cutting Edge 1 & 2 brought us that classic as well as King Of Love and the ever ear-catching The Happy Song.

Soul Survivor have put this disc together with the similarly acclaimed Tim Hughes' break-through disc, Here I Am To Worship.  A much more recent album than 1994’s Cutting Edge, and quite clearly from the same British school of modern worship,  the late Noughties disc brought us the worldwide anthem Here I Am To Worship as well as Day After Day and Maker Of All Things.

I’m going to love having these two together as I can finally put my cassettes of the Delirious tunes out of their magnetised misery and the Hughes album is a classic I have never owned.

Tidy work to the Brit’s I say.